(2nd Draft - final edits to be completed)

The spring of 2025 was a very interesting year due to the fact that I had spent the longest continuous duration in Gaoshan ever, from January to June. After having spent more than seven years travelling to and from Gaoshan, I finally found the time to take a proper deep dive. The sample set made available this year and this blog post are a product of that experience.

Overview

(for the introduction to Gaoshan Village, click here)

Gaoshan Village is surrounded by tea gardens in all directions. With over 140 registered households, most of which are directly linked to tea-growing ancestries, Gaoshan is one of the highest production villages in the region.

The gushu gardens of Gaoshan include trees aged around 200-300 years old, with the oldest tea trees estimated to be over 500 years old. There are many gardens of different ages that were planted as each generation looked to pass on more cultivated land to the next. In terms of quantity, gushu makes up a smaller and smaller percentage of overall village production, with an increase of younger gardens being planted in the last 50 years, and the majority of these were planted in the most recent 20 years.

The general profile of Gaoshan can be stereotyped as a style of Yiwu tea that is overall brighter and more vibrant, with aroma and sweetness being the dominant characteristics, as well as a more textural liquor with comparatively more bitterness and astringency than the average Yiwu. However, individual gardens, with their unique micro-terroir, can exhibit specific sets of traits even when picked and processed using the same standards.

Our sample pack examines these terroir and character differences with five different gardens of different ages and locations, all of which were processed by me using the same processing preferences.

Gaoshan Terroir

The eastern side of the village is a sharp slope downwards towards the main road, G219 and generally houses tea gardens with poorer forest ecology. In the heavily forested area that neighbours the eastern side of the village, we have the famous 'Thousand-Year Lychee Tree' that serves as a marker of the entrance to the closest Gushu gardens. Unfortunately, low production and high cost in these gardens resulted in our decision not to use these gardens as part of the sample set this year. We can clearly see on the map the general lack of general tree cover as you get closer to the road and any available flat land that isn't too rocky has been traditionally been cleared for growing food crops and only more recently has some been reclaimed for new tea trees.

The area to the south of Gaoshan that is not pictured is where the village road leads to the main entrance and connects to the main road. As the mountain ridge flows from north east to south of the village, the ecology is generally similar as what we can see on the east side of the map.

The western area is the main location and largest production area of Gaoshan. It is also known by its now more famous micro-terroir name, Bajiaolin or '巴蕉林', as the forest houses a fair amount of local, wild-varietal bananas. It is named as it is also the location of the largest amount of Gushu trees. With the larger gardens estimated to average between 200-300 year old trees, and several surviving individual trees that could potentially be as old as 500 years old, as well as the deep forest coverage that shades the entire area, most of the gardens here have a more 'wild-Yiwu' like feeling about them.

The northern side of the village is the highest point of the mountain ridge and was the latest side of the village to be developed. The oldest tea trees around this area are roughly 100 years old with many gardens being much younger, the majority having been developed in the last 30-40 years. The coverage of the nearest old-growth gardens was reduced to accommodate the need for more housing and roads, and the ever-growing population. As land nearby the village was cleared, new generations have planted more tea trees in previously undeveloped areas further away to account for the loss within the village, and most of this new tea comes from the north, north-western side of the village. Even more recently, more land has been cleared to build a government-sponsored trade center and second exit to the main road, one which is closer to the exit of Yiwu highway which was scheduled to open at the end of 2025.

Blind-Tasting

Before you read any further, if you plan on doing a blind tasting session of this pack, please finish the tastings before reading any further. The information listed below will factor biases into your tasting, so it is best to learn more after the session has been completed.

Information About Selected Gardens

Five gardens were selected for the sample pack. They were selected as they were are flushing during the same week in early April with similar weather and pick. They also represent a fair range of locations, terroir and tree age.

Code Mapping

Garden 1: LJM-B5

Garden 2: LJM3

Garden 3: BNCY-1

Garden 4: LXY-3

Garden 5: BJL1

Remarks around tasting

Each garden has been carefully selected to showcase a unique taste profile and should be easily distinguishable during side-by-side comparisons. Objectively, the younger gardens tend to be more 'vibrant' in character, showing off more punchy fragrance and a more upfront taste, whilst the older gardens tend to be deeper and more reserved, as well as longer-lasting.

Final Comments

With these five different samples, we can get a sense of how individual gardens show off their own unique profile. From a consumer perspective, any individual vendor's production, which may be labelled 'Gaoshan' may be made from an individual garden, a specific selection of family gardens, a fair range of Gaoshan gardens, or a blend of the previous along with other regions' teas. In addition to the various processing variances, this means that consumers have little chance to understand the difference between individual gardens and their 'single-estate' products on market. For example, our retail Gaoshan cakes are made exclusively from gardens that have at least mainly 100+ year old tea trees, and are a blend of many of these gardens all around the village, picked throughout the whole of Spring, processed to our family preferences. As a result, our Gaoshan cake is unique enough to show differences among other retail productions of Gaoshan available on the market.

With this in mind, I hope the sample pack has given you insight into the terroir and production of tasting teas as well as some background on Yiwu and Gaoshan as a whole. I sincerely hope that it also sparks more curiosity and questions in you, and I would be more than happy to hear from you if it does.

Visiting Yiwu and Gaoshan

If you are planning to go to Yiwu and would like a guided visit to Gaoshan and/or the nearby areas, please feel free to get in touch. We understand how challenging it can be for people to navigate mountain villages, and having local contacts who support us is of great help. Therefore, we are happy to host visitors interested in Yi-Xiangtang culture and/or tea. Details can be arranged further via Wechat, Facebook or email. If interested, please make initial contact through the Contact Us page (I prefer to avoid unnecessary spam by not publicly publishing my contact details here).

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