Place · in Xishuangbanna
Bulangshan
Bulangshan is an administrative township in Menghai county, not a single peak, and it is where the bitter school of sheng puerh lives. Its southern edge is the Myanmar border. The name covers everything from one of the two most expensive village addresses in Yunnan down to bulk plantation leaf pressed by the tonne, so Bulangshan on a wrapper tells you a taste direction and almost nothing about grade.
What grows here
Sheng puerh, and the village names are what actually trades. Inside the township: Lao Ban Zhang and Xin Ban Zhang, Lao Man'e, Man Xin Long, Wei Dong, Bakanan and Bakalong. Just outside it and constantly folded in by sellers: Bangpen, Hekai and Bada, which are separate places administratively and cost less. A good deal of township leaf also goes to Menghai for shou production rather than being pressed as sheng under any village name at all.
The ground
The township runs high and the famous villages sit near the top of it, on steep slopes under broadleaf forest with a large day-to-night temperature swing. Growers point at all of that when they explain the bitterness. More useful than the explanation is the contrast sitting inside it: Lao Man'e and Lao Ban Zhang are close enough to walk between and their teas are not confusable, so whatever this ground does, it does at a scale far smaller than the township the label names.
The bushes
Seed-grown assamica populations, and Lao Man'e is the reason to care. The village keeps two distinct kinds of tree side by side in the same gardens, ku cha and tian cha, bitter tea and sweet tea, and picks them separately. The ku cha is more bitter than anything else in Xishuangbanna and it clears slowly, if at all. The tian cha behaves like the rest of the township. It is the clearest demonstration in Yunnan that a village signature can be a population rather than a place.
What to look for
The name is a range, not a grade. Cheap Bulangshan is real, and it is terrace leaf off the lower township. Expensive Bulangshan is a village, and the village should be named on the wrapper. The border matters too, since the township touches Myanmar and leaf comes across it under no label at all. The tasting check is conversion: bitterness that stays bitter is not the Bulangshan signature. It is either Lao Man'e ku cha or poor leaf, and those two are priced nothing alike.
How it got here
The Bulang, who give the township its name, are among the region's oldest tea cultivators and Lao Man'e is held locally to be the oldest of their villages here. Through the state-factory decades the mountain was poor and remote and its leaf went into recipe blends unnamed, exactly as Lincang's did. The reversal came with the single-village market of the 2000s and it was abrupt: inside about a decade Lao Ban Zhang went from an anonymous Hani village to the top of the Chinese tea market, dragging the whole township's prices up behind it.
Other places in Xishuangbanna
- Nannuo
- Yiwu
- Bada
- Naka
- Lao Ban Zhang
- Yibang
- Bangpen
- Bohetang
- Gedeng
- Guafengzhai
- Hekai
- Lao Man'e
- Luoshuidong
- Mahei
- Mangzhi
- Mannuo
- Manzhuan
- Mengsong
- Wangong
- Xin Banzhang
- Youle