Editorial mission
tea.report exists because the Chinese tea trade generates enormous amounts of real data — harvest tonnage, auction results, customs filings, cooperative price sheets — and almost none of it reaches buyers in a usable form. We aggregate, verify, and publish it. The scope is deliberately narrow: Chinese tea only, because that is where pricing is least standardised and the need for a public record is greatest. A report might read “based on 14 of an estimated 40 cooperative harvest returns” rather than imply a complete picture — we would rather publish a partial number honestly than a complete one that isn’t. There are no exclamation marks here, and no “liquid jade” copy. Sentence-case headings, cited figures, a tone closer to a customs bulletin than a tasting note.
Why tea.report exists
The wider group of Chinese-tea sites built by this same small team — the encyclopedia at thetea.app, the pǔ’ěr deep-dive at puerh.app, the sourcing trips at tea.travel, the courses at tea.school — had plenty written about flavour, terroir, and process, but nowhere to put a number. Harvest volumes, cooperative pricing, and auction results were tracked informally, scattered across field notes and trader group chats. tea.report is where that data gets a permanent, cited home — the same discipline a commodity desk applies to a price curve, applied instead to a spring pluck in Fuding or a hammer price in Guangzhou.
Editorial principles
Every factual claim carries a source: a GB/T standard (GB/T 22111, for instance, is the national geographical-indication standard for pǔ’ěr tea), a customs filing, a cooperative report, or a named interview. Headings are sentence case; copy avoids emoji, exclamation marks, and marketing superlatives. House typography marks precision — em dashes with hairspace, italic pinyin with tone marks for every tea name on first mention. When a comparison to a tea outside China is useful for context, it stays brief and clearly labelled as context, never the subject of the report. Charts run on a cream background with a single accent colour, because the information should carry the page, not the decoration.
Sourcing methodology
Our numbers come from four layers: structured seasonal outreach to cooperative heads and smallholder growers across Yunnan, Fujian, Anhui, Zhejiang, and Guangdong; public customs and auction records; published standards and academic literature on tea science; and named interviews with producers and traders, always attributed. Each report’s methodology note states exactly which of these fed its figures and flags known bias — oversampling of larger cooperatives over smallholders is the most common one. The note is public, and it gets corrected in the open whenever our sourcing improves.
Transparency and limits
Chinese tea markets are not fully transparent. Many sales happen off-exchange, and some regions report only partial harvest data. Every report states its coverage rate in the same sentence as its headline figure, not in a footnote. We do not smooth spikes, hide outliers, or revise a forecast without a visible changelog. tea.report does not accept payment from tea companies in exchange for coverage, and holds no tea inventory of its own — the two conflicts of interest that would matter most for a publication that prices other people’s crop.