Place · in Lincang
Fengqing
Fengqing is a county in Lincang and the birthplace of dianhong, made here in 1939 when the war closed off China's eastern black tea regions. Two things usually go unsaid. The county was called Shunning at the time, and the tea was invented rather than inherited: a trained tea technologist, Feng Shaoqiu, was sent to find somewhere in Yunnan that could make a black tea for export and settled on this one.
What grows here
Dianhong across its full range, from bud-only golden grades through whole-leaf gongfu grades down to CTC for blending, all off the same broad-leaf material. The county also has old tea trees and makes sheng puerh from them, which almost never reaches a wrapper saying Fengqing. The black tea price is steadier, so the leaf goes that way, and Fengqing's puerh reputation is correspondingly thin for a county with this much old stock.
The bushes
Fengqing large-leaf, an assamica selection taken out of the county's own seed populations and recognised nationally, is the plant dianhong was built on and is still what most of it is made from. Its buds run large and heavily downed, which is the whole reason the golden grades exist: a small-leaf Chinese bush cannot give you that much gold no matter how carefully it is plucked.
Harvest seasons
Unlike the puerh counties, Fengqing picks across a long season, because an oxidised black tea does not depend on a single spring crop the way a pressed cake does. Spring is still the best material and the golden bud grades are spring work. Summer and autumn carry the volume and go into blended and broken grades, legitimately so. A dianhong that does not state a season is usually not spring, and for a lot of dianhong that is perfectly fine.
How it is made here
The standard black tea sequence, wither, roll, oxidise and dry, with two local adaptations that follow from the leaf. It is large and soft, so rolling is kept gentle to leave buds intact, and the separation of golden bud lots from leaf lots happens in grading afterwards. The 1939 factory was set up to make gongfu black tea, whole leaf and orthodox, and that is still the county's default. The broken and CTC grades came later and sit alongside it rather than having displaced it.
What to look for
Dianhong is a category covering all Yunnan black tea, so it is not a provenance claim. Fengqing is one, and it is used loosely. Golden bud content is a plucking standard rather than an origin marker and not automatically a quality one: all-bud grades run sweeter and lighter, leaf grades carry more malt and body, and which you want is a preference. The county also holds a celebrated ancient tea tree at Xiangzhuqing, routinely described as more than three thousand years old. No method establishes that. The figure is estimated from trunk girth on a tree with no usable rings, so treat anything sold on its proximity accordingly.
How it got here
The Shunning experimental tea factory started work in 1939 and its descendant is still the county's main producer. The first batch of gongfu black tea went out through a state trading company in Hong Kong and on to London, to earn wartime foreign exchange, so the tea was built for an export palate from the beginning rather than adapted to one later. Fengqing has stayed a black tea county ever since, through the state period and after it, and it never converted when the puerh money arrived next door.
Other places in Lincang
- Bangdong
- Daxueshan (Mengku)
- Mengku
- Bawai
- Bingdao
- Bingdao Laozhai
- Dahusai
- Dijie
- Nahan
- Nanpo
- Nuowu
- Xigui
- Yun County