A decade in one Bulang village, traced by Amgalan Chin
Amgalan Chin first reached Lao Man’e — a remote Bulang village in Xishuangbanna — in 2012 while tracing the old tea-horse road. He returned to the same slope and the same families in 2015 and 2020, collecting spring maocha from trees that were already old when the first stone markers were carved. The 2010 lot (obtained through a trusted intermediary) was plucked just before the late-April rains; it has aged into a dark, resinous tea with camphor and plum-bark depth. The 2015 came from a drier year: leaves were thicker, bitterness sharper — now settling into a honeyed, baked-apple warmth after five years of Kunming storage. The 2020 harvest followed a wet spring, producing fragrant leaves with a brisk, almost white-flower top note that forecasts a beautiful aging trajectory. Amgalan’s cross-regional background — from the tea caravans of Mongolia to the subtropical mists of Bulang — gave him the patience to wait, collecting these snapshots not as commodities but as a lesson in time. He now offers this vertical as a guided tasting: brew them side by side to taste the decade that shaped them.