Award Winning Organic Premium White Peony (Bai MuDan) Tea

TeaVivre’s organic-certified White Peony (Bai MuDan) tea is farmed and produced at Mt. Taimu using material from tea trees of the Dabaihao variety. When brewed this tea presents a pale yellow-orange color of liquid like our Silver Needle tea, but with a richer flavor. White Peony tea, or Bai MuDan as it is called in China, is a lightly oxidized white tea produced with the same minimal processing as Silver Needle; the main difference is that Silver Needle contains only the unopened buds, while White Peony includes one or two freshly-opened leaves as well as the buds.

TeaVivre’s organic White Peony tea is of premium quality, produced by a gold medal-winning plantation in Fujian, and good growing conditions mean that this tea has an excellent clean pekoe-scented fragrance and taste.

	Cup Method		Chinese Gongfu Method
	Teacup: 12oz / 355ml		Gaiwan: 3.8oz / 110ml
	194℉ / 90℃		194℉ / 90℃
	3 Teaspoons / 2 Grams Tea		5g Tea
	Brewing time: 5 - 8 mins		5 steeps: 20s,30s,40s,60s,80s

Heshan Organic Tea Garden is in the main producing area of white tea in Fuding, to the west of Taimu Mountain at an elevation between 600 and 900 meters. The weather here is warm and humid with abundant rainfall, and the tea plantation is surrounded by fog, all of which result in the perfect conditions for tea bushes to accumulate a rich array of microminerals and organic nutrients. The tea plants growing here are mainly of the Fuding Dabaihao varieties.

Heshan Organic Tea Garden in Fuding, Fujian Province

Mr. Lin was born in Fuding, Fujian, and has been living in a tea-filled environment all his life. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are all tea farmers; when in elementary school, Mr. Lin helped pick the tea when there were not enough workers. This led to his dream of becoming further engaged in the tea business.

He said: “My original idea was to establish a good life for my family by running a tea business. But when I got to that point in 1993, I changed my mind: Fuding is one of the best places for growing tea. So I wanted to create a long-term organic tea business.”

Mr. Lin is now one of the first founders of Chinese white tea, owning almost 2800 acres of high-quality Fuding tea gardens, including the only organic tea garden in Fujian that has passed all the European, American, and Japanese certifications. This organic garden has also become the national agricultural standard.

In 2008, his Silver Needle white tea won the gold medal at the annual Chinese White Tea festival in Beijing.

This Bai MuDan tea is produced in Fuding, a famous tea production area located in the northeast of Fujian Province. Fuding is of the subtropical monsoon climate, characteristic to coastal areas; it experiences an average annual rainfall of about 1661mm, and the average annual temperature is right around 18.5°C. This tropical, mountainous coastal area is perfect for growing pekoe, with abundant rainfall and temperatures neither too hot in summer nor too cold in winter; the mountains around the farms are more than 80% forested, which ensures the soil retains a high natural fertility and organic content. This in turn eliminates the need to use fertilizers.

This white tea is made from the leaves of the Fuding Dabaihao plant, which propagates asexually and is shaped like a small tree, and in 1985 was certified as a national tea plant variety. It can grow up to 2.8m high with a thick trunk, and its spring leaves contain 1.8% amino acids and 28.2% tea polyphenols, marking it is an excellent base to make Silver Needle and White Peony tea.

Since both follow the same method of processing and use the same source plants, the histories of Bai MuDan and Silver Needle white teas are very similar, with the only difference being which parts of the plant are used.
White tea is the oldest form of Chinese tea. Farmers discovered that cooling, sun-drying, or baking the leaves ensured that the tea could be stored easily and then used at a later time; these steps of course formed the basis of the withering and drying processes that are still used to this day.
The Bai MuDan version of white tea, essentially the same as Silver Needle except for the leaf-bud ratio, was first produced in the early 1870s in the area around ShuiJi, in the Zhenghe county of Fujian province. Later on in the 1960s, production spread to the Songxi county in Fujian, and today the main production areas for Bai MuDan are these two counties as well as Fuding and Jianyang counties.