Michael Zhan

Michael Zhan joined Teamotea in 2017 as the company’s first dedicated procurement specialist on the ground in China. Since his initial spring sourcing trip that year, he has spent every March through May in the Yìwǔ (易武) mountain range of Xishuangbanna, cupping raw máo chá (毛茶) from smallholders across villages like Gāoshān (高山) and Má Hēi (麻黑). He works primarily with a single family producer — Lao Xu, whose grandparents cleared the old arbour gardens six decades ago — returning each year to build on the previous season’s lot-selection notes. That continuity is what he offers guests on the Tea garden fieldtrip — Yiwu spring: an 8-day walk through forest plots, tasting directly off the withering racks, learning to read a fresh-picked leaf by vein pattern, by moisture, by the way it bruises between your fingers.

Michael’s other home ground is the Yíxīng (宜兴) kiln town, where he first visited Chen Jianping’s workshop in 2018. Chen, a second-generation zǐshā (紫砂) potter, turns small-batch xī shī (西施) and shí piáo (石瓢) forms from 1970s stock clay. Michael now sources those pots exclusively for the Yixing pot session — choosing and seasoning, a two-hour hands-on service in which participants handle a freshly fired pot, learn to distinguish clay density by sound, and season the surface through a series of hot-water charges and a single gentle boil with a leaf they bring themselves. After the first boil, the water takes on a faint mineral sweetness, the pot’s pores beginning to open. Michael shows how the pot’s colour deepens unevenly at first, then settles into a quiet lustre after three rounds.

His daily work — vendor visits, lot selection, procurement runs — underpins both services. When he sits with a Yunnan farmer over a gas burner to cup 23 lots of shēng pǔ’ěr (生普洱) in one afternoon, he is building the same muscle memory that later helps a fieldtrip attendee understand why this slope’s leaves produce soup with a longer finish. His cupping notes from those sessions appear weekly on puerh.app during the spring harvest window, offering a transparent look at what was passed over and why. He also leads a four-part module on pot seasoning and clay identification for tea.school, drawing on his Yixing supplier network to give students a vocabulary for handle weight, pour speed, and the way a pot’s lid fit can change after its first firing.

A session with Michael is quiet, unrushed. He will ask you to smell the wet leaf before he says anything about it — a Yiwu gǔ shù (古树) releasing steamed bamboo, wild honey, the faint smokiness of a wood-fire kill-green. He pours slowly, a low circular motion that keeps the stream from splashing, and he never fills the cup to the rim. What people remember from his fieldtrip isn’t just the tea; it’s the realisation that every lot they buy back home is the result of a thousand tiny decisions made in a village kitchen by someone they’ve now met.