Fang Ting

Fang Ting grew up in Xinyang, Henan, where the spring harvest of Xìnyáng Máojiān (信阳毛尖) set the rhythm of her childhood. Her family ran a small tea-drying operation, and by age fourteen she could distinguish between a míngqián (明前, pre-Qingming) pluck and a later flush by touch alone. A formative apprenticeship under local master Zhāng Xiùyīng gave her an early command of green tea processing, but it was a trip to Wǔyí Shān in 2012 that redirected her career. Watching Shuǐ Xiān (水仙) being rocked in a bamboo basket over charcoal convinced her that partial oxidation held the most intricate questions in Chinese tea.

She spent the next three years training at several yancha workshops, eventually settling under the guidance of Wǔyí master Wáng Shùnmíng. There she built a rigorous cross-category cupping discipline — what she calls "triangulating from green to black" — using Máojiān's sharp clarity and Yán Chá's mineral depth as sensory anchors. A parallel immersion in Yúnnán pu-erh, beginning with a 2015 residency at a Měnghǎi raw-tea collective, rounded out her tasting framework. Fang Ting now considers the triangle of Henan green, Wǔyí oolong, and Líncāng raw pu-erh the core of her professional palate.

At Teamotea, Fang Ting serves as the senior expert bridging shop.thetea.app, shop.puerh.app, and the editorial desks at puerh.app and tea.doctor. Her 2026 report "Wuyi rock-tea vendor consolidation — what changed in 2026" drew on field interviews with fourteen producers and became a reference point for buyers navigating the new pricing tiers that emerged after a succession of small-farm closures. She followed it with "Henan green tea price index: 2025 first-flush analysis," a data-driven look at how early-spring weather in Xinyang shifted auction-floor expectations. Both pieces reveal her signature method: ground-truth sourcing followed by chartable, no-narrative-reader-needed conclusions.

Fang Ting also designed and teaches the oolong cupping module and the introductory pu-erh path at tea.school, where she walks students through the same three-category comparison she honed in Wǔyí. Her classroom mantra — "first taste the cultivar, then the craft, then the mountain" — echoes her belief that Henan's northern tea culture, often overlooked, offers a benchmark of purity that southern categories can be measured against.

Her current research tracks how climate-driven yield shifts in Fujian and Yúnnán are reshaping the price relationship between rock tea and aged raw pu-erh. When not on the road, Fang Ting maintains a small cupping library in Zhèngzhōu stocked with over 200 reference samples, a third of them from Henan itself. She remains the only senior expert on the Teamotea roster whose daily-drinker is a Xìnyáng Máojiān picked within 50 kilometres of the house where she first learned to fire a wok.