Wu Guang Yan
Wu Guang Yan makes tea in Anxi County, Fujian — the birthplace of Tie Guan Yin oolong. His list of achievements is remarkable: from 2012 to 2026, he secured an extraordinary ten gold and ten silver medals in various tea competitions, including a three-peat of "Gold Medal Tea King" titles at the Anxi Tieguanyin Tea King Competitions in 2024, 2025, and 2026—a feat that saw just 50 grams of his tea sell for an astounding 125,000 yuan. But his real work happens before a single leaf is picked. He runs his own family farm, producing roughly 25,000 kilograms of high-grade raw tea a year, meeting standards strict enough to carry China's official "reassurance tea" (放心茶) certification for green, ecological, organic production. He's built his cooperative around a simple rule he calls "tea enterprise and tea farmer, sharing one fate": growers are guaranteed a floor price of 200 RMB per kilogram, with top-grade leaf paying out as high as 1,600 — a structure that's pushed average household income across his network of farmers past 200,000 RMB a year. He backs that pricing with hands-on standards: plots are tested individually for soil pH, fertilizer is dosed to each parcel's needs rather than applied blanket-wide, and a four-step method he developed himself is now taught in the fields as part of a farmer-lecturer program — right down to telling growers when their land is better suited to another crop than tea. The result, as he puts it, is full traceability: every leaf can be followed from the mountainside it grew on to the cup it ends up in.
