Xiangyi 湘益

The House

The factory was built at Yiyang in 1958 and put into production in 1959, moving from Anhua, where it had been the Anhua No. 2 Tea Factory. The archive traces the line back to Peng Xianze, described as the father of Hunan black tea theory, who in 1939 leased a tea house in Anhua and set up a brick-tea works; through a series of reorganisations it became the Anhua No. 2 Tea Factory in 1953, and then the Hunan Yiyang Tea Factory when it moved, hand-pressing giving way to machine pressing. It was restructured into Yiyang Tea Factory Co. in 2007. The archive records the first machine-pressed fu brick tea as having been made here. The factory complex, built in the late 1950s, was designated a provincial cultural relic protection unit in 2019.

For decades the house sold under the People brand, then, from 1959 to 1994, under the China Tea brand shared by state tea enterprises; the Xiangyi trademark was registered in 1994, and the fu brick range had all taken it up by 1998. In 2012 it was recognised as a well-known trademark (China) by the then State Administration for Industry and Commerce. The company works from the Longling development zone at Yiyang, with a registered capital of 55 million yuan and about 100 mu of land, and a stated capacity of 12,000 tonnes a year. Its border-sale tea is recorded as about a quarter of the national total and its reserve of border-sale raw material as 26.7 percent, figures the archive places first in the country; more than 600,000 tonnes have been sent to the border regions over six decades. It is a state-designated key fu brick tea producer and a drafter of the national standard for the product.

What They Make

Fu brick tea, a compressed dark tea. It is made from dark raw tea (heicha) through wet-piling, fermentation, pressing into bricks, and the flowering step (fahua) — a run of more than thirty processes, and the longest cycle of any Chinese tea. The archive records the flowering step as found only in fu brick tea, producing the "golden flowers" (jin hua, Eurotium cristatum) that grow inside the brick, a beneficial fungus. The archive notes that fu tea, unlike other teas, keeps and improves with age, and that in the northwest it is drunk as butter tea, milk tea, and salt tea; a local saying holds that one may go three days without food but not a day without tea.

Timeline

Passing It On

The archive gives a four-generation line. Peng Xianze came first, recorded as the pioneering predecessor of the craft. Chen Xianjing, the second generation, helped lead the Yiyang factory from 1958 as deputy director and then director until his retirement in 1989. Liu Xingyi, the third, joined the factory in 1985 and learned from Chen Xianjing and Zhou Tie'an; designated a national-level representative inheritor of the craft in 2018, he developed a high-grade fu brick tea for the domestic market in 2005, ending the era in which fu tea was made only for the border trade. The fourth generation — Huang Yan, a provincial-level inheritor, and Xu Dijun, Yao Jian, and Huang Tian, municipal-level — learned from Liu Xingyi. As of February 2023 the company counted one national-level inheritor, one provincial, and three municipal.

Source: official materials published by Yiyang Tea Factory Co., Ltd. Translated and condensed from the house's own record; no information has been added.

Historical facts on this page come from Official materials published by Yiyang Tea Factory Co., Ltd. Designation recorded 2016-09-30. This page is editorial content; it is not a product listing and nothing here is an offer for sale.

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