The Shen Family Estate
Four generations
on one mountain,
since 1986.
Heritage loose-leaf tea, hand-picked in Yunnan and shipped fresh from the mountain to your teapot.
A letter from the founder
In the spring of 1986, my father planted the first thirty-two hectares.
He was thirty-one, and the road up to Fengqing was still a single muddy track. He had been given the southern slope of Old Tea Mountain by his grandfather — a tired plot, exhausted by decades of careless picking — and he set out, alone, to replant it. He brought cuttings from the old wild groves above the village: large-leaf varietals that had grown on these slopes since before anyone alive could remember.
He did not call it an estate. He called it Xinglongju — the house of thriving prosperity — and he meant it as a wish for the leaves more than for the family. For the first ten years he sold everything to a state cooperative in Lincang, and we drank whatever the cooperative did not want. The tea was not yet special. It was only honest.
What changed, slowly, was the picking. My father trained every seasonal hand on the slope to take only the bud and the two leaves beneath it, and to take them before nine in the morning, when the dew was still on the leaf. He would walk the rows at dawn with a small notebook. He wrote down which bush had yielded well, which picker had rushed, which section of the terrace was ready for a year of rest. By the time I took over the garden, that notebook had forty-eight volumes.
— Shen Guoqing, founder, 1986
A generational arc
Thirty-eight years, one family, one slope.
Five chapters from the founding of the estate to the fourth-generation handover of 2022 — and the quiet, working years that follow.
-
1986
The first planting
Shen Guoqing, aged thirty-one, replants the southern slope of Old Tea Mountain with cuttings from the wild groves above Fengqing village. Thirty-two hectares, one notebook, one picker. The estate is named Xinglongju — the house of thriving prosperity.
-
2014
A processing room of our own
An ISO 22000–certified processing facility is built at the foot of the slope, with hand-rolled baking in copper pans over chestnut wood. For the first time, the leaves never leave the family's hands between branch and finished tea.
-
2021
Best Single-Estate Pu'er, Las Vegas
The estate receives the "Best Single-Estate Pu'er" award at the North American Tea Convention in Las Vegas — the first time a Fengqing producer has been honored in the category. The same year, our partnership with One Tree Planted begins: two native saplings planted for every kilogram sold.
-
2022
A fourth generation takes the row
Li Mei, the founder's granddaughter, returns from a Beijing consultancy to take over daily operations — the fourth-generation handover. She keeps her grandfather's forty-eight notebooks on the desk. She does not retire them.
-
2024
Today, the same slope
Eleven varietals, 14.2 metric tons a year, an average of 6.8 days from the mountain to a U.S. doorstep across the last 2,400 orders. The notebook still comes out at dawn. The cups are still washed by hand.
A working portrait
The 32 hectares, at 1,950 meters.
Four frames from the slope — the way the tea actually travels from a leaf at dawn to the dried leaf that arrives at your door.
A letter from the fourth generation
I was offered a desk in Beijing. I asked for the slope instead.
For six years I worked as a sustainability consultant in Beijing, advising beverage brands on how to write better copy about mountains they had never visited. The work was clever. The tea at the office was not. Every cup tasted like a meeting.
When my grandfather began to slow down in the winter of 2021, I came home for a month to help with the spring picking. I did not plan to stay. I was supposed to fly back on a Thursday. On the Wednesday, I drove up the slope at five in the morning with my grandmother's notebook, and I watched my cousin pick a single bud at a time, in the same slow rhythm my father and his father had used, and I understood, very simply, that the estate was about to lose a generation if I got on the plane.
So I did not get on the plane.
I am the fourth generation. I am also, frankly, the first one with a Shopify account and a logistics partner in California. My job is not to romanticize what my grandfather built — he built it well, and the slope will still be the slope when I am finished. My job is to make sure that the cup you drink in a kitchen in Portland or a flat in Lyon tastes the same as the cup my grandmother pours at six in the morning, before the mist has lifted off the terrace.
To do that, I have made three small promises to the family, and I would like to make them to you as well.
One. Every leaf we ship leaves the slope within fourteen days of being picked. We do not warehouse finished tea. If you order a first-flush sheng pu'er in April, the leaves in the bag were on the bush in April.
Two. We will never blend another estate's tea into a Xinglongju bag. If the bag says our name, the leaf is from our thirty-two hectares — full stop. We cut five of the usual eight layers of middlemen to do this, and the price you pay is thirty-eight to fifty-five percent below comparable single-origin Yunnan teas.
Three. For every kilogram we sell, we plant two native saplings through our partnership with One Tree Planted. We are a small estate; the slope is finite; we owe it more than we take from it.
If you are reading this from a kitchen far away, I would like you to know that the leaves in your cupboard were touched by hands I know, in a room I walk into every morning, on a mountain my family has not left in thirty-eight years. Thank you for inviting us onto your table.
— Li Mei, proprietor, fourth generation
The estate, in numbers
A ledger, not a badge.
Four figures we keep on the wall of the processing room. They are the only metrics we ask you to remember.