Menghai Views

• General Goods

In the year the Qing Monarchy was overthrown by the 1911 Revolution, a newspaper was received by the Jintang School in Cixi, to which a big square stamp in ancient seal characters was affixed. The regret was that none of the teachers and students could figure out the characters on the stamp. Then, a student came up, took over the newspaper, studied it carefully, and read out loudly, 'The Seal of the Chief Military Commander of Hubei Province of the Republic of China'. All the teachers and the students cast admirable eyes upon this youngster. The youngster was no other than Sha Menghai, who was merely 12 years old then and became a master in modern calligraphy later.

Menghai Tea Factory was founded in 1940 and is located in Menghai County, Xishuangbanna Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China (中国云南西双版纳勐海县）. The factory was originally called Fo Hai Tea Factory (佛海茶厂), but changed its name to Menghai Tea Factory in 1953 with the establishment of the Xishuangbanna autonomous prefecture.[1]

Menghai Tea Factory is credited as being one of the first two factories to make cooked (熟茶, shúchá) pu'er tea in 1973 (the other factory was Kunming Tea Factory). As the tea factory industry in China privatized in the late 1980s through the 1990s, Menghai Tea Factory adopted its Dayi (大益) logo and went fully private in 1996. Currently, Menghai Tea Factory is owned by The Bowin Company, who purchased Menghai Tea Industry Co. Ltd and Menghai Tea Factory in October 2004.[1]

Menghai Tea Factory is perhaps the most widely known producer of compressed and loose pu'er tea, including túochá (沱茶, Bowl-shaped Tea (?)), bĭngchá (饼茶, Disc Tea ), and other compressed shapes. Vintage Bĭngchá from Menghai Tea Factory are perhaps the most highly prized pu'er tea produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Current productions from Menghai Tea Factory products remain popular, even with trends of pu'er collectors favoring smaller producers. Because of the high prices fetched by both new and old Menghai products, Menghai products often suffer from widespread counterfeiting. In 2006, Menghai began issuing microprinted tickets in their pu'er cakes in an attempt to throw off counterfeiters.