56 STiR tea & coffee industry international

Maliandao MarketA sea of tea in BeijingStory and Photos by Si Chen

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The aroma of tea sweetens the air along Beijing’s mile-long Mǎliándào Tea Market. The largest tea market in northern China, Mǎliándào is a very busy street harboring six tea malls, countless

boutiques and stalls. The market covers more than 200 acres just south of the Beijing West Railway Station, generating more than $1 billion annually. It is an ocean of tea—tea growers, wholesalers, retailers, and teaware artisans are all in one place, a tea lover’s dream. Merchants there are incredibly resourceful when it comes to finding prestigious offerings—it is common to see a 10 sq. ft. shop sourcing 100 kinds of tea, or a temoku tea bowl from the Song dynasty, to the delight of connoisseurs.

Huayun Red Robe is a typical shop in Mǎliándào, primarily wholesaling Bohea tea, (Yán Chá or Rock tea) from the Wuyi Mountains, which is also home to the famous Lapsang Souchong. Store owners Yihua Luo and his wife Zhonghong Li, have multi-roles in the tea business—they are tea growers, retailers and wholesalers: Owning a small tea garden in Wuyi, their hometown, the couple grow their own tea and make tea with their own recipe every June. In Mǎliándào they both wholesale and retail, with big boxes of tea inventory stacked inside their 160 sq. ft. (15 m2) showroom. Bohea is a niche market in Beijing where Jasmine and oolongs are popular but fans frequent the shops weekly providing stable revenue.

Raw (‘sheng’) pu-erh cakes (375g) from the 23 tea mountains of Yunnan province.

A designer teaware boutique

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58 STiR tea & coffee industry international

Across the corridor from Huayun you will see Nihu Zhang, or ‘Clay Pot Zhang’ (‘Zhang’ is the owner’s surname). Zhang is a Zisha (‘purple clay’) tea pot artisan with a national reputation for his craftsmanship. You often find the master sitting in a corner shaping a tea pot or carving beautiful calligraphy in the clay by hand. It takes months to make one Zisha tea pot. Zhang’s best works sell for $10,000. Works by his apprentices and students are a bargain, selling for less than $100.

Nan Cui, a Chinese tea connois-seur and business consultant with Fusion Pacific Ltd. in Winnipeg, Canada, explains the difference in the Chinese and Western tea trade: “In China the tea industry is less standardized compared to the Western mass production model, where production, wholesale and retail are clear-cut and divided among industry players.”

The beautifully decorated paifang is a prominent landmark of Mǎliándào Tea market, resembling the Chinese gate at Washington D.C.’s Chinatown.

Hybrid business model – wholesale packages inside a retail shop, which is the norm in Cha Yuan, one of the most popular tea malls in Mǎliándào

Owner Zhonghong Li posing in front of their stock at Huayun Red Robe in Cha Yuan Market.

Artsy tea shops displaying tea cakes and sets from Yunnan province

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“The Chinese tea industry has its roots in traditional agriculture,” he explains. “Tea plants are grown in almost every county in Southern China, and in the past Chinese people mostly drank locally-produced teas. Although trading tea within the country dates back more than a thousand years, it is only since market reforms 30 years ago that China has seen the boom of mass production and trading of tea,” he said.

“In Beijing for example, local residents once drank only jasmine tea. In the past two decades, successful marketing and branding by large companies has changed the market, and nowadays Tieguanyin Oolong and Pu-erh are the most popular teas,” said Cui.

Birdseye view of Mǎliándào street showing about 1/3 of the whole market

Xiao Xiong, staff at Huayun Red Robe, is packing a kilo of Bohea tea into single-brew packets.

A tea-set outlet