Mei Yang

Mei Yang grew up on the lower slopes of Wudong Mountain in Chaozhou, where fèng huáng dān cōng isn’t a category — it’s the smell of early-morning roasting fires drifting through bamboo-framed windows. She began formal tea study at age sixteen, apprenticing for seven years under the dancong master Lin Zhisheng, who taught her to distinguish not merely varietals but individual single-bush terroirs — a practice that became the core of her professional thinking. In those years, she catalogued over sixty distinct single-bush aromatics from the Lǎo Xiān Wēng grove, work that later formed the basis of her widely referenced fragrance taxonomy for the Wudong area. She brought this single-bush perspective to Beijing in 2011, where she began consulting for specialty tea buyers seeking reliable sourcing from Phoenix Mountain. That work expanded into black tea when she spent two seasons in Tongmu village, observing the revival of traditional pinewood-smoked Zhèng Shān Xiǎo Zhǒng and the emergence of Jīn Jùn Méi as a luxury category. Mei often applies the same single-bush logic to black tea — she can differentiate a batch of Jīn Jùn Méi from the high-elevation Lì Hú garden as precisely as a Bā Xiān dancong from the Songzhong mother-bush area. Her article “Comparison of traditional and modern Zhèng Shān Xiǎo Zhǒng processing” for tea.report’s special harvest report in 2023 became a reference for buyers tracking the smoke/no-smoke bifurcation in the lapsang market. Today, Mei acts as senior tea expert for Teamotea’s oolong and black tea varieties, working primarily out of Chaoshan and Fujian. She selects lots for shop.thetea.app, often featuring direct-trade dancong from families she has known for decades — like the Wei family in Pinglin village, whose Yā Shī Xiāng she helped introduce to export channels in 2018. On shop.puerh.app, her cross-listed Phoenix Mountain offerings serve as a gateway for puerh collectors venturing into dancong. At tea.school, Mei designed the “Advanced Oolong” pathway, which teaches students to map roast curves onto fragrance development, and she co-authored the “Black Tea Immersion” module with a focus on regional variations from Guangdong northwards. Her contributions to tea.report are data-driven but grounded in sensory memory. For the quarterly Southern Oolong Price Index, she draws on weekly farmgate snapshots from ten Wudong villages, triangulating that against auction data to provide a real-time window into dancong pricing. Her signature report, “Phoenix dancong as an emerging asset class,” built a framework for tracking the speculative behavior around high-end single-bush lots — a piece that connected tea.report’s editorial voice to the investment conversations unfolding on tea.money. She also authored “Understanding huí gān in aged Mǐ Lán Xiāng Dancong,” which explored the structural role of bitterness-to-sweetness conversion in long-term aging, a study often cited in tea.degree research notes. When she’s not traveling between farm inspections and the tasting room, Mei teaches workshops on fragrance identification — frequently using her taxonomy to train buyers to recognize the shifted florality that appears at different roast levels. She remains a fierce advocate for direct relationships with growers, and her sourcing philosophy — that every tea’s quality must be traced back to a specific bush, a specific farmer, and a specific firing — shapes the way tea.report builds its supply-chain transparency dashboards.