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This listing is for our 2026 pre-sale of Taiping Houkui. This tea will be picked and processed in mid to late-April. If other items are ordered together, everything will ship together once the tea is ready. If you wish to have other items sent first, please place a separate order with those items. We will try to make some of this tea available after the pre-sale period, however, quantity is limited so we recommend securing yours early, not to mention saving 10%. The last of the famous Chinese green teas to be picked each spring, this tea has a very short picking window of around 15 days, which starts from 谷雨 (literally “grain rain”) and runs until the start of summer (立夏). Houkui from the core region is severely limited for those who haven’t reserved theirs ahead of time. Within this period, there are often only 1-2 pickings, which only contributes to its scarcity. After a trial year in 2025 and sampling at least 10 different plots of land in the villages of the core region, we’re very happy to return to the same producer and bring back a unique version of this tea. Unlike some other areas, such as Yunnan, where tea cultivation has at times traded places with other agricultural products, the practice of making Houkui in the core region has remained consistent for generations. That heritage shows through, both in the slender, labour-intensive leaves and in the cup. Made from first picking, local “Tuzhong” (heirloom) cultivar bushes in Houcun, this particular tea combines a sugary sweetness with a nice orchid fragrance in the back of the throat. The texture in the soup is full and refined, with an embedded fragrance that makes this tea very cohesive. Compared to other famous green teas, this Houkui truly stands out as perhaps the most elegant among them, not just in appearance, but in the soup as well. This tea is fully handmade with care, and as such we have done our best to pack it for safe international travel. However, please note that a small amount of breakage is unavoidable. Each purchase is for 30 grams, with 60 grams consisting of 2 x 30-gram tins. $1.00-1.06/gram Picking Period: est April 18-26 2026 Region: Taiping, Anhui