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Day 6 started early in Huangshan town having had some time to explore the 'old street' crammed full of shops & restaurants the night before.  We wandered up the road, for breakfast.... ...past the tourism toilets [sorry couldn't resist a photo!] before hailing a cab to our next destination.  You can already see a hint of the magnificent mountains in the background. Anhui province is home to four of the top ten Chinese teas.  As well as Huangshan Maofeng tea there is also Qimen Black Tea, Lu'an Guapian tea & Taiping HouKui tea.  Breaking down the name 'Huangshan Maofeng' we see that : "Huangshan" means...

Those of you who know us at Comins well know that we take the provenance of our tea very seriously - travelling all over the world in order to visit the people and places that produce the teas we serve you everyday.    Back in March we teamed up with the Soil Association to bring you the first in a series of short articles focussed on tea & one of our favourite topics - soil. You can read the first article focused on Kenya here - the next will follow soon. Over the coming months we will be sharing stories from around the tea world...

TAIPING HOUKUI | THE PROCESS People often ask how we plan tea trips, make decisions on where to go, who to meet.  Well, it often starts with an interest or curiosity about a certain tea.  The trip then grows around the area that tea come from.  This year the trip was really all about Taiping houkui, one of the top ten teas in China which is produced in the HouKeng area of Taiping county at the base of the Huangshan Mountains, Anhui province.   We have long been fascinated by this tea and the manufacturing process that results in the long pressed leaves - take...

TAIPING HOUKUI | THE PLACE First a short introduction to the area.  If you have read about Taiping Houkui before you may have read that the only way to reach some of the villages involved in its production is by boat and indeed this is still the case for some areas.  As we trekked through the area on this gloriously bright day we saw boats zipping across and along the water.  The three main villages for Taiping Houkei production are Houkeng, Hougang and Yanjiachun.  We chose to base our visit around Houkeng and road access to the area we visited - the new HouKeng village -...

Anji - Huangzhou - TaiPing After leaving Mr Ye in the am we headed off to Huangzhou and to the tea museum for a browse before heading for dinner on the West Lake. For those of you planning a trip to China the Tea Museum is a great place to visit and learn more about the rich tea history and tea culture of China.  I have a definite plan to start my journey with mandarin in the coming months but for now the excellent translation here was very welcome!  Although we did not come from Shanghai this time it is pretty easy to...