Fuding: White Tea City At The Crossroads
Bailin Township Intersection Connecting Taimushan, Panxi, and Fuding
Thirty years ago, white tea was a marginal curiosity, even in Fuding. Farmers throughout the coastal city’s constituent townships we have spoken to recall making red tea and jasmine tea for export or sale in China’s northern provinces. As the price of white tea has dropped, some may now consider shifting back to these original production styles, but many more will simply exit the tea industry. The number of fully registered Fuding white tea factories seems to be around to 2,000. These 2,000 factories support around 300,000 full or part-time tea farmers and 80,000 in selling, processing, transport, pressing, and other related services. Taken together, this represents the majority of Fuding’s population and the economic heart of the world’s only white tea city. The challenges that the Fuding white tea industry is facing now will have a direct and lasting impact on the thousands of families that have come to depend on it.
Fuding’s meteoric white tea boom is over. Between 2013 and 2023, China’s white tea market grew from 1.23 million tons to 10.02 million tons, with Fuding leading the national charge. This market shake-up brought a lot of people, in fact all the people we work with, into the white tea game. Then a coal miner, Wu Shihui was thus given a chance to go home and help his aunt back in Guanyang Township set up their little attic workshop, Yuanming Founder Qiu finally quit his job as a restaurant worker in America and convinced his wife Zhu to return to her home in Diantou and get in on the action, while our newest contact, Huanggang Old Factory Co-op’s Auntie Zhou, saw it as her chance to close her shop in Shandong’s Jinan City and take her children back to their ancestral village in Panxi. Like many mountainous areas, Fuding’s population had been stagnant and aging as locals moved out to larger urban centers. It sat at 530,000 residents in 1995, and the municipal area was still home to just around 530,000 souls come 2010. Since then, depending on the figures you look at, some 30,000-60,000 people have joined the city despite a declining birthrate. Many new residents are former tea farmers that returned to pick leaves, process white tea, or speculate on cakes, depending on their circumstance. Since these members of the Fuding diaspora have come home, the city’s fuzzy white Yinzhen, picturesque Baimudan, and sugary Shoumei have come to be prominently featured at large tea markets and conventions from Gansu’s Lanzhou to Guangxi’s Qinzhou. You are now likely to find at least a few neglected white tea cakes alongside Xinyang Maojian, orange peel ripe puer, and dark tea bricks in the dustiest small town tea shop. Recently however, the gravy train has gone off the tracks for some local stakeholders.
Fuding Yinzhen Up Close
These last two Springs, a steady stream of negative social media sentiment has poured out of Fuding’s terraced tea gardens. In May 2024, one comment on a Tiktok post read “last year, I picked 20,000 RMB worth of tea, this year the tea I picked was worth just 5,000 RMB.” Another comment from April this year reads “If tea is this cheap, it is better to go work in a factory. If you let the tea trees go wild for three years, they will still be fine.” A video taken at the Diantou Tea Market that same month is captioned “this year Yinzhen material is back to the same price it was a decade ago. We have sat here for three hours, but no one has bought our tea. Our hearts grow sour.” For some Fuding tea growers at least, the last two years have certainly been difficult.
Social Media Posts Quoted Above
Distressed growers and processors have been fast to point the finger at one another. “What Diantou tea market, you should call it the outsider tea market” reads one comment, “It’s all out-of-town tea there, everything is a mess.” Fuding’s neighboring Fu’an City and Zhenghe County are also core tea production areas that have been taking part in the white tea boom. Thousands of tea-related families in these areas are now feeling the same squeeze as in Fuding. As the total volume of sales now dwindle, producers are all the more anxious to emphasize the competitive advantage of their local area’s tea in terms of historical legacy, affordability, or environment. One red tea producer in Fu’an we spoke to back in June seemed borderline celebratory that now the “ridiculously inflated” prices for Fuding white tea were coming down, a “skill-free,” “invented” tea with no history. A similar video with an equally combative comment section can be found on the Tiktok of one not-so-humble Fu’an lawyer. For their part, some Fuding producers we have spoken to have long knocked the “sour,” “cheap,” “undrinkable” white tea in Fu’an. Many Zhenghe producers are also eager to remind you of their relatively higher elevation, preponderance of ancient trees, and the claim that they were producing Baimudan before Fuding or Fu’an. These producers are all competing for government project funding and media coverage, just as much as they striving to keep their share of a consumer audience.These expressions of mutual nastiness are markedly different from the usual attitude of independent producers or speculators who avoid controversy and call-outs of this manner. It is symptomatic of the strained situation that large macro-economic forces have created.
The Fu’an Dabai Cultivar that now covers much of Zhenghe County.
Official reporting on the state of Fuding white tea has been more balanced. Comparing 2023 and 2024, Fujian Province’s white tea export volume fell by 56.5% in terms of volume, and 77.6% in terms of total export value. Although this downturn appears severe, it is important to remember that the export volume of Fujian green tea also fell at a rate of 34.4% in the same period, while the average export value of Hunan dark tea dropped by 23.7%. All this means that Fuding’s white tea is not the only segment of the tea industry that is suffering. One article in the China Co-op Daily more modestly estimated the decline in Fuding raw leaves prices as between 15-20%, relatively minor compared to the “15-50%” seen at tea markets nationwide. A social media post claiming that tea farmers were dumping fresh leaves into the river out of frustration was further debunked as a hoax by television broadcasters. However drastic the downturn in the Fuding white tea market is now, it is not a situation explicitly unique to Fuding, or neighboring Zhenghe and Fu’an, nor does seem true that the market has completely collapsed.
“A Leaf Has Enriched The People of This Land.” - Sign at Fuding Credit Union.
Indeed, the situation on the ground feels much more like a stiff price correction rather than a complete market route. Diantou and Panxi townships are still full of open tea shops, while white tea promotional materials still covers the Fuding city landscape, be it a bank, hotel, or transit station. Nonetheless, one tea seller in Bailin Township says he cutback from three storefronts to just one section of what is now mostly an infant/toddler specialty store. Another in Panxi Township, helping her mother sort raw Summer material for jasmine tea production, complained that she has had to knock 20 RMB off a 2014 Shoumei tea, now only able to make back just the cost of production on a tea whose value is supposed to only appreciate with age. On the other end of the spectrum, another producer in Diantou said that “if there were 10,000 factories before, 5,000 will come out of this alive, but those that survive will be stronger and more professional. ” He has mastered the white tea “orthodox flavor” (正味) production techniques, built a modern production facility, and come to blend tea from a variety of different townships. He has thousands upon thousands of unwrapped cakes waiting for the market to rebound, and downstream market actors to affix their packaging for right price. He thinks for aged Shoumei at least, he will start to see that right price as soon as next year, while the price of new silver needle may continue to fall.
It remains to be seen whether or not white tea prices have hit their nadir, but it seems true that the downturn in local demand means there will be less farmers and factories involved in white tea production for at least the next few years. Those that stay in the game will have to accept potentially more work for a thinner margin of profit. Although all this will probably have little affect on the price seen in the boutique western tea market, where reduced prices are rarely passed onto vendors buying tea at retail prices and in quantities considered quite small by Chinese standards, other effects may be felt. For starters, those abroad may see more of the other teas historically produced in Fuding beyond white tea. We shall now look at two contenders for revival, jasmine pearls and Bailin Gongfu Tea.
Zhu, co-proprietor of the Yuanming Factory, remembers that when she was a young girl in the 1980’s, the sign at the entrance to Diantou’s tea market was not “China’s #1 White Tea Town” but the “Diantou Tea & Flower Market.” Jasmine tea was the big local seller in those days, and she permanently bent her fingers processing the first Spring buds that were then rolled into jasmine pearls, but are now made into Yinzhen. Along the road from Panxi to Bailin all the way up to Diantou on August 6th, we could see people sunning these already rolled pearls. Auntie Zhou recalls that when her husband’s father took over the cooperative factory in 1990, almost all of the tea in Huanggang Village, now a core white tea-growing site, was destined to become the base material for loose or rolled jasmine tea. She moved to Shandong’s Jinan Tea Market later that decade to sell such jasmine tea. To this day, Fuding still supplies a lot of the base leaf material used in higher end jasmine teas. Fuzhou factories will send tea material up to Fuding, especially Dianxia Township, for experienced female workers to roll into pearls and other shapes. The distinctively white fuzzy buds of the local Fuding Dahao and Dabai cultivars have long been closely associated with jasmine tea drinkers in Beijing. Yet, the flowers are nowhere to be seen. One tea seller in Bailin township recalls the unforgiving Summer heat under which the most fragrant, noontime and afternoon flowers had to be carefully picked, and for prices far lower than the white tea material that they are now accustomed to picking. Zhang Shiding, the father of modern Bailin red tea, was among the technicians who travelled to Guangxi’s Heng County to train up the talent in the place that is now China’s “jasmine capital.” As was true forty years ago or one hundred forty years ago, Fuzhou, and not Fuding is the site where jasmine flowers meet Fuding tea leaves. Fuding producers thus have an up-hill battle in transitioning to final jasmine tea processing. Fuzhou has the technical talent and brand power, but the rising demand and price for jasmine tea in an otherwise depressed market may tempt some in Fuding into giving it a shot.
Top to Bottom: Jasmine tea processing in Fuzhou, Bailin Red Tea Commemorative Plaque, Jasmine Pearls Sunning in Fuding.
Red tea is another option. Master Zheng, a student of Zhang Shiding, the Bailin Gongfu Tea founding father mentioned above, quite literally spat at the idea of drinking the jasmine pearls his neighbors were then making. For him, a resident of Bailin Township and proud leader in the Bailin Gongfu tea association, their local red tea is and was an example of Fuding’s unique taste and legacy that is on par with white tea. As his master taught him, Fuding’s Bailin Gongfu red tea always had a lower temperature bake that sets it apart from Wuyi, while its utilization of Fuding Dabai sets it apart from the more floral hodge-podge of Oolong cultivars now used in Fu’an red tea. It is fresh, but not overtly floral, sweet without being yam-like. It is its own unique thing, and deserving the support that the Fuding government has given it for the last seven years. The challenge to converting to Bailin Red teas lays in the mass uprooting of Fuding Dabai in favor of Dahao over the past few years. If producers want to make that traditional taste that may find a place in the contemporary market, it may mean another round of replanting.
On a final note, it is probably a good thing for Fuding white tea that local production slows down. The intensity of production over the last decade has meant that a lot of farmers who decided to make white tea growing and picking a bigger part of their income have uprooted not just the lower-yield Fuding Dabai cultivar, but also the hyper-localized “Caicha” that predated both Dabai and Dahao. At the same time, a lot of the same soil amendments, be they chemical or organic fertilizers, have helped level out the diversity in soil profiles that affect flavor. Put simply, the nuances of terrior within Fuding have been evaporating. One Diantou producer estimates that as early as 2017, this process of homogenization made identification of a micro growing region difficult, and it has only become harder yet. On top of this, an ever-expanding pool of low cost brown shoumei, made to “look old” via excessive sunning or thick piling has only hastened the pop of the Fuding white bubble. Just like Tieguanyin and Anhua Heicha is past years, falling prices mean that most speculators will find a new grift. Those who stick around will have to find a more sustainable model. Domestic and global taste for Fuding white tea will likely live on. The challenge will be building up a value chain where farmers and producers get consistent returns on organic field management, careful picking, and orthodox processing.
Zhenghe Dabai’s Not So Pretty Shape, Unpruned Tea Bushes, and a Creative Pressing of Wild Tea.
Feng and He, a tea growing and processing couple from Zhenghe County’s Tieshan Township, provide a glimpse into what reinvigorated Fuding tea production might look like. These last two years, precisely as the white tea market crashed, they have prospered. Feng grew up a tea farmer with his parents and has since spent most of his adult life operating excavators, a trade he still carries on for the better half of each year. He took over some abandoned tea fields from her aunt who had long ago moved to Shanghai for work, and convinced her husband to help her make a variety of strange teas. This year, they have finally made more in the two months of tea production than they do in the rest of the year working construction. Like many in their village, Feng and his father has decades of experience selling roasted or unroasted Lapsang and Shuixian to Wuyishan, where it is repackaged and passed off as core region tea by local speculators; they have like-wise learned to make every shape and size of white tea that is outsourced from Fuding factories. Combining this diverse skill-set with the mishmash of local cultivars and high elevation tea fields that were abandoned for their short picking season, and they have all they need to make dozens and dozens of experimental teas, some of which are quite good. They accept lower yield and sell small limited quantities of their teas directly to fans online. The pictures they post online are not exactly appetizing, but their unbeatable price-quality ratio has won them enough fans to support their children and elderly parents. Hopefully, younger generations of tea farmers in Fuding will find their similar path to modest and sustainable prosperity.