Mei Yang

Mei Yang grew up in the foothills of Wūdōng Shān (乌岽山), where the morning mist clings to old tea bushes and the scent of roasting leaves drifts through every village lane. Her earliest memories are of walking through Pingkeng’s terraced gardens with her father, a smallholder who cultivated a handful of Xiān Táo Xiāng (仙桃香) and Yā Shǐ Xiāng (鸭屎香) bushes — just enough to sell fresh leaves to the local cooperative. By age fourteen she could name a dozen fragrance types by nose alone, a skill her grandmother called 'the ear of the leaf,' a family phrase meaning the ability to listen to what the tea wants to become.

Her formal training began at seventeen under Master Huang Zhiming, a fourth-generation dancong maker whose family had tended the same cluster of old-growth bushes above 1,100 metres since the late Qing dynasty. Huang taught her the full arc from shài qīng (晒青) to tàn bèi (炭焙), insisting she work the bamboo trays and charcoal stoves in silence for the first two years 'until the hands know more than the mind.' This apprenticeship forged her distinctive single-bush perspective: the conviction that every individual tree — not every garden, not every village — has its own aromatic signature and processing optimum.

Her specialisation in mì lán xiāng (蜜兰香) emerged organically. The honey-orchid cultivar was her family’s flagship, and she spent five years documenting how elevation, soil pH, and picking date shift its expression from creamy florals to ripe stone fruit. This work formed the basis of her fragrance taxonomy, a system now used in professional cupping sessions that maps over thirty distinct dancong aroma profiles to specific bush lineages and processing parameters. Senior tea buyers from Guangzhou to Singapore rely on her classification when sourcing single-bush lots.

Mei’s expertise extends naturally into black tea territory. She first visited the Tongmu Zhèng Shān Xiǎo Zhǒng (正山小种) region in 2012, drawn by the smoky pine character that reminded her of certain heavily roasted dancong. Spending successive springs in the Wuyi mountains, she built relationships with smallholders producing Jīn Jùn Méi (金骏眉) from high-altitude tips and worked alongside a master smoker in the Green Village to refine her understanding of pinewood curing. Her comparative work on the interaction between cultivar chemistry and oxidation depth in oolong versus black tea processing has been published in several internal research briefs and teaching materials at tea.school. Her deep dive into floral aroma cultivars, 'Floral aroma cultivars in Phoenix dancong — by named cultivar,' became a reference for distinguishing the eight core fragrance families, and she is currently compiling a companion piece on honey and fruit tones in mì lán xiāng production batches.

In her role as Senior Tea Expert at Teamotea, Mei oversees oolong and black tea curation for shop.thetea.app, offers Phoenix mountain speciality selections on shop.puerh.app, and leads advanced tasting paths for tea.school. She lives in Chaozhou with a small library of fired-clay teapots and a single-bush Yā Shǐ Xiāng tree planted in her courtyard — the same cultivar her father grew, now bearing leaves she processes entirely by hand every April.