Old woman with some oher tea crop, in Yi Bang, a hilltop Han/Yi village on the Tea-Horse route (Cha Ma Gu Dao), in the hills above Xiangming, Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China.

An 80-year old inhabitant of Yibang village with some freshly-picked leaves. Yibang. Hanging the skins of flying foxes in or just outside the house is a local custom. 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’.