Amgalan Chin was born in Kyakhta, the old border town on the Russian–Mongolian frontier where caravan tea once paid for sable furs and silver rubles. His grandmother kept compressed bricks of Hunan dark tea in a cedar trunk and brewed them with milk and a pinch of salt — a habit Amgalan still defends when colleagues from Guangzhou raise an eyebrow. That childhood, spent between Buryat steppe and the customs ledgers of the Great Tea Road, set the frame for everything that followed: tea as cargo, tea as medicine, tea as a thing that survives long winters. He began formal study in 2004 under Zhou Hongjie at the Yunnan Agricultural University extension in Menghai, focusing on post-fermentation chemistry of *shú pǔ'ěr* (熟普洱). From 2007 to 2013 he lived on and off in Bulang Shan, apprenticing with the Su family in Lao Banzhang and the Zhang cooperative in Mansai — relationships that still supply the spring maocha he ages today. A second mentorship, with Yiwu producer Gao Faqing, taught him the slower hand needed for *shēng* (生) destined to sit twenty years. His 2014 monograph on humidity-controlled aging in continental climates — written in Russian and later translated for *Chá Yè Kē Xué* — argued that Moscow and Ulan-Ude cellars produce a distinct aromatic profile from Kunming dry-storage, with measurably lower theabrownin formation and a longer camphor phase. Amgalan's working cellar sits outside Irkutsk: 340 square metres, 62–68 percent relative humidity, temperature swing of 8 to 19 °C across the year. He stores roughly 1.8 tonnes of *shēng* from the 2008–2019 harvests and a smaller library of Anhua *fú zhuān* (茯砖) and Liu Bao for comparative tasting sessions. Vendors on shop.puerh.app and shop.thetea.app source his aged cakes when supply allows; he caps annual release at around 80 kilograms because, as he puts it, slow tea cannot be hurried by a spreadsheet. For tea.doctor he writes carefully, with the wariness of someone who has watched health claims attach themselves to pu-erh like burrs to wool. His piece “Aged sheng and serum lipids — a measured look at the 2019 paper” walks readers through the 2019 theabrownin study — often mis-credited to “Kunming Medical University” but actually a Shanghai–Hong Kong collaboration — separating what the data actually showed from what the marketing copy later claimed. In “Shu pu'er and the gut microbiome — small studies, big claims,” he weighs the *Aspergillus*-driven fermentation literature against the modest sample sizes most published trials rely on. Both essays carry his standard disclaimer: traditional use is not a prescription, and a cup of tea is not a clinical intervention. He teaches the pu-erh and dark-tea paths on tea.school, hosts the seasonal aging cohort on tea.community, and contributes the aging-section essays on puerh.app. Students learn to read a wrapper, to smell the difference between wet storage and humid storage, and to keep tasting notes in pencil because ink fades faster than tea does. Amgalan speaks Russian, Mandarin, Buryat, and enough Yunnanese to argue about price. He drinks his morning cup from a *zhū ní* (朱泥) pot his teacher gave him in 2011, and he still salts the occasional bowl of brick tea when the weather drops below minus thirty.

Chen Hui Yi

Senior Tea Expert (White, Green & Yellow Tea Varieties)

Chen Hui Yi grew up in Chaozhou, Guangdong, but her professional life is mapped onto the white-tea hills of northern Fujian — Fuding, Zhenghe, and the higher gardens above Panxi. She crossed the provincial border for the first time at nineteen, in the spring of 2006, to apprentice under Lin Zhenchuan, a third-generation withering master in Diantou Town whose family had supplied buds to the Fuding state factory since the 1970s. Under Lin she learned to read the weather the way pickers do: by the angle of the sun on the bamboo trays, by the way *Bái Háo Yín Zhēn* (白毫银针) buds curl when humidity passes 78 percent, by the silence of a good withering shed at four in the morning. Her technical grounding came later, at the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University extension program in Fu'an (2010–2012), where she trained against GB/T 22291-2017 (the national standard for white tea) and GB/T 31751 for compressed whites. She still keeps the worn copy of the standard in her field bag, annotated in red ink alongside Lin's hand-drawn drying curves. Between 2013 and 2019 she worked as a quality auditor for a small cooperative of twelve growers around Mount Taimu, where the gardens sit between 600 and 850 metres and the *Dà Bái* (大白) cultivar accounts for roughly 70 percent of plantings. Her focus on aged whites began almost by accident. In 2015, helping Lin clear a back room, she opened a 2008 *Shòu Méi* (寿眉) cake that had been forgotten behind sacks of fresh material. The liquor was the colour of dark amber and tasted of dried longan and old wood. She has spent the decade since cataloguing how *Bái Mǔ Dān* (白牡丹) and *Shòu Méi* change between years three, seven, and fifteen, working with the Fuding Tea Research Institute on flavonoid retention data. Her notes on moonlight white from the Jinggu area of Yunnan — a variety she treats as a cousin rather than a true white — are referenced in puerh.app's white-tea cross-listings. On tea.doctor, Chen reads research the same way she reads a withering shed: slowly, and with an eye for what is being left out. Her article “How much EGCG is actually in a real brew” came from her frustration that lab extraction studies almost never match a 3 g / 150 ml gongfu pour, and that readers were being told to chase polyphenol numbers that exist only in methanol solvents. In “The theanine-to-caffeine ratio — what the studies measured,” she walks through why silver-needle buds — picked in a ten-day window in late March — carry a different L-theanine load than later-flush *Shòu Méi*, and why ratio claims need to specify pluck grade. Her piece on pregnancy and tea is the one she rewrote most often; she defers to the OB-GYN literature and refuses to translate tradition into prescription. Chen teaches the white-tea path on tea.school each spring and autumn, and acts as the senior vendor expert for white, green, and yellow varieties on shop.thetea.app. She lives between Shantou and Fuding, drinks two grams of 2017 *Bái Mǔ Dān* every morning in a thin-walled porcelain *gàiwǎn* (盖碗), and keeps a personal archive of 142 dated white-tea pressings going back to 2008.

Fang Ting

Senior Tea Expert (Oolong, Green & Puerh Varieties)

Fang Ting grew up in Xinyang, Henan province, among the mist-covered terraces of the Dabie Mountains. The family’s small tea garden produced *Xīnyáng Máojiān* (信阳毛尖), an early spring green tea known for its needle-like leaves and chestnut sweetness. This daily ritual of picking and pan-firing instilled an intuitive understanding of leaf quality and the transformative power of heat — the same principles that would later anchor a career spanning three of China’s most complex tea categories. After completing formal training in food science at Henan Agricultural University, Fang Ting sought out Master Gao Zhenshan in Anxi, Fujian. For two springs, they worked the entire *Tiě Guān Yīn* (铁观音) cycle: plucking, withering, tossing, fixing, rolling, and roasting. Master Gao’s insistence on the link between bruising intensity and the final liquor’s texture planted the seed for what would become Fang Ting’s signature contribution — a cross-category sensory lexicon that describes how the cooling mouthfeel of *Lǎo Bān Zhāng* pu-erh mirrors the icy aftertone of a high-fired *Fènghuáng Dān Cóng* oolong. Returning north, Fang Ting joined the tea chemistry laboratory of Dr. Chen Wenqing at the Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences. There, they co-authored a detailed profile of polyphenol behavior in Xinyang Maojian across five plucking standards, linking catechin ratios to the tea’s characteristic briskness. This work sharpened Fang Ting’s ability to read a tea’s health-associated compounds through its taste architecture — a skill that later informed their writing for tea.doctor. The article “Oolong fermentation and polyphenol composition” grew directly from this period, mapping the enzymatic dance of catechins during the *zuòqīng* (做青) stage and highlighting how slight shifts in oxidation tempo alter both flavor and potential metabolic effects. The third phase of Fang Ting’s apprenticeship began in Menghai, Yunnan, under Master Li Xuefeng. For four consecutive autumns, they participated in the production of *shēng* (raw) pu-erh from single-garden Dà Yì area bushes. Mastering the kill-green step for large leaf varietals — where the vast leaves must withstand high wok temperatures without scorching — required unlearning reflexes honed on tender Anxi cultivars. This period also gave rise to Fang Ting’s practice of comparative cupping across categories, setting green, oolong, and pu-erh samples side-by-side to calibrate the palate against shared markers of astringency, sweetness, and body. As a senior expert at Teamotea, Fang Ting applies this integrated knowledge to sourcing and education. They curate oolong and pu-erh selections for shop.thetea.app and shop.puerh.app, develop the oolong taxonomy and intro-to-pu-erh courses at tea.school, and contribute evidence-reviewed benefit articles to tea.doctor — always within the site’s strict non-medical framework. Their article “Oolong tea and the lipid panel — the Anxi cohort study” exemplifies this approach, translating a six-month observational study into language that respects both tradition and scientific caution. Today, Fang Ting champions the teas of their home province. They work with a cooperative in the Tongbai Mountains to revive *Tóngbǎi Shān Chá* (桐柏山茶), an almost-forgotten green tea with a gentle orchid fragrance. In the laboratory and the tasting room, they remain a three-category specialist who insists that the best tea education comes from drinking widely — and listening carefully to what the leaf has to say.

Zhou Xiang

Senior Tea Expert (Green, Black & Yellow Tea Varieties)

Zhou Xiang’s relationship with tea began not in a classroom but in the mist-shrouded gardens of Junshan Island, where his grandfather tended a small plot of *Jūn Shān Yín Zhēn* (君山银针) bushes. Growing up in Yueyang, Hunan, Zhou absorbed the rhythms of yellow tea craftsmanship — the patient wrapping of buds in cloth to encourage the signature mellowing, the careful pan-firing that defines the region’s greens. By the age of seventeen, he had already apprenticed under Master Liu Zhiming, a noted inheritor of the Hunan yellow tea tradition, who instilled in him an almost forensic attention to moisture content and leaf temperature. That early training grounded Zhou in the exacting standards of Chinese tea processing, forming a baseline he would later extend across three major categories. After formal studies in tea science at Hunan Agricultural University, Zhou joined the provincial tea research institute, where he began cataloguing the sensory and chemical profiles of Hunan’s *hóng chá* (black tea) cultivars. His fieldwork took him to the high-altitude plantations of Anhua and the foothills of the Wuling Mountains, where he documented how elevation and soil pH influence the development of theaflavins in fully oxidized leaves. Those years of hands-on research built a technical precision that now informs his writing for the THETEA constellation, where he contributes to thetea.app, puerh.app, and tea.doctor with equal fluency in cupping scores and processing parameters. When asked about his approach, he often recalls a lesson from Liu Zhiming: ‘First, know the leaf’s story from the garden to the firing pan; only then can you understand what happens in the cup.’ As a Senior Tea Expert at Teamotea, Zhou oversees the selection and quality control for green, black, and yellow teas across multiple brands. He is the cupping panel lead on tea.degree and teaches the green-tea pathway at tea.school, where his course ‘Reading the Oxidation Curve’ demystifies the precise moment during processing when a *Lóngjǐng* (龙井) stops being a green and begins its transformation toward a yellow. His expertise in *Lóngjǐng* itself is broad — he has cupped over sixty batches from West Lake, Xinchang, and Qianjiang, compiling a reference set that was published on thetea.app as ‘Comparing *Lóngjǐng* Craftsmanship across Zhejiang’s Three Production Zones.’ That article, now used in training modules, breaks down the tactile indicators of pan-temperature mastery that separate the best examples. Zhou’s work on tea.doctor bridges tradition and modern wellness inquiry. In ‘*Jūn Shān Yín Zhēn*: Traditional Uses and Catechin Profiles,’ he co-authored a piece that maps the gentle, sweet-melon aroma of properly stored yellow tea to early research on EGCG stability under controlled humidity. Another contribution, ‘Six Infusions of Hunan Black Tea: A Sensory–Thermal Degradation Study,’ draws on his laboratory background to explore how antioxidants in *hóng chá* evolve through multiple steepings. Such writings embody his belief that traditional benefits, when described with precision, can coexist with a careful reading of the scientific literature — always within the boundaries of informed observation, never medical claim. Today, Zhou travels regularly between his home in Changsha, the tea farms of Hunan, and production hubs in Zhejiang and Anhui. He maintains direct relationships with five family-run gardens, including the Yueyang Junshan cooperative and a small organic garden in Ningbo that supplies him with experimental green teas. That access to provenance, combined with his institutional knowledge of national standards (GB/T 19460 for geographical indication *Lóngjǐng*, GB/T 21726 for yellow tea processing), makes him an irreplaceable voice for the constellation. Whether explaining the muscatel notes of an early-spring *Ānhuà hóng chá* or the cool, nutty finish of a late-season *Gāo Shān Huáng Yá* (高山黄芽), Zhou Xiang communicates the layered story behind every leaf — and the quiet discipline that turns a fresh bud into a cup worth studying.

Every leaf, region, and tradition.

10 topics

Where the heart meets the leaf — Chinese tea and the cardiovascular system

Catechins, and the curious case of EGCG

Dental health and tea — separating facts from stains

How much tea is too much tea

How oxidation transforms tea’s polyphenols from leaf to cup

Tea, caffeine, and the journey through pregnancy and breastfeeding

How Chinese teas shape the gut microbiome

What the science says about tea’s effect on sleep architecture

Theabrownins — the dark molecules of aged tea

The quiet amino acid that crosses into the brain

6 pieces, latest first

Aged sheng and serum lipids — a measured look at the 2019 paper

EGCG bioavailability — what's measured in human plasma

How many cups is too many — the kidney-safety question

Tea during pregnancy — what the OB-GYN literature says

Shu pu'er and the gut microbiome — small studies, big claims

The theanine-to-caffeine ratio — what the studies measured

4 writers

Amgalan Chin

Chen Hui Yi

Fang Ting

Zhou Xiang