Elevation
A high, shaded north slope. Cool air, slow growth, wide day-to-night swing.
The mountain where white tea was first written down.
The place
Maolinggang rises above the old town of Xiaofeng in Anji, on a spur of the Tianmu range — deep forest, high elevation, thick mist, rich humus, and the ruins of a temple called Jinguang.
It is, by the written record, the earliest home of Anji white tea: a place where albino tea trees grew wild centuries before the cultivar was ever farmed. naturallumi grows on that same slope. This is the story we send with every leaf.
Maolinggang · the high slope
Anji County Records · 1930
Buds white as jade, tended by the monks of Jinguang Temple.
A written lineage
Three moments
1930
The first record
The Anji County Records note dozens of wild white tea trees on Maolinggang, by the Jinguang Temple — leaves “white as jade,” fired to a faint yellow, tended by the temple’s monks. It is the earliest written account of Anji white tea anywhere. Through war and the shifting of the mountain, those original trees were lost; only the record remains.
1982
The mother tree
Fifty-two years later, a provincial survey found a single century-old white tea tree at Tianhuangping. Propagated by cutting, it became Bai Ye No.1 — the cultivar now planted across all of Anji. Maolinggang is the historical origin; Tianhuangping, the source of the modern seedling.
Today
A return to the slope
naturallumi farms the Maolinggang slope again — among bamboo, old stone foundations, and scattered groves of tea. We pick by hand for ten days each spring and send the leaf whole, unblended, with its history attached.
The terroir
What the mountain gives the cup
Bamboo
Surrounded by bamboo forest — the source of the cup’s cool, green note.
Spring water
Fed by mountain spring and morning mist; humus-rich, living soil.
Amino acids
The albino flush runs high in amino acids — sweetness, freshness, almost no bitterness.
Know the difference
Not all Anji white is the same
What we grow
Maolinggang white
- The historical origin slope in old Xiaofeng
- High-mountain, small-lot, single origin
- Picked by hand over a ten-day window
- Sold for what it is — traceable to one place
The wider region
Xilong & Tianhuangping
- Modern, large-scale production zones
- Volume bai cha for the broad market
- Machine-assisted, blended across gardens
- Where most “Anji white” on shelves comes from