Yibang

Yi Bang, a hilltop Han/Yi village on the Tea-Horse route (Cha Ma Gu Dao), in the hills above Xiangming, Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China. Yibang mountain was one of the original 'Six Great Tea Mountains', and began producing tea for distribution in 1723. Archibald Colqhoun, a British engineer, explorer and one-time foreign correspondent for the London Times, wrote in his account of an 1881-2 expedition through southern China, Across Chryse (1883), that Yibang was the ‘most highly esteemed tea-growing district, whence the best so-called “Puerh” tea comes’.