OUR STORY
Growing up in a tea family, PINYE’s founder Wu LiMei would join her father as he ventured into the local mountains to pick wild tea, upon returning home roast the tea filling the home with the sultry aroma. Memories of the laughter of her family gathered around the table enjoying the savory tea.
In 2012, inspired by her childhood experience, LiMei began gifting her father’s tea to friends. Encouraged by the demand for her father’s teas and concern over the chemicals in the tea on the market, LiMei launched PINYE Tea Company to share her love for clean healthy tea.
In 2014, after more than a year of searching for land with the right terroir to grow natural tea, the family acquired 30 acres of mountainous land with the ideal terroir for growing tea in the Wuyi mountain range. They began the laborious process of transforming the valley into a tea plantation, with over 50,000 tea trees were planted, using biodynamic principles to cultivate a resilient ecosystem.
In 2019, along with her architect husband and young son, she moved to the tea mountain to oversee the design and construction of the tea factory, completed in 2022.
Our mission is to bring the authentic Chinese tea culture to the world.
THE TASTE OF DEEP MOUNTAINS
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In summer, when the whole country is hot, the mountains near Wuyishan are still cool. Far away from the heat, far away from the human world. When I arrived at DongkenJue, Wuyishan, I took a bumpy mountain path into a different sort of life, with lush, green mountains planted with tea trees.
People often say that a jungle is a sort of organism all of its own, self-regulating, regenerating. The insects that pollinate the plants, and the root systems of the trees purifying the soil, are all one single system; the soil is pure, the water is pure, and the mountain itself imparts a self-regulating purity. Pìn Yĕ’s hidden tea plantation here distils the flavor of these mountains.
Tea helps our health, partly because it brings us stillness and quiet. It can’t be rushed. Sitting next to the river, hearing the flow of water and the wind blowing through leaves, one feels one thoughts loosen and unwind. As the leaves steep again and again, each with their own flavor, and minutes become hours, an otherworldly feeling takes over: but then, this is just the world, an old world, and one that we visit too rarely. Tasting the tea grown on the mountain behind me, I could taste the mountain I’d walked on that morning; the mountain that I slept on, and was sitting on. Pìn Yĕ’s ethos is about preserving this stillness, this sense of being at one with nature.
Pìn Yĕ’s story brings together the three flavors of tea; the bitterness of the first steeping, the sweetness of the second, and the mellow lightness of the third. The origin of is one of generations living in Wuyishan around tea culture; the clean flavor of the tea comes from a simple, uncomplicated way of life. Not long ago, this was virgin land; the tea trees have been carefully nurtured, cared for through the four seasons, watered by the rivers; but the tea between us is just the starting point for a path into a different world, one of craftsmanship and friendship. We hope to bring the breath of the mountains into the city, and to bring the sunshine and wind of Wuyishan DongkenJue into your life.
AWARDS
GOLD Medalists in 2021 and 2022 in the Fujian Province Tea Championship representing the regions of WuYi, FuDing, PuTian for our Rock Oolong and White Peony.
