Wudong Mountain Dancong Oolong

Every famous tea producing region has its core, be it Wuyi Mountain’s Zhengyan, Hangzhou’s West Lake, or Suzhou’s Dongting Mountain, these are where the ancestral tea gardens can be found, dating back to when tea farmers first tamed the wild leaves and shaped them into the famous teas today: Wuyi Yancha, West Lake Dragonwell, and Suzhou Biluochun.

Dancong Oolong is no different from these famous teas in this regard.  While these oolongs are often claimed to come from Chaozhou or even the Phoenix mountains, these are broad brushstrokes of the area surrounding the true living heart: The Wudong Mountain.

The Wudong Mountain occupies the highest elevation amongst the phoenix mountains, with its peak, Heaven’s Pond, rising to about 1114 meters.  On the slopes just beneath Heaven’s Pond are the old groves of core region Wudong Mountain Old Bush Tea Trees and the Wudong Village.  The most common surname in this village is Wen, which makes sense, as it was the Wen clan that originally took up stewardship of this land generations ago. 

Wen Zitong is the youngest in a long line of generational Wudong Mountain tea farmers.  He has studied tea making from his father since a very young age, and has been awarded several honorifics in the past few years, including the Kungfu Tea Culture Communication Ambassadorship, and the Master Craftsman award by Chaoshan Kungfu Tea Making Technology University, where he now teaches as a special training instructor.

All these awards aside, what really sets Wen Zitong apart from the other tea makers in the region is his prodigal rise to fame at such a young age.  Not only was he just 21 years of age when he was asked to teach at the University, he was also the youngest tea maker to ever win the Chaozhou Kungfu Tea King competition.  When asked about it, he will tell you it is just because his father got old before his time and needed a lot of help from Wen Zitong when he was still rather young.

By the time he was 18, he was running the whole show up on the mountain, checking tea leaf picking quality, carefully controlling the withering, the shake wilting, and the kill green of these teas, following with the baking and slow charcoal roasting.

Now that Wen Zitong is 25, he is more fully in control of the teas his family makes than ever, and the quality is consistently on a different level from most any other dancong oolong we can find.  We are so proud and honored to work with such a talented young artisan and highly recommend sampling his Wudong Dancong Oolongs.