$$ Mianhua Gushu
★★★★ (4/5)

Mianhua Gushu - Terrace Tea as BingDao Introduction

An eccentric tea farmer trying to make it big

Mianhua Gushu tea vendor livestreaming from DiJie mountain location

Taobao store listing : https://mhgs11.world.taobao.com/shop/view_shop.htm?spm=a1z09.2.0.0.b9772e8dJ4D2HG&user_number_id=2215033055835

This store was interesting mostly because I can see the owner is trying very hard not be dishonest, whilst still trying very hard to use every marketing trick possible to promote his tea listings. The most interesting concept he has was to sell terrace grown tea “台地茶” as an introducer to BingDao tea. His argument was that most cheap Bingdao Tea is either fake or from the terrace, and he wanted us to sample his terrace grown tea to compare.

Some Notes

  • Owner streams outdoors and showed us his altitude and location on his map app - pretty interesting way to convince us that he’s the real deal and not a scammer.
  • He is new to livestreaming and originally sold directly to purchasers. He revealed on the livestream that his orders are down ~30% this year due to a declining market. ** Most orders from his terrace trees were reduced. so in terms of picking, he said that a lot of his smaller trees were not picked this spring because it was hard to flip a profit. He would still pick his ancient and large trees. ** Rough numbers - 150 RMB (probably inflated number) to hire a worker to pick leaves and they can roughly pick 8 KG of raw leaf per day (need to fact check this). ** He walked around his garden during the stream, and showed us that his garden was rather irregular and not suitable for machine picking. He said this wasn’t true for all farms, some terraces have very regular planting patterns and can be easily picked by machines
  • His farm is located up the mountain in DiJie (~ 1 hour access). I think he mentioned 1900 m above sea level.

Tea tasting

Bingdao Dijie Raw Pu-erh tea from terraced farms
Raw Pu-erh

Bingdao Dijie initial thoughts

Famous Bingdao region tea from terraced farms in Dijie sub-region. Softer than expected with subtle sweetness.

Price: $9
slight bitterness sweetness softer +1 more
7/1/2025