The quiet path to white tea mastery
Chen Hui Yi grew up in the tea-scented streets of Guangzhou’s Fangcun district, a hub of wholesale tea trade. As a child, he watched his grandfather steep oolong in a gaiwan — a daily ritual that instilled a reverence for leaf and water. By his teens, he was working part-time in a family friend’s tea shop, learning to grade Tiě Guān Yīn and Lóng Jǐng by touch and aroma.
His fascination with white tea began unexpectedly. On a trip to Fuding in his early twenties, he encountered a farmer who produced Bái Háo Yín Zhēn using only sun and gentle indoor withering — no heat, no rolling. The purity of that process captivated him. He spent the next three summers apprenticing under a master in Taimu Mountain, absorbing the ancient techniques of airing the buds just so, watching the weather like a painter watches light. He learned that white tea is a conversation with the elements: humidity, breeze, and the leaf’s own chemistry.
Returning to Guangdong, Chen Hui Yi sought out small producers across Fujian and Yunnan who shared his insistence on minimal intervention. He built relationships with families who still picked Dà Bái and Shuǐ Xiān cultivars by hand, and he began curating micro-lots for a growing circle of enthusiasts. His palate also branched into yellow tea — he studied Jūn Shān Yín Zhēn and Méng Dǐng Huáng Yá, mastering the delicate “sealing yellow” step that requires split-second timing.
Over the next decade, Chen Hui Yi developed a reputation for his skill with aged whites. He transformed a former silk warehouse in Guangzhou into a temperature-stable aging cellar, experimenting with how southern China’s humid, subtropical air could gently mellow Shòu Méi and Bái Mǔ Dān over years. His 2018 Shòu Méi brick, stored in that cellar, became a benchmark — smooth, woody, with whispers of jujube and camphor. He also championed Moonlight White, a Yunnan style that uses both sun and moon-lit withering, bringing a fruity, full-bodied profile to white tea lovers.
Today, Chen Hui Yi serves as a Senior Tea Expert at Teamotea, where he teaches the white-tea path at tea.school, writes encyclopedic entries on white-tea varieties for thetea.app, and curates the white and yellow tea collection on worldtea.shop. He often says that the clearest test of a white tea is how it behaves after ten infusions — if it still holds sweetness, it was made with integrity.
A cellar that breathes — aging white tea in Guangzhou
The teas in Chen Hui Yi’s collection are born in some of China’s most celebrated white-tea regions — the misty peaks of Fuding in Fujian, where granite-rich soil and sea fog nurture plump buds; the high plateaus of Jinggu in Yunnan, where ancient tea trees yield large, downy leaves for moonlight white. But the final character of many of his offerings is shaped much closer to home, in Guangzhou.
Chen Hui Yi converted a 1950s silk warehouse in Guangzhou’s Liwan district into a dedicated aging room. Its thick brick walls and tiled floors buffer seasonal temperature swings, while the city’s natural humidity — rarely below 70% — encourages a slow, enzymatic transformation that deepens a white tea’s flavors without mold. Here, cakes of Shòu Méi and Yín Zhēn rest on bamboo shelves, surrounded by the faint scent of aged wood and dried fruit. The result is a uniquely Guangdong-aged white tea: softer, rounder, with a humid-cellar sweetness reminiscent of old Pǔ’ěr, yet retaining the clarity of its original withering.
That cellar is as much a part of his craft as the sourcing trips themselves. He visits it daily, adjusting ventilation and checking the progress of his bricks like a composer listening for the right note.