The Machines That Started Dianhong Are Still Running
Fengqing, in Lincang, Yunnan, isn't only where this tea grows — it's where Dianhong itself was invented. In the early 1940s, tea researcher Feng Shaoqiu built the region's first modern black-tea factory here, planting the gardens that would define the style around 云南大叶种, the broad-leafed varietal built for depth rather than delicacy.
Those founding gardens are old-growth forest now, eight decades on. Inside the old 初制所 — the primary-processing workshop — the maker describes the original tea-making machines as still in use: the same rollers and driers, still doing the same job on leaf picked from trees planted before anyone running them today was born.
This batch is picked 明前, before Qingming — the grade Baoputang chose specifically to trace back to the founding gardens rather than newer plantings nearby. First-grade, bud and leaf together, dried down to a tight, dark, gold-tipped leaf. Steeped, it runs clear amber, honey-toned underneath with a light floral note that doesn't compete with the honey for attention.
Eighty-some years is a strange span for a tea to sit inside. Long enough that the machines behind the first Dianhong and the machines behind this one are, by the maker's account, the same machines. Not long enough that the trees have finished growing.