A white tea cake like no other.  Winter sprouted purple-bud/leafed harvests from botanically unclassified ye cha bushes in the pristine remote Bama wilderness area of the southwesterly Nannuo Mountains.

Ye cha bushes are noticeably different in both their look and their taste/flavor profile.  For reasons lost to the sands of time, ye cha bushes weren't as chosen by history's aboriginals of southern Yunnan's mountains and propagated to comprise what are now the area's ancient Da ye zhong tea tree gardens.  Still found in the jungle wilderness, ye cha can harvested and made into tea by those with access.

Da E harvested these tea leaves in late January / early February and made both this white tea and some red tea (blended into this year's old arbor red cake).  Purple coloring is the result of plant's containing a mutation that allows for it to trade anthocyanins for chlorophyll when more sunlight is let in, reducing photosynthesis.  It's a natural sunblock for some understory plants when the canopy is seasonally allowing more sunlight in.  Elsewhere in the tea world, this mutation has been selectively bred into some variety and there are now purple leafed cultivars.  This is the original, naturally occurring wild purple mutation.

A coveted micro terroir of Nannuo Mountain, between the Nannuo villages and Pasha, this tract of Bama Zhengshan came back into the possession of Da E and her two sons after her deceased ex husband's most recent wife remarried.  Read more about this story in 2024's product page or in this youtube video.  At this time there are just 28 families that have rights to these handful of tracts of this rugged remote area.  Bama tea can easily fetch 3-4 times the price of standard Nannuo Gushu.

While Bama Village proper can be seen as the highest part of Old Stone Village, climbing towards the ridges that cradle the Southern Nannuo Mountains, its tea production area sprawls down the other side of these mountains, loosely following the river 拔玛 Bámǎ as it meanders southwest down these slopes.

Photo taken in early April 2024.  The rivulets that comprise Bama River were extra dry during this historic spring drought