Fang Ting

Fang Ting works out of Zhengzhou, but the table she sets is mostly built from southern leaves. She came to tea the long way — first through Xìn Yáng Máo Jiān (信阳毛尖), the downy green from her home prefecture in southern Henan, then southward into Fujian when she started apprenticing in 2011 under a Wuyi Shan roaster who insisted she learn to taste charcoal before she learned to taste cultivar.

She spent four seasons between Tongmu and Xingcun, the two villages that anchor the Wǔ Yí Shān (武夷山) rock-tea zone, hand-firing batches of Ròu Guì (肉桂) and Shuǐ Xiān (水仙) over longan charcoal. That stretch — the long nights of bèi huǒ (焙火), the slow re-roasting that decides whether a leaf reads as fruit or as stone — is still the spine of how she pours. She talks about minerality the way other people talk about salt: not as a flavour, but as a structural fact you build the rest of the cup around.

In 2017 she travelled to the Fenghuang ridge in eastern Guangdong to study dāncōng (单丛) with the Wei family in Wudong village, who farm trees above 1,200 metres on the western face. That trip turned into a returning seasonal habit — she now visits the same three farmers each spring before the Qīng Míng (清明) picking — and it's the backbone of her Phoenix dancong masterclass, where guests work through five aroma types from the same producer rather than five producers cherry-picked for contrast.

Her pu'er work came later and stayed quieter. She doesn't pretend to be a Yunnan specialist — for that side of the constellation she points people to puerh.app and to the field notes from the Yiwu and Bulang trips logged there. What she does run is cross-category cupping: a side-by-side of an aged shú (熟) brick, a 2008 shēng (生) cake from the Menghai Tea Factory, and a heavily-roasted Wuyi oolong, set up so a drinker can feel how fermentation, oxidation, and roast each leave a different residue on the tongue. It's the format she uses for brand clients who need their R&D team to taste vocabulary, not preference.

A session with Fang Ting is slower than most guests expect. Her private gongfu cha session runs about 110 minutes for two people, usually four teas — a Xìn Yáng Máo Jiān from her own prefecture (she sources from a co-op near Shihe district), a Wudong dancong, a medium-roast Ròu Guì, and one wild card she picks after the first pour based on what the room seems to want. She uses a 110ml zhuni pot for the oolongs and a tall glass for the green, and she narrates very little during the first three infusions. The talking comes after, when guests have something concrete to compare against.

The wet leaf at the bottom of her gaiwan after a dancong session is the detail people remember — opened-out, almost intact, with the broken edges where the charcoal touched them. She uses that visible damage to explain why Mì Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) honey-orchid dancong tastes the way it does, and why over-roasted versions go flat in the third steep.

For corporate and private events she works as a tea ceremony — host hire for events, traveling with a portable charcoal setup and a 24-cup service kit. She's run ceremonies for a Shanghai design studio's anniversary, a Chengdu restaurant opening, and a small wedding in Luoyang where the couple wanted Lǎo Cōng Shuǐ Xiān (老枞水仙) instead of a champagne toast. Her event format is built around one tea served three ways across the evening — opening, mid, and closing — rather than a tasting flight that competes with dinner.

She holds an instructor certification from tea.school (issued 2019) and teaches the oolong roasting module there twice a year. Her cupping work for tea.equipment R&D — pairing zhū ní (朱泥) and zǐ ní (紫泥) clay against the same Wuyi leaf — is published in the equipment notes section of the constellation. For drinkers who want to start with the green-tea side of her practice, the Xìn Yáng Máo Jiān sessions she runs each April are listed on tea.events.

She's based in Zhengzhou but travels for event work across mainland China, Hong Kong, and occasionally Singapore. Bookings outside the mainland need eight weeks lead time; private sessions in Zhengzhou typically open four to six weeks ahead. Cancellations more than 48 hours out are refunded in full.

What she will not do: speed-tasting formats, blind ranking for marketing copy, or any session that asks her to declare one tea better than another. Her standing line, repeated often enough that her regulars quote it back: a tea is good when it tells you where it grew up.