Eine Unze Gold, 1539 aktenkundig

Tea from this part of western Hunan was not discovered by anyone. Local histories trace official tea production in the Qianling area to the Qin period — the reason our name is Daqin, Great Qin. For most of the intervening centuries the tea travelled inward, toward capitals, rather than outward.

That is the unusual thing about this origin: it has a long documented history and almost no export history. Keemun was built for the London market in the nineteenth century. This tea was not built for any market at all. It was simply what these mountains made.

We contract the full annual output of the gardens we buy from. The land stays with the farming families who work it; the picking standard, the timing and the offtake are agreed with us before the season starts.

This is not a charitable arrangement and we would rather not present it as one. It is simply the structure that lets a small supplier commit volume ahead of a season instead of bidding for it afterwards — and the only structure under which a lot can honestly be traced back to a plot and a day.

It also means that when a season is poor, it is poor for both of us. We think that is the correct alignment.

Most tea reaches a Western buyer through several hands, and by the time it arrives the answer to "where is this from?" has become "China."

We are a small supplier and we cannot compete with a trading house on price, breadth or logistics. What we can do is answer that question precisely — this mountain, this block, this day, this batch number, this analysis report — and let you check every part of it.