Chen Hui Yi

Chen Hui Yi works out of a small cupping room in Guangzhou where the tea.taxi 100g portions are weighed, smelled, and signed off before they go into delivery bags. Her remit is narrow on paper — white, green, and yellow tea — and wide in practice, because those three categories cover everything from a Fújiàn bái háo yín zhēn (白毫银针) picked in late March to a Húnán jūn shān yín zhēn (君山银针) that arrives in tight, sealed tins. If a Monday box contains a white or a green, she chose it.

She started tasting professionally in 2011, first as an apprentice buyer at a Fāngcūn (芳村) wholesale stall in Guangzhou — the same district where most of southern China's tea still passes through on its way to retail. The stall handled Fújiàn whites in volume, and the work was simple and brutal: open ten sacks, cup ten sacks, write down which two were worth the asking price. She credits two people from that period. The first is Lín Zhènxīng, a Fúdǐng (福鼎) producer based near Diǎntóu town, who walked her through the difference between a sun-withered shòu méi (寿眉) and an indoor-withered one — the sun-dried leaf goes coppery at the edges and tastes of dried apricot, the indoor leaf stays greener and tastes flatter. The second is Wú Měilíng, a retired grader from the old Fúdǐng Tea Factory, who taught her to cup whites at a slightly lower temperature than the standard 100°C, around 92°C, to keep the downy hairs from scorching.

The Guangdong base matters. Guangzhou is not a white-tea growing region, but it is where aged whites get traded and stored — the humid summers push fermentation forward in a way that dry-stored Fújiàn whites never quite match. Chen Hui Yi keeps a small archive of pressed cakes from 2014 onward in her cupping room, and she pulls one out roughly every six weeks to check how the same batch is moving. This is the work that feeds her selections for the weekly sample subscription: she knows what a three-year bái mǔ dān (白牡丹) should smell like dry, and she can tell within two infusions whether a cake has been stored wet or dry.

For greens she travels more. Most years she spends ten days in late March in Xīhú (西湖), Hángzhōu, walking the Méijiāwù (梅家坞) and Shīfēng (狮峰) plots for lóngjǐng (龙井). She buys small lots directly from a family in Wēngjiāshān (翁家山) — Méng family, third generation — and the lóngjǐng that lands in the weekly box almost always comes from that source. The wet leaf, after two minutes in a tall glass at 80°C, smells of fresh chestnut and a little river stone. For huáng shān máo fēng (黄山毛峰) she works with a co-op outside Tāngkǒu in Ānhuī, and for bì luó chūn (碧螺春) she sources from the Dōngshān (洞山) peninsula on Tài Hú, never the cheaper Sìchuān imitation. Each of these gets cupped twice — once on arrival in Guangzhou, once again the week it ships — to catch any staling.

Yellow tea is the smallest part of her catalogue and the part she is most particular about. Real jūn shān yín zhēn (君山银针) production from the island in Dòngtíng Lake is tiny — a few hundred kilos a year — and most of what is sold under that name is yellow-leaning green from elsewhere in Húnán. She buys from one producer she trusts and rotates in huò shān huáng yá (霍山黄芽) from Ānhuī when jūn shān is out of season. The infusion is pale gold, almost the colour of clear broth, with a soft cereal note that distinguishes it from a green of similar appearance.

A gift delivery with hand-written card, when it includes one of her selections, comes with a short tasting note in her own handwriting — water temperature, steep time, what to expect in the second infusion. She writes these in batches on Friday afternoons. The cards are not personalised beyond the recipient's name and a line about the tea, which is the point: she would rather get the brewing instruction right than write something flowery.

She does not run sessions or ceremonies through tea.taxi — the platform is delivery, not in-person — but she answers questions sent through the order page within a day or two, usually with a photograph of the dry leaf next to a ruler. If a customer wants to go deeper into white tea specifically, she will point them toward the longer tasting flights run by colleagues on tea.school, or toward the regional travel programmes on tea.travel that cover Fúdǐng during the spring pick.

Her working method is unsentimental. A tea either holds up across three infusions in a gàiwǎn (盖碗) or it does not go in the box. The aim of the weekly sample subscription, as she describes it, is to give someone fifty-two clear reference points across a year — not fifty-two surprises.