The Yunnan-Darjeeling blend tells a fascinating geographical and historical epic: that of two mythical black tea terroirs, separated by the highest mountains in the world, but united by an unknown history and a thousand-year-old Tea Route.
Yunnan, in southwest China, is considered the ancestral home of tea. For over two thousand years, its mist-shrouded mountains have nurtured the cultivation of wild tea plants, giving rise to the renowned Dian Hong and Pu'er teas. As early as the 7th century, during the Tang Dynasty, Yunnan became the starting point of the legendary Tea Horse Road (Chama Gudao), a caravan network linking China to Tibet, Burma, and as far as India. Mule caravans, laden with bricks of compressed tea, crossed mountain passes and valleys to reach the Tibetan Plateau, then descended to the Himalayan foothills, creating a commercial and cultural bridge between China and the Indian subcontinent.
Darjeeling, on the other side of the Himalayas, was born much later. In 1848, the British botanist Robert Fortune, sent on an industrial espionage mission by the East India Company, clandestinely entered China to steal tea plants and manufacturing secrets. Disguised as a Chinese merchant, he brought back 20,000 tea plants from the mountains of Fujian and Anhui to India, where they were planted on the slopes of Darjeeling starting in 1851. Thus was born the "champagne of black teas," the fruit of a daring theft and an exceptional terroir.
What unites these two regions, beyond legend, is a historical reality: the Yunnan-Burma-India Tea Route, which allowed Yunnan tea to transit through Burma on its way to India and Tibet. This alternative trade route, used particularly at the end of the 19th century when conflicts between Sichuan and Tibet disrupted traditional caravan routes, directly connected Yunnan to the Himalayan foothills where the Darjeeling tea plantations flourished. Yunnan tea thus circulated to Indian markets, creating an invisible yet real link between these two legendary provinces.
Yunnan-Darjeeling celebrates this unlikely encounter: that of the ancestral Chinese cradle and its Indian heir, united by the tea routes, the Himalayan mountains, and the audacity of humankind. This rare blend embodies the honeyed sweetness of Yunnan and the floral vibrancy of Darjeeling, two complementary characters that converse in an elegant and timeless cup. It is a sensory journey between two worlds, a celebration of the history of tea and the route that brought them together.
