This is my biggest concern when it comes to buying and drinking tea. There is a huge financial incentive for bad actors in this space to decieve the buyer, especially since there is a huge number of parties involved in bringing the tea out to market. Here are some ways fraud can happen. There is a saying that you can only guarentee your production if you pick it yourself or literally sit there in Yunnan and watch them pick the tea, and I definitely think there is truth to that.

Ways Fraud Can Happen

• Tea harvester - farmers hire tea harvests to manually pick tea (if they are hand picked). These harvestors can cost up to 150 RMB per day and they work long hours manually picking tea from tea trees. It’s possible for either the picker or farmer to mix leaves from ancient trees with smaller terraced teas etc to bulk up the yield. At the end of the day, it’s nearly impossible to check every single batch and because fresh leaves have a huge price difference between ancient and younger trees, this might be a way for farmers / pickers to increase profits.

• Factory / production - During the “Kill Green” phase. Tempting for someone to throw in some cheaper leaves and bulk up the production.

• Loose leaf / Maocha wholesale - It’s possible when these leaves are sold in bulk to have some other leaves mixed inside to bulk up. I’ve talked to a few wholesalers / purchases and they try to either visually verify and taste the tea before a purchase. However, it’s very possible that people will get lazy. Thousands of kilos get exchanged each day and are kept as loose leaf, so there is a lot of room to manoeuvre. Things only really get finalized after a cake is pressed (at which point you can’t alter the blend)

• Labelling / wrapper - It’s super cheap to buy customized wrappers (taobao stores sell them at less than 1 RMB per label). These wrapper factories can print and allow producer to print anything they want - so simplying typing “ancient tree” and put any year on the label - this drastically can increase the sale value of the final product.

• Cake compression stage - not every farmer has access to cake compression, and yet again, you can’t guarentee authnticity until it’s pressed.

My Thoughts on This Reality

When I researched this I was pretty depressed - how can we really be sure that we are getting what we think we are getting. If fraud can happen even at the harvesting stage - then there is really no truth in this system. This is one of the reasons I chose the name “imperfect” tea for this site. It’s the acceptance of the fact that there isn’t 100% truth, but maybe a better way of thinking about it is that we aim to get 80% of what we think we’re getting - and maybe that’s something we can be ok with.

Tree Rental - An Extreme Solution

One other thought / trend that is popular is to rent a tree. I saw some farmers offering this and they basically can take you around the garden and you can rent a tree from then for the season. The funny thing is they put a sign with the name of the person who rented the tree, and you can see some large ancient trees with name on them. And being 2025, they have a solar powered CCTV system that monitors the tree so the buyer can remotely view the CCTV at any time.

I actually think this is a cool idea. Hardcore tea folk can then just go there and harvest it manually etc / or hire workers that they trust. The lengths some people go through to ensure authenticity is insane.