The Most Expensive Tea in the World — and Who Buys It

On a sheer rock face in the Wuyi mountains of northern Fujian, six gnarled tea trees grow out of fissures in the stone. They are over 350 years old. They are insured by the Chinese government. And the leaves they produce — a small handful per year — are the most expensive tea in the world.

**The legend.** In the late Ming dynasty, a young scholar travelling to Beijing for the imperial examinations fell desperately ill in Wuyi. Local monks brewed him a tea from the cliff trees; he recovered, passed his exams, and returned years later as a court official. He climbed back to the cliff and draped his red ceremonial robes around the bushes in gratitude. The tea has been called *Da Hong Pao* — Big Red Robe — ever since.

**The auction.** In 2002, twenty grams of Da Hong Pao from those original mother trees sold at auction for 180,000 yuan. Adjusted for inflation, that works out to roughly $1,250,000 per kilogram — making it, briefly, the most expensive tea ever sold by weight, and easily the most expensive *anything* you can drink.

**The protected mother trees.** The leaves were last harvested commercially in 2005. After that, the Chinese government banned further plucking from the original trees and declared them a protected national heritage site. Every cup of 'authentic' Da Hong Pao on the market today is, technically, from clones — descendants of cuttings taken from the mother trees and propagated to other Wuyi gardens.

**Who buys it.** The original auction lots went to wealthy Chinese collectors and to a Singaporean tea merchant. Subsequent commercial-grade Da Hong Pao (the high-end clonal version, $30–80 for a 25-gram tin) is sold mostly to: serious Chinese tea collectors, gift markets within China and Hong Kong, and a small number of Western specialty buyers. Anyone selling 'mother-tree Da Hong Pao' for under £200 a gram is, with near certainty, lying.

**Is it worth the price?** A good clonal Da Hong Pao at £30 is genuinely extraordinary tea — dark fruit, mineral, a long roasted finish. The original mother-tree leaves were probably very similar in flavour. What you were paying for, at $1.25 million a kilo, was history. Not flavour.