A Jingmai chronicle — from Amgalan Chin’s cellar
Amgalan first stepped into Jingmai during a study of the ancient tea-horse routes that once carried Yunnan’s leaf to the Mongolian steppe. The mountain’s distinct honeyed-floral profile — bright as a wild orchid meadow when young, mellowing into dried apricot and antique wood with time — captured his cross-regional imagination. That year, he befriended a small family producer in Mangjing village and began setting aside a few kilograms of spring maocha, not for immediate drinking but to answer a single question: how does Jingmai age when nothing is hurried?
The vertical was born from that slow practice. In 2013, 2018, and 2023, Amgalan returned to press a single small cake from the same garden plot, using the same traditional sun-drying and stone-compression technique. Each cake was stored quietly in his cellar in ordinary Yunnan conditions — not wet-stored, not dry — just the patient rhythm of seasons passing through a tea brick.
Now he releases the set for serious students. Tasting the three cakes side by side is like flipping through a diary of the mountain’s voice: the green, almost white-tea-like freshness of 2023; the succulent middle age of 2018 where honey and gentle wood begin to surface; and the 2013, a decade in, with its resonant camphor, leather, and slow, deepening sweetness. For Amgalan, this vertical is a teacher — and he hopes it becomes one for you, too.