Liu Shenyang

Liu Shenyang is a tea master at tea.report, where he leads the platform's coverage of vintage pu'er valuation, storage economics, and auction market dynamics. His work spans the full lifecycle of aged tea — from raw maocha sourcing in the Měnghǎi (勐海) mountains to the humid cellars of Hong Kong and the glossy auction halls of Guangzhou.

Shenyang entered the pu'er trade in 1999, apprenticing under the late Hong Kong tea merchant Fong Dai-chun, a quiet figure who had been stockpiling raw cakes since the Cultural Revolution. Under Fong's tutelage, Shenyang learned to grade tea not just by taste but by storage history — distinguishing dry-storage gān cāng (干仓) notes from the earthier tones of traditional humid storage. He later spent three years in Kunming, working alongside factory managers at the Dayi (大益) and Xiaguan (下关) operations to understand how production dates, batch codes, and wrapper variations affect collectability.

By 2010, Shenyang had begun building a proprietary price database, meticulously logging auction results from China Guardian, Poly, and Bonhams Hong Kong. That dataset, now exceeding 12 000 individual hammer records, underpins many of tea.report's quarterly vintage reports. In his article 'Guangzhou spring 2026 — vintage tea auction results', he dissected the surprising 18% quarter-on-quarter price rise for 2003 Dayi 'Silver Dayi' cakes, attributing it to a tightening supply of verified Guangdong dry-storage examples. His follow-up piece, 'Provenance documentation and its effect on realised auction price', demonstrated that intact provenance papers added a 22 – 34% premium over unaccompanied cakes of identical year and factory — a finding that has reshaped how serious collectors inventory their cellars.

Shenyang's most cited work is perhaps 'Warehouse storage cost per kilogram per year — pu'er aging economics', where he broke down the real annual cost of professional storage, factoring in rent, climate control, insurance, and the opportunity cost of capital. He arrived at a figure of ¥58 – 85 per kilogram for Guangzhou's commercial cellars, a number now used as a benchmark by the tea.money initiative for harvest pre-buy projections. Another landmark analysis, 'Storage provenance and the vintage pu'er pricing curve', showed that cakes stored in Hong Kong for over a decade trade at a 15% discount to comparable Yunnan-stored cakes when sold at mainland auctions, challenging the long-held belief that Hong Kong's humidity is universally beneficial.

Beyond the numbers, Shenyang remains a tactile evaluator. He personally inspects every lot he writes about, often spending entire afternoons with a single 400-gram cake — examining its compression marks, sniffing the wrapper for the faint camphor scent of genuine age, and steeping it in a 120 ml gài wǎn (盖碗) until the leaves yield a reliable tasting trajectory. His library of over 200 sealed auction catalogues from 1996 to 2025 is a resource frequently consulted by researchers at tea.degree and the editorial team at tea.report.

Today, Liu Shenyang serves as the connective tissue between traditional connoisseurship and modern tea finance. He teaches a biannual 'Reading a Vintage Cake' intensive at tea.school and advises private buyers on building investment-grade collections through shop.puerh.app. His forecasts and price indices are followed by distributors on tea.community and help shape the pre-season contracting strategies of Teamotea’s sourcing arm.