#白茶
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A White Tea Named for a Wilderness
An Yiwu old-tree white tea named for the place it comes from — 艽野 ("wild distant grassland") and 山白 ("mountain white") — picked from transitional-type ancient trees inside a state-protected forest.
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The Humblest Grade, the Longest Reward
Shoumei is white tea's plainest grade — more stem and leaf than bud, the part nobody photographs. It's also the one that ages furthest, through lotus leaf, through zongzi leaf, into dates and medicine.
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What Eight Years Sounds Like in a Cup
Named "Songbai" — pine white — for how the down on its buds caught the light. Eight years on, the same tea now tastes like a different sentence.
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Three Hundred and Sixty Hours of Doing Almost Nothing
White tea's whole process is a kind of restraint — no firing, no rolling, just 360 hours of slow withering. The baseline vintage that makes the rest of this aging arc legible.