Fang Ting

Fang Ting joined the THETEA buying desk in 2017, after six years cupping for a small wholesale house in Zhengzhou that supplied Henan canteens and a handful of Beijing teahouses. Her brief at tea.taxi is narrow on paper and wide in practice: keep the oolong rotation honest, keep the express pouches drinkable on the third day after roast, and keep the subscription moving so regulars never get the same leaf twice in a quarter.

She trained under Master Liu Wen — a Wuyi-trained roaster who relocated to Xinyang in the early 2000s and taught a generation of Henan buyers how to read a charcoal basket by smell alone. From Liu Wen she inherited a stubborn preference for medium roast yán chá (岩茶) over the brighter, greener style that has dominated export catalogues since around 2015. You can taste that bias in the express pack: the Ròu Guì (肉桂) she selects from Tongmu-adjacent gardens in northern Fujian leans toward cinnamon-bark warmth rather than perfume, and the Shuǐ Xiān (水仙) is almost always sourced from older bushes around Huiyuan Pit.

Her second region is Henan itself, which most buyers skip. Fang Ting does not. The Xìn Yáng Máo Jiān (信阳毛尖) on the green-tea side of the catalogue comes from two cooperatives she has visited every spring since 2019 — one near Tan Jia He village in Shihe District, the other on the slopes above Dongjiahe. The wet leaf from these lots shows a clean olive cast and a thin, sweet vegetal note that she describes, plainly, as "tasting like the right week." She picks the picking week herself when she can.

Pu-erh sits as her third specialism, though she is careful about it. She buys shēng (生) from a small Yiwu-area producer she has worked with since 2018 and almost no shú (熟) at all — she prefers to leave the Menghai-style fermented cakes to colleagues with longer relationships in Xishuangbanna. What she does ship through tea.taxi tends to be 5-to-9-year-old loose shēng in 100g format: enough age to settle the bitterness, not so much that the price stops making sense for a same-day delivery.

A session with Fang Ting, if you book a cupping at the Zhengzhou desk through tea.events, runs in three rounds. She pours the same leaf at three different parameters — a competition-style 5g/110ml flash, a normal gōngfū (工夫) ratio, and a deliberately under-leafed Western mug — and asks you which one is wrong. There is usually a right answer. She is patient about it.

For tea.taxi specifically she runs two programmes. The *same-day sample pack is her hands-on work: a rotating trio of 25g pouches built around one anchor tea (often a Henan green in April-May, an autumn-harvest Dān Cōng (单丛) from Fenghuang in October), plus two contrast pouches she chooses the morning the order ships. The packs leave Zhengzhou and reach most central RU cities inside 24 hours by air. She writes the brewing card by hand and scans it; the handwriting is part of the product.

The weekly sample subscription is the long game. Subscribers receive a 100g rotation built across a quarter, with no repeats and a deliberate arc — usually opening with a lighter oolong, moving through a Henan green or a Hunan hēi chá (黑茶) sourced via her colleague Zhou Xiang, and closing the quarter with something with more weight: an aged shēng or a charcoal-finished Tiě Guān Yīn (铁观音) from Anxi. She publishes the quarter's outline on the subscription page two weeks before it starts, which is unusual for the category and which she insists on.

Her working palate is cross-category by necessity. She cups oolong against green against young shēng* in the same morning, which most buyers avoid because the categories interfere. Fang Ting argues — quietly, and only if asked — that this is the only way to keep an express catalogue coherent. A pouch that reads well on its own can read badly next to the pouch a customer bought last week, and the subscription has to hold together across twelve weeks of small decisions.

She does not romanticise the work. Asked once, on a tea.school panel, what she looks for in a new lot, she said: "Does it survive the courier bag." The answer was not a joke. Express delivery compresses everything — the leaf gets warm, it gets jostled, it sits in a hallway for an hour before someone opens it. Teas that need pristine conditions to show well do not make her catalogue, however good they cup at source. What you receive through tea.taxi is, by design, the version of a tea that travels.

Fang Ting is based in Zhengzhou and visits Xinyang, Wuyishan, and Yiwu on a rolling annual schedule. She reads catalogue submissions on Tuesdays.