1980s Mr Chen’s Tong Xing Hao

Highlights:

• Big/old tree early 80s cake: dark, thick, sweet full flavour
• Rich fully aged complex puerh taste profile
• Mr Chen’s Home Taiwan excellent dry storage
• Strong grounding Qi and durability
• A very rare old tea connoisseur dream find

Ever since most of the 50s-70s puerh has been drank up and gone forever, cakes like this (early 1980s, with good strength material and dry storage) are the next best thing to get that fully aged (and clean) puerh experience. The tea soup is so rich (yet dark it’s really textbook fully aged puerh. There’s really very little of this kind of tea left in the world, and most of it is at much higher pricing than this.

Both from our research and tasting this cake appears to use big/old tree leaves from Yiwu, and they definitely had good strength that has not faded but transformed perfectly. This cake seems to have had some mild shou processing, of the early/light fermentation kind (not “heavy”/full fermentation modern shou processing), which doesn’t impact the quality at all, in the sense that it’s rich like sheng of this age would be and indeed unless you pay attention to the wet leaves, you would think it’s sheng puerh.

For tea this old, besides leaves strength (very good here), storage is everything, and this cake is a great example of dry storage. This cake with dry storage is sold in China for about 2-3 times as much as our price. Wet storage versions could be cheaper, but we find there’s little point in this very old teas with wet and even traditional/natural storage, they lose most of their beauty and value this way.

Brew it really strong to get the most out of it.

Note: there are cakes with similar looking wrappers, this version (very faded ink) is by far the one with the best leaves material.

Mr Chen’s introduction

There’s actually a lot of old tea in Taiwan at much more reasonable prices than in mainland China, unfortunately most of what is found in Taiwan is too wet stored. Mr Chen, a personal friend of ours, old time collector, bought a few tongs of various teas during the 90s and early 2000s (before prices skyrocketed), and has been storing them in his home (dryly) since.

This kind of tea in China sells for crazy money, it’s very lucky we’ve access to these at all, Mr Chen has sold them to us at a very generous price and we pass the great deal on to you.

380-390g cakes nominal, weight loss over the years because of aging. Cakes packed naked in a tong, we’ll wrap them in a white wrapper for you.