Place · in Pu'er
Jinggu
Jinggu is a county in Pu'er prefecture with a cultivar of its own and a marketing problem attached to it. Jinggu large white, a heavily downed big-bud assamica selection out of Minle township, is the plant behind most yue guang bai, moonlight white, which is sold worldwide with a story about drying under the moon. The county also makes a lot of ordinary sheng puerh, most of which leaves under somebody else's name.
What grows here
Moonlight white above all, made from the local large white cultivar. Then sheng puerh off Kuzhu Shan, Wenshan and the surrounding hills, plus a considerable volume of shou. Jinggu is one of the counties whose mao cha most reliably ends up inside cakes wearing a Xishuangbanna name, for the straightforward reason that the leaf is decent and the price is not.
The bushes
Jinggu large white is the point of the county. It was selected out of the local seed population at Yangta in Minle township and carries an unusually heavy silver down on a large bud, which is what makes a bud-led white tea practical from a broad-leaf plant at all. Ordinary seed-grown assamica populations cover the rest of the county and make the sheng, and they are not what the white tea is from.
How it is made here
Moonlight white is a long indoor wither. It is not sun-dried and it is not dried at night. The leaf withers in shade over an extended period and picks up a little oxidation on the way, which is where the two-tone finish comes from: dark on the upper face of the leaf, silver on the downy underside. The moon in the name is decoration. Nothing in the method requires darkness beyond ordinary shade, and nothing about it is unique to Jinggu except the cultivar going into it.
What to look for
Two things get sold wrong here. Moonlight white is a white tea, so treat ageing claims for it as a separate question from puerh ageing: it is not sun-dried mao cha and it will not behave like a sheng cake however the shelf is labelled. And a vendor who leans on the moon story is telling you about their supplier rather than their tea. For Jinggu sheng the problem runs the other way from the famous mountains. Nobody bothers faking Jinggu, they relabel it, so a cake honestly sold as Jinggu is often the same leaf without the borrowed name on top.
How it got here
Jinggu spent the state period as a supplier county, sending mao cha out to be pressed and blended elsewhere, and a great deal of it still goes that way. The white tea is the exception: the local large white cultivar was recorded and propagated well before there was an export market for it, and moonlight white only became a name outside Yunnan when Western and coastal Chinese buyers went looking for something from the province that was not a pressed cake.
Other places in Pu'er
- Jingmai
- Qianjiazhai
- Ailao Shan
- Wuliang Shan
- Jingdong
- Kunlu Shan
- Zhenyuan