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The Tea Trade

About The Tea Trade

The Tea Trade publishes guides to the Chinese tea trade for tea importers, packers and traders abroad, and for tea exporters in China. The guides are written in English and French. Until their Chinese versions are published, the Chinese pages list the English and French guides.

The Tea Trade is run by Neo.

What the site covers

  • 01 Chinese tea types and export grades, such as gunpowder and chunmee.
  • 02 Import rules country by country: duties, documents and payment, starting with Morocco and West Africa.
  • 03 Tea packaging: how inner bags, roll stock and foil paper protect tea, and how customs classify them.
  • 04 Trade practice: payment terms, shipping and the documents of an order.
  • 05 Trade data: tea exports and imports, from customs statistics and UN Comtrade.
  • 06 A glossary of tea packaging and trade terms in English, French and Chinese, and tools for tea packing lines.

How the guides are written

Four rules apply to every guide.

  1. 1

    Official and primary sources first

    Customs tariffs and circulars, laws, decrees and official trade statistics come before secondary reports. Every guide lists its sources at the end.

  2. 2

    Every fact that can change is dated

    Duty rates, rules and trade figures say when they were checked, and every guide shows when it was published and last updated.

  3. 3

    Only what can be checked

    No price without a public source, no health claims, and no private companies or brands named. Government bodies, standards, ports and places are named.

  4. 4

    Corrections by email

    If you find an error, email us the page and, if you can, a source. We check it against the source and correct the page.

Guides are researched and drafted with the help of AI tools, then checked against the sources listed at the end of each guide. Some cover images are illustrations generated with AI, labelled as such. They only illustrate concepts, and never show real products, documents, brands or people as if photographed.

Contact

For corrections, questions about a guide or anything else, write to: contact@theteatrade.com

Photo credits

The photos on this site come from Unsplash and are used under the Unsplash License. They illustrate the guides and the topics. Thank you to the photographers.

  • Close view of a picker’s hands plucking fresh tea shoots, in a checked jacket and red patterned sleeve covers, above a woven basket.

    Photo: Tang Don / Unsplash

  • Aerial view of tea bushes planted in concentric rings on a hilltop, with a person standing in the middle, arms outstretched, and terraced hills beyond.

    Photo: Aoyu Zhang / Unsplash

  • Close-up of twisted dry green tea leaves, some with pale downy tips, beside the curved edge of a metal scoop.

    Photo: Invisible / Unsplash

  • Twisted dry tea leaves in dark green with silvery downy tips, heaped in a white bowl.

    Photo: Drew Jemmett / Unsplash

  • A pale porcelain lidded bowl of steeped green tea leaves on a slatted wooden tea tray, its lid resting beside it.

    Photo: Jia Ye / Unsplash

  • Mint tea poured from a silver teapot into glasses packed with fresh mint leaves, on a blue table.

    Photo: Jaida Stewart / Unsplash

  • A person pours a thin stream of tea from a small metal teapot into a glass on a perforated metal tray.

    Photo: Carlos Torres / Unsplash

  • A hand carries a tray crowded with small glass cups of amber tea.

    Photo: Baqeer Gashua / Unsplash

  • Top-down aerial view of a container ship stacked with red and green containers, leaving a white wake on deep green water.

    Photo: Venti Views / Unsplash

  • Four container cranes stand in silhouette against a low sun that is reflected in calm water.

    Photo: snap wander / Unsplash

  • A hand holds a blank sage-green zip pouch with a hang hole, against a white wall.

    Photo: Vitalii Abakumov / Unsplash