Lao Ban Zhang is a Hani village on Bulang Mountain in Menghai County, Yunnan. For a long time few people outside the region knew its name. As pu-erh grew in popularity in the 2000s, the village's old-arbor tea became famous among tea lovers in China and beyond, and life in the village changed with it. Chen Sheng Hao has been part of that story since 2007. Here is how our partnership grew, year by year.
Tea is the village's main livelihood. The quality of its leaf was always there, but it needed someone to recognize it and bring it to a wider market before Lao Ban Zhang became known as the "King of raw pu-erh". Our founder, Shenghe Chen, played a large part in that. Our partnership with the village is built on a "company + base + farmers" model: the farmers pick, and we buy their fresh leaf directly and process it in the village. Over the years the village has also built three gates, one after another; the newest, completed in 2016, appears further down.
Our years with Lao Ban Zhang
2007. Shenghe Chen visited Lao Ban Zhang to discuss working together. That year we bought the farmers' unsold harvest, more than 10,000 kg. We count the start of our partnership with the village from 2007.
2008. With the approval of the local government, we signed a 30-year cooperation agreement with Lao Ban Zhang village and set up a first-processing workshop there.
2009. A road into the village, funded by Chen Sheng Hao, was opened. The villagers named it "Chen Sheng Lao Ban Zhang Avenue".
2010. We celebrated three years of working with the village. The "company + base + farmers" model was starting to show results, and it drew attention across Yunnan.
2011. The Xishuangbanna Lao Ban Zhang Tea Research Association was founded, bringing more research attention to Lao Ban Zhang tea. The villagers honored Shenghe Chen with a thread-tying blessing, one of the highest honors in Hani tradition.
2012. Five years into our partnership, the whole village celebrated with songs and dances. The villagers presented Shenghe Chen with tea gathered from every household in the village as a thank-you.
2013. We invited tea experts to the village to train farmers in green prevention and control of pests and diseases in their tea gardens.
2014. We invited villagers to visit our factory in Menghai, to see how their leaf is made into finished pu-erh.
2015. Eight years into our partnership, we and the villagers gathered to celebrate our friendship and what we had built together.
2016. The village's third gate was completed. It was designed with the Hani villagers and built by Chen Sheng Hao, and it has become a landmark that visitors stop to photograph.
2017. At Chen Sheng Hao's tenth-anniversary celebration, the villagers again presented Shenghe Chen with tea gathered from every household, marking ten years since we first came to the village.
2018. We held a meeting with the village to mark ten years since the 2008 agreement, to look back on what we had learned and to plan the years ahead.
2019. Our Chen Sheng Lao Ban Zhang raw pu-erh was named one of Yunnan Province's "Top 10 Famous Teas".
2020. Chen Sheng Lao Ban Zhang · Premium appeared on six CCTV channels, including CCTV-1.
2021. Chen Sheng Lao Ban Zhang was presented at the China International Consumer Products Expo, hosted by the Ministry of Commerce and the People's Government of Hainan Province.
2022. In our fifteenth year in the village, the villagers presented the first fresh leaves picked from the "Number Two Tea King Tree" to our chairman, Shenghe Chen, and our general manager, Chen Liubin, as a thank-you for their part in the village's prosperity.
2023. More than 500 Chen Sheng Hao franchisees visited our Lao Ban Zhang base. Villagers lined the road to welcome them, and the group walked through the old-arbor tea gardens.
2023 was also our 16th year with Lao Ban Zhang. On November 25, 2023, we held our 16th Anniversary Celebration and New Product Launch in Ningbo, Zhejiang, looking back on 16 years of working with the village.
You can taste the tea from this partnership in our Lao Ban Zhang collection.
