Lineage & History

Golden Needle represents the absolute pinnacle of the single-bud picking tradition, harvested before the Qingming rains, when the bud has concentrated everything the tree stored through winter into one untouched shoot.

Yunnan's large-leaf tea tradition reaches back over seventeen centuries, but it was in 1939 that tea master Feng Shaoqiu first travelled to Fengqing to demonstrate that the Da Ye Zhong cultivar could produce a red tea of international calibre. The tea he made that year, later named Dian Hong, went on to be served at diplomatic state banquets and gifted to foreign heads of state. It remains the defining achievement of Yunnan red tea craftsmanship. The single-bud picking that produces Golden Needle is the highest expression of that tradition: slower, rarer, and entirely uncompromising.

Terroir & Microclimate

Lincang sits in the western highlands of Yunnan, where the Nujiang and Lancang river systems carve deep valleys through forested ridges. The ancient Da Ye Zhong trees that produce this harvest grow at 1,500 to 1,800 metres in mineral-heavy, acidic soils, iron-rich red clay over limestone, well-draining and slow to yield.

The defining feature of the Lincang highland microclimate is the diurnal temperature shift: intense daytime sun followed by an immediate and severe drop after dark. This thermal stress slows chlorophyll production in the bud, forcing the plant to concentrate natural sugars and amino acids rather than expand leaf mass. The result is a tea with an extraordinarily thick body, naturally devoid of bitter or aggressive tannins, not a processing achievement, but a direct consequence of where and how the tree grows.