A trade signboard may gather dust, but mastery of the craft never fades. Waiting for a child to come of age took eighty long years.
In 2004, Li Dingwei was well into his eighties. It was in this year that he made a decision he had harboured for the greater part of his life: under his personal tutelage, his eldest daughter, Li Chunxian, established a tea workshop, officially reviving the name of “Anle Tea Firm”. Counting from the passing of his father, Li Bingrong, in 1925, when distribution was entrusted to Tongqing Hao, the family had waited nearly eighty years for this day. An octogenarian elder, seated once again on the ancestral grounds where he had been raised, guiding his daughter in the nuances of tea making—this was a scene three generations in the making.
Upon reviving the house, Li Dingwei’s first priority was to repay a historical kindness. In honour of the generational brotherhood shared with Tongqing Hao, and to commemorate Master Liu Guiguang’s tender touch and his blessing—“the hope of the Li clan”—he deliberately named the new establishment “Anle Tea Firm · Tongqing Tea Factory”. Two centuries earlier, the two houses had forged an unbreakable bond; two centuries later, this new factory name cemented that historic friendship into perpetuity. The words spoken to him as a child were answered with a lifetime of profound gratitude, cast into the very name of the enterprise. This was the noble ethos of a historic house: never wearing benevolence on one’s sleeve, but enshrining it within one’s name.
Following its revival, production at the Anle Tea Firm expanded year on year from 2004 onwards, with its teas distributed primarily to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Emerging once more from Yibi Village, the tea travelled across the length and breadth of the country. Whereas it had once relied on pack-horse caravans travelling towards Yiwu Street, it was now conveyed nationwide through modern logistics networks. The transport routes had evolved, but the tea remained the authentic harvest of that very same village. The phrase “expanded year on year” reads plainly, yet behind it lay the perseverance of an octogenarian elder and his family, steadily lifting a heritage house out of the dust of history, stride by stride.
The roots of this heritage house have remained firmly in Yibi Village. Today, the address printed on the packaging—Yunnan Yiwu Zhengshan Tea Co., Ltd., Anle Tea Firm, Tongqing Tea Factory—marks the precise mountain village where Li Hongzong settled two centuries ago and where Li Kaiji established the firm. The founding ambition to “rival Yiwu Street” endures, two hundred years later, in the very same soil. The territorial roots remain unbroken, the familial line remains uninterrupted, and the lineage of tea naturally perseveres. For a genuine heritage house, workshop buildings may be relocated, but the terroir of the tea mountains can never be moved. The tea trees of Yibi Village are nourished by the very same mountain mists, and the teas of Anle Hao capture the timeless character of that single mountain range.
From the household’s relocation to Yibi in 1824, to its zenith during the Guangxu reign, to its distribution through Tongqing Hao after 1925, its subsequent quietude, and its eventual revival in 2004—these two centuries of Anle Hao form an authentic miniature of Pu-erh tea’s broader history: spanning the imperial tribute tea era, the classic Haoji private firm era, and the contemporary renaissance of Pu-erh. In the era of imperial tribute, it possessed a designated Tea Official to oversee harvests; in the Haoji era, it stood as a pillar of Yiwu; and in the modern revival, it set forth anew from its ancestral village. Three historical epochs, three distinct roles, one continuous lineage—the triumphs and tribulations of the Yiwu tea ranges are inscribed directly upon this family’s genealogy.
Today, Anle Hao teas on the market remain dedicated to authentic Yiwu Zhengshan harvest and traditional stone-mould pressing techniques. While the grand scale of three hundred mu and forty to fifty permanent labourers has passed into history, the “Tea Official Lineage’s” uncompromising devotion to raw materials and craftsmanship has been handed down intact. When tea connoisseurs savour a cake of Anle Hao, they partake not merely of compressed tea leaves, but of two centuries of authentic, documented family history—distinguished by the audacity of foundation, the honour of stewardship, and the enduring nobility of gratitude. A cup of tea may cool and be replenished; this chronicle has been recounted, yet the story of the firm continues to be written.
This narrative leaves us with an enduring reflection: what makes a historic Pu-erh house truly precious has never been merely the seal stamped upon a tea cake, but that which has remained unbroken behind the seal—the village that was never abandoned, the debt of gratitude remembered across decades, and the mastery of the craft passed down through generations. Two hundred years of Anle Hao stand as its finest testament.
(End of the Three-Part Anle Hao Brand History)
Author: Lam Sam (老茶頭·林燊)
ZenTea Manor 禪茶莊園 · 天盈供應鏈公司
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