Dong Ding

In 1855 a scholar named Lin Fengchi sailed home from the exams in Fujian with thirty-six tea cuttings. Twelve went into the hillside above Lugu, and everything grown there since came from those.

The mountain's name means frozen summit. It remembers people climbing the cold peak barefoot, long before there was tea on it.

The leaf is rolled into tight half-balls by heat and cloth, worked, broken open, and worked again, for hours. That repeated pressure is what gives the tea its body. It drinks floral and creamy, vanilla over toasted grain, and finishes clean and slightly tart.