The First Tea Mountain to Become a World Heritage Site
Jingmai Mountain sits in Lancang county, Pu'er, Yunnan — the source Baoputang has drawn its custom 0013 and 0016 puer series from since 2007. In 2023 it became the first tea-themed site in the world inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, recognized for something most tea-growing regions don't have: trees that were never planted in rows.
28,000 mu (about 4,600 acres) of cultivated ancient tea trees grow scattered through old-growth broadleaf forest rather than cleared into a plantation. The result is a three-layer structure — forest canopy above, tea trees in the middle story, undergrowth below — that locals trace back more than a thousand years to 帕岩冷, the Blang and Dai ancestor credited with first planting tea here.
That layering does something specific to the leaf: cloud cover keeps humidity high, decomposing leaf litter feeds the soil, moss grows directly on the tea trees' bark, wild orchids root in the same branches. Tea picked from trees living inside that ecosystem carries a quality growers describe simply as 兰韵 — orchid character — a fragrance plantation-grown leaf doesn't develop.
Baoputang's own 0013 and 0016 series both come from trees like these — never a single farm, always old-growth forest the tea was never fully separated from. Which makes Jingmai an odd kind of heritage site: not preserved because anyone set out to protect it, but because nobody ever finished the job of clearing the forest away.