Gong Liping and Ran Yijun are skilled Yunnan tea sourcers and producers with dedication to quality throughout the whole tea making process, from raw materials to compression.
Gong Liping was born in 1955 in Ninger County (previously called Puer County) of Puer City (previously called Simao City). The contemporary Puer City has been called ‘Puer City’ since the late 1300s, except for a brief period from 1950-2007 when it was renamed to Simao City. Puer City, the namesake of puer teas, was a major distribution hub for puer teas on the “Tea Horse Trade Road” (Cha Ma Dao), a network of caravan paths connecting Yunnan, Sichuan, Tibet, and India (also called the Southern Silk Road). In 2007, when Simao City was given back its old name of Puer City, and to avoid confusion, the county within Puer City, previously called Puer County, was renamed to Ninger County. Gong Liping, as well as the beginnings of the puer tea trade, are from this county in southern Yunnan.
Gong Liping has been surrounded by tea since she was a child, and after graduating college, began working in one of Yunnan’s oldest puer facilities learning to make puer teas. She’s spent her life dedicated to tea, traveling to different regions in Yunnan and learning how to make sheng and shu puers, as well as how to compress tea into disks and gourd shaped cakes. She has become highly respected and well known in the tea industry for her exceptional shu puers and compressing skills. She’s known for compressing large and small quantities of puer tea, compressing up to 10kg down to 5g, each difficult extremes to work with.
Ran Yijun, Gong Liping’s business partner, has a deep knowledge of plants that makes him skilled at sourcing sheng puers and uniquely good at identifying what type of plant the tea comes from, categories such as forest grown, old growth, and more. Zhuping says he also has a penchant for the dramatic, as he poses for photos and speaks with a poetic flair. Although he is not a Yunnan Native, Ran married a woman from the Bai ethnic minority, whom he met during his time in the army traveling in Yunnan. He was brought into the tea industry though his wife and partnered with Gong Liping, drawn to her skill for compressing tea and her old factory (as many puer makers will attest that an older facility building is ideal for producing shu puers, due to its natural environment already containing microbes suited for shu puer fermentation). Throughout all of his travels throughout Yunnan, Ran’s favorite tea comes from Yiwushan (Yiwu Mountain). He says they have exceptional quality and although there are many communities on one mountain range, each tea from the villages has a distinct recognizable trait, making them his favorite to taste and explore.
Ran Yijun has also played an important role in Seven Cups’ endeavors. Sheng (raw) puer is very rarely found in loose-leaf form, the way we find most teas today. They are most often found compressed into cakes and makes them a bit daunting in some ways. Austin and Zhuping, dedicated to making tea available to everyone, wanted to change the steep onboarding ramp of compressed tea cakes and asked Ran Yijun to find loose-leaf sheng puers. It was an optimistic request they were not sure was possible but to their surprise, Ran Yijun was able to collect many loose leaf sheng puers! Though sheng puers have been more of an ‘underground’ tea compared to its sibling, shu puers, they are slowly becoming more popular and accessible, we hope you’ll give them a chance. Gong Liping and Ran Yijun provide exceptional teas, including some of our best-sellers, like the Naka Sun-Dried black tea, Nuomi Toucha (Sticky Rice) shu puer, and Yue Guang Bai (White Moonlight) white tea.