From Mengku’s ancient gardens, sourced by Michael Zhan
Every spring, Michael Zhan travels to Lincang’s Mengku mountains, where old arbor trees push their first flush above 1,600 metres. In 2024, the weather gave a slow, cool start: leaves thickened, bitterness softened, and the sugars concentrated into a honeyed sweetness rare even for this region. He spent three days with a small family-run workshop, tasting maocha straight from the pan and tracking how the kill-green and rolling were handled by feel rather than timer.
The result is a sheng that sidesteps the bold structure of Bulang or the lush easy fruit of Yiwu; it’s an alpine lightness, a thread of white peach and wildflower that lingers without weight. Michael chose this cake for the marketplace because it shows young sheng’s elegance clearly, and with time it will grow into a soft, golden, deeply comforting tea. Once split and blind-tasted at Sandry Law’s Kunming station against reference samples from previous seasons, it moved straight to listing, a map of one spring’s sweetness and cool mountain air.