The Sovereign and the Minister, in a Tea Bag
君臣佐使 is a term from classical Chinese medicine formula theory — a way of ranking the ingredients in a prescription by role, not importance: 君, the sovereign ingredient that does the main work; 臣, the minister that supports and directs it. Baoputang's new boiling-bag blend borrows the same logic for a simpler pairing: 2009 aged Gongmei white tea as the sovereign, 2016 Xinhui chenpi as the minister.
The white tea is the older of the two by far — Fuding spring Gongmei, picked in 2009 and left to age seventeen years in dry storage. Over that time its polyphenols kept oxidizing slowly, the leaf's original grassy sharpness settling into a rounder profile: date-toned sweetness underneath, a soft medicinal warmth, the fresh floral top notes long gone.
The chenpi plays support, not lead: first-tier Chakeng-village peel from 2016, naturally sun-dried with nothing added to fix its color or scent. On its own it's citrus and slightly bitter; paired with the white tea, it's there to open the cup's fragrance and round off the aged tea's edges, not to compete with it.
Each bag holds four grams of the white tea to two of the peel — a ratio, not a coincidence, meant to keep the minister exactly where a minister belongs: present, felt, never louder than the sovereign it's serving.