editorial mission
tea.report exists to close the gap between the fragmented, often opaque Chinese tea trade and the professionals who depend on it. We focus exclusively on Chinese tea — from Yúnnán shēng pǔ’ěr (云南生普洱) harvests to Fújiàn Bái Háo Yín Zhēn (福建白毫银针) price trends — because that is where the most complex, least standardized market lives. Our mission is to aggregate, verify, and contextualize data from primary sources: direct producer surveys, wholesale terminal reports, customs trade records, academic studies, and interviews with named tea masters. Every number carries a citation traceable to a GB/T standard, a harvest ledger, or a documented transaction. When data is incomplete — and in a harvest-dependent, weather-sensitive industry it often is — we hedge explicitly. A report might state “based on 14 of 47 expected harvests reported” rather than implying a complete picture. We reject the marketing clichés that dominate tea publishing. You will find no exclamation marks, no unsubstantiated superlatives, no “liquid jade” prose. Instead, you will find clean charts, sentence-case headings, and an analytical tone modeled on the best data-journalism traditions. Our team of engineers, market analysts, and tea-domain experts maintains a rolling quarterly schedule of reports, a live price index, and a methodology hub that is updated as our sourcing improves. tea.report is not a newsroom; it is a data product with an editorial soul. Every published insight is designed to be actionable for a buyer negotiating a spring lot, a distributor planning container volume, or an investor evaluating tea-export ETF opportunities. And because we are part of the THETEA constellation — 34 interconnected tea brands — our work links directly to the raw data APIs at tea.support, the harvest pre-buy marketplace at tea.money, and the educational context at tea.school, ensuring you never have to leave the constellation to go from raw number to informed decision.
why tea.report was founded
The THETEA constellation began with a simple observation: tea is data — terroir coordinates, picking dates, oxidation percentages, auction prices. Yet the world of Chinese tea market intelligence remained scattered across WeChat groups, handwritten ledgers, and whispered price rumors. Teamotea’s co-founders had already built 33 other tea brands — from community platforms to travel services — when they decided the missing piece was a rigorous, transparent market-data brand. tea.report launched as that 34th brand, a dedicated space where harvest volumes from Ānhuī (安徽) and shipment flows to Mòsīkē (Moscow) could be tracked with the same editorial discipline applied to financial markets. The founding team combined expertise in platform engineering, supply-chain operations, and tea sourcing to build a publication that treats a spring Da Hóng Páo (大红袍) price fluctuation with the same seriousness that a terminal treats a commodity curve.
editorial principles
We operate under a strict set of rules. First, every factual claim carries a source — a Chinese tea standard (e.g., GB/T 22291-2017 for white tea), an academic paper, or a named tea-master interview. Second, we use only sentence case in headings and avoid emoji, exclamation marks, and marketing fluff. Third, our house typography signals precision: em dashes with hair spaces ( — ), italic pinyin with tone marks for tea names. When we must compare Chinese tea to a foreign counterpart — say, to contrast a Fúdǐng (福鼎) bái chá (白茶) processing method with a Darjeeling white — we do so briefly and only for clarification, never as a primary product focus. Opinions are rare, clearly labeled, and never substitute for missing data. Our charts follow a cream-background, ink-axis, single-accent palette that prioritizes readability over decoration. These aren’t aesthetic choices; they are functional, ensuring that the information, not the packaging, dominates the reader’s attention.
sourcing methodology
tea.report’s data supply chain is as carefully constructed as the physical tea supply chain we cover. We maintain a network of producers, cooperative heads, and wholesale-market contacts across major growing regions: Yúnnán (云南), Fújiàn (福建), Ānhuī, Zhèjiāng (浙江), and Guǎngdōng (广东). Each season, we send structured surveys to a panel of growers, requesting planted area, yield, picking window, and first-sale price. These are cross-referenced with customs datasets for export volumes and with terminal market reports from Kūnmíng (昆明), Guǎngzhōu (广州), and Běijīng (北京). For macro trends, we incorporate academic literature from tea-research institutes and government-published harvest summaries. Tea-master interviews — always attributed — provide qualitative context that raw numbers cannot: how a drought altered leaf texture, or why a particular lot commanded a 20% premium. When we build a price index or a forecast, we document exactly which sources fed the model and note any biases (e.g., oversampling of large plantations versus smallholders). This methodology page is public, and we update it whenever we refine our approach.
transparency and limitations
Good data journalism means admitting what you don’t know. Chinese tea markets are not fully transparent; many transactions happen off-exchange, and some regions report only partial harvest data. In every report, we disclose the coverage rate: “based on 32 of approximately 60 expected mid-harvest reports from Yúnnán.” If a price trend is extrapolated from a small sample, we say so. We do not smooth spikes or hide outliers. If our forecast model changes, we explain the revision and publish a changelog. Readers are encouraged to question our data — and to contribute. We have a structured feedback channel for producers and buyers to correct or supplement our datasets. tea.report’s independence is fundamental: we do not accept payment from tea companies in exchange for favorable coverage, nor do we own tea inventory that could create a conflict of interest. Our revenue comes from subscriptions (free and pro tiers) and API licensing, not from trading the commodities we analyze. This alignment of incentives is what allows us to be a trusted source inside the constellation and beyond.