Dayi 大益牌

The House

The archive dates the factory to the war years. With the country under attack from 1937, two graduates — Fan Hejun, who had studied in Paris, and Zhang Shicheng, a physics graduate of Tsinghua University — travelled to Fohai, the old name for Menghai, to survey the local tea trade, and decided to build an experimental tea factory there. Working with local people, they cut timber, made bricks, and raised the buildings; the Fohai Experimental Tea Factory was completed in nine months and began production in

1. The archive records this as the beginning of mechanized tea production in China.

The factory made black tea in-house while buying and commissioning brick tea for Tibet, and its tea reached Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. In 1941, as the Pacific war reached Burma and Thailand, the district was bombed and the staff were evacuated.

Rebuilding began after the founding of the People's Republic of China. On 14 November 1951 the Yunnan branch of the China Tea Corporation took it over. Tang Qingyang (1916–1994), sent to rebuild it in 1951 and its head until his death in 1994, is recorded as having written the factory's name over its gate in his own hand.

The technical record follows closely. Artificial pile-fermentation (wodui) succeeded in 1973. In 1975 the blends 7542, a raw cake, and 7572, a ripe one, were developed and became the benchmarks by which the trade judges pressed raw (sheng) and ripe (shu) pu-erh. In 1989 the "Dayi" trademark was registered and two ten-thousand-mu tea-garden bases were established at Bada and Bulangshan. In 2004 Wu Yuanzhi and his team took over the near-bankrupt state factory, which passed into private ownership and has since moved toward research-based and industrialized production. The Dayi tea-making technique was listed as national intangible cultural heritage in 2008, and in 2022 Chinese tea-making techniques, this one among them, were inscribed on the UNESCO representative list. The company's stated core value, from its motto, is "cherish the tea, care for people"; its Dayi Love Foundation was set up in 2007.

What They Make

Blending and fermentation are the two core techniques. Blending (yanpei) combines two or more teas of different but related character to raise quality and hold a stable taste; the company keeps a raw-material warehouse of ten-thousand-tonne capacity and blends by year, region, and season. Fermentation is central to ripe pu-erh: the factory developed artificial pile-fermentation in 1973 and, the archive records, has fermented continuously for close to fifty years since, producing what the trade calls the "Menghai flavour." In 2016 it introduced a third-generation controlled fermentation, described as a microbial method that makes the process more transparent and the taste more consistent. The blends 7542 and 7572 remain benchmarks; later products include the Yiyuansu tea-crystal range.

Timeline

Source: China Time-honored Brand Digital Museum, Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). Original record: lzhbwg.mofcom.gov.cn. Translated and condensed from the official Chinese archive; no information has been added. Statements of standing are reproduced as recorded by the source.

Historical facts on this page are compiled from China Time-honored Brand Digital Museum, Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). Designation recorded 2012-02-29. This page is editorial content; it is not a product listing and nothing here is an offer for sale.

Independence. Time-Honored Goods is an independent multi-brand store. We are not the official site of Dayi, and we do not speak for the house. See Independence & Sourcing.