About Us - About Our Tea

Who We Are

Zhi Zheng Tea Shop is a Chinese-British company based in Jinghong, the regional capital of Xishuangbanna Autonomous Prefecture in the southwest of Yunnan Province, China. Jinghong City is in the heart of the Six Famous Tea Mountains tea growing region.

We - there are two of us, one Chinese, one British - met in a friends tea shop a few years ago and decided to start making small batches of our own 'label' handmade, raw Puer tea from ancient and old arboreal tea trees, by working with individual tea farmers.

Zhi Zheng.Song is now a registered trademark. Most of the tea we produce is under this label, however we sometimes make very small quantities of tea - sometimes only a few kilos - which we wrap in plain or hand-stamped paper.

Our 250 gram Puer cakes are an example of this.

What We Do

Since we live in the area we are better able to maintain good relationships with a number of Xishuangbanna's finest tea growers. We are able to regularly visit tea farmers we work with as well as look for new teas. When we're not in the shop, we're in the mountains.

Please take a look around our website or visit our Puer shop in Jinghong. You can also contact us by email or telephone.

We sell high quality, Sheng or raw (green) Puer tea from old, or ancient arboreal trees. We have new Puer tea which can be drunk now or stored for many years. We also have tea that has already been aged for some years. Our teas come in compressed and loose leaf form.

We have selected a range of excellent teas to please a variety of palates. These Puer teas come from different areas within the "Famous Tea Mountains" region, and so each has a distinct flavour. See 'About Puer Tea' for more information,

We also have some excellent Black tea (Dian Hong) from Feng Qing in Lincang to the west of Xishuangbanna.

Please look in the shop for Puer teas and for purchase and shipping details.

This is also a good place to start your journey if you are new to the Puer teas of this region. We believe we have some of the best information available to help you in choosing wisely when you purchase tea. Please go to 'about Puer tea' for more information about Puer.

Recent Developments

This year we established a base near the foot of the mountain in Nan Nuo Shan where we can process our own tea. This was the first year we have been able to do this, buying fresh leaves from farmers on Nan Nuo Shan and inviting a few tea farmers to work with us to make tea. We can also conduct tea workshops there.

The picture on the left is the building in early 2011.

See here for more pictures of our Nan Nuo Shan site

or see our blog for more photographs

The tea farmers we work with

We work with a number of different farmers from across Xishuangbanna; From Yiwu: Luo Shui Dong, Man Zhuang, Mang Zhi, YiBang, to Jinuo Shan and Nan Nuo Shan and the Menghai tea region; Bulang Shan, Lao Ban Zhang, Lao Man E, Ba Ka Long, Meng Song.

More recently we have been producing teas from other areas; Naka, Jing Mai, Ban Ma and Xigui and Bing Dao in Lincang.

Here are a few of the farmers we work with. They are all local tea farmers from families who have been making tea for generations using traditional methods, and are highly skilled in hand-made Puer tea production.

Click on the pictures to see more

Double-click on the Quicktime file to the left to see a short clip of Aini people in Nan Nuo Shan picking a tree.