Menghai Tea Factory / TAETEA

Menghai Tea Factory — today operating as the TAETEA Group and known around the world by its Dayi (大益) brand — is the single most influential producer in the history of pu-erh tea. Founded in 1940 by a group of over ninety Chinese tea specialists, the factory sits in Menghai county, deep in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan — the ancient homeland of the Camellia sinensis var. assamica big-leaf tea tree.

In 1973 the factory's master tea makers invented the 'wet-piling' (wo dui, 渥堆) process that created shu pu-erh, compressing the slow microbial transformation of aged sheng into a few controlled weeks. That process is now the standard for every ripe pu-erh produced in China, and Menghai's 7542 (raw) and 7572 (ripe) recipes remain the official benchmarks against which every other pu-erh cake is judged.

In 2008 Menghai Tea Factory's craft was added to China's National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Today TAETEA runs more than 2,000 branded stores across Asia and ships Dayi cakes to collectors worldwide. 931 sources these cakes direct, so you can trust the batch numbers and the provenance.