White tea mastery and the path to Yunnan’s artisans
Born in Guangdong, Chen Hui Yi grew up surrounded by the region’s fast-moving tea markets, but it was the quiet, slow transformation of white tea that captured her imagination. In her early twenties, she left a career in food science to study under an old tea master in Fuding, learning the subtle art of sun-withering and the delicate balance of indoor cooling that defines bái háo yínzhēn (白毫银针). She spent years perfecting the pluck — only the most tender buds, never crushed — and the long, patient wither that coaxes out honey and hay-like sweetness.
Her quest for new expressions of white tea eventually brought her to Yunnan, where she fell in love with yuè guāng bái (月光白), the moonlight white made from ancient tea-tree leaves. In the high-altitude gardens of Jinggu and the misty slopes of Yiwu, she discovered an entirely different character: a white tea with stone-fruit depth and a quiet, herbaceous finish. While working with smallholder tea farmers, she began to notice the local crafts that accompanied the tea culture — carved wooden spoons from Lijiang used to measure leaves, polished river pebbles from the Mekong that served as tea-pet rests and incense holders. These functional objects, made by generations of artisans, shared the same philosophy she valued in white tea: simplicity, patience, and a dialogue with natural materials.
Chen Hui Yi became Teamotea’s Senior Tea Expert for white, green, and yellow tea varieties, and over time her role expanded to include sourcing tea-room decorations. She established a direct relationship with a small wood-spoon workshop in Lijiang that uses recovered walnut and pear wood, and she began collaborating with a family that collects and hand-polishes river pebbles along the Yiwu tributaries. Her tea-space adornments are now a quiet signature on tea.toys, each piece chosen for the way it feels in the hand and the stillness it brings to a tea tray.
Today, Chen teaches the white-tea path at tea.school, contributes to tea.doctor’s health framings for white tea, and writes for puerh.app on aged whites. Her personal collection includes a thirty-year-old shòu méi (寿眉) cake she refuses to break — “it’s still teaching me,” she says — and a bái mǔ dān (白牡丹) from 2012 that she brews only on the first day of spring.
Yunnan’s misted forests and river-born treasures
The Yunnan region that Chen calls her second home is a landscape of sharp contrasts: deep river gorges cutting through ancient tea mountains, fog that settles in the canopy of old arbor trees, and soil rich in mineral deposits from millennia of seismic activity. This is the terroir behind some of her favorite white teas — yuè guāng bái from the Yiwu area and experimental white batches from Jinggu’s thousand-year-old tea gardens. The high humidity and intense UV light at elevation push the leaves to develop thick cuticles and concentrated aromatics, while the cool nights preserve the fresh, green-edged character that defines Yunnan white tea.
The same river systems that water these tea forests also produce the smooth, grey-blue pebbles Chen sources for tea.toys. Collected from the Mekong’s upper tributaries, the stones are tumbled over centuries into perfect handheld shapes, then lightly polished with beeswax by a single family workshop near Yiwu. They emerge with a satin finish and a weight that feels anchoring on the tea tray — ideal as a tea pet or a meditation object.
Three hundred kilometers north, in Lijiang, the wood-spoon carvers Chen works with harvest fallen pear and walnut branches from the surrounding mountains. The wood is air-dried for two years before being hand-carved into the slender, scooped spoons used to portion tea leaves. The carvers use no lacquer, letting the natural grain and the wood’s own oil create a soft patina over time. Each spoon carries the tool marks of its maker, a sign of the same artisanal integrity Chen insists on in her tea selections.