Three Strips of Paper, a Thousand-Year Tea Forest — A Tea Maker's Notes on Jingmai Mountain's First-Ever Stamps

On my worktable today are photos of a new stamp set: three stamps joined as one long strip, like a landscape scroll unrolled sideways. Clouds over a mountain village, hamlets climbing the slopes, forest layered over tea bushes. It is Jingmai Mountain, where I go up twice a year to buy fresh leaves.

Today, September 17, 2026, China Post officially issues the special stamps Cultural Landscape of Old Tea Forests of Jingmai Mountain in Pu'er — a World Heritage site issue, catalogue number 2026-14. The date was not chosen at random. On September 17, 2023, at the 45th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this same landscape was inscribed on the World Heritage List: China's 57th World Heritage site and the very first tea-themed cultural heritage site anywhere on Earth. Today is its third anniversary.

What the three stamps actually show

The set has three connected stamps, each with a face value of 1.20 yuan — 3.60 yuan for the full set. Their names read like a short poem: Jingmai Above the Clouds, People and Land in Harmony, Tea and Forest Growing Together. Designed by Guo Zhenshan, they are painted in watercolor with the freehand brushwork of classical Chinese landscape painting and printed by photogravure.

The first stamp is the sea of clouds. Jingmai sits above 1,000 metres, wrapped in cloud for much of the year; the villages float in the mist, and mornings often arrive before you do.

The second shows the traditional villages of the Blang (Bulang) and Dai peoples, built along the mountain's contours.

The third is the one I keep coming back to, because it is the view I know from every spring and autumn trip up the mountain: tall timber on top, tea trees in the middle, herbs and grasses on the ground — three living layers. This is not artistic license. Since around the 10th century, when Blang ancestors found wild tea trees in these forests, no one cleared the woods for plantation rows. Tea was planted in the shade of the canopy. Chinese calls this lin xia cha, "underforest tea," and it is the core reason Jingmai became a World Heritage site.

A family rule older than any brand

On Jingmai, tea has never been merely a crop.

A Blang ancestral teaching, recorded by Xinhua when the site was inscribed and recounted by Su Guowen, an elderly inheritor of the local tea-ancestor ritual, runs roughly like this: leave your children cattle and a disaster may take them; leave them gold and silver and it will run out; leave them tea trees, and generations will never be exhausted — so protect the tea trees as you protect your own eyes.

After years of working with these mountains I understand why that sentence matters in the cup, too. Jingmai's signature is its orchid aroma (lan xiang), and it is unforgiving. Get the withering or the wok-firing even slightly wrong, and the floral note simply never appears. The fragrance is not added; the trees build it slowly out of altitude, mist, soil, and the flowers and epiphytes around them. In the mouth, Jingmai raw pu-erh is gentle and sweet, low in astringency, with a quick returning sweetness (hui gan).

Will a stamp change the tea?

A few tea friends have already messaged me: now that Jingmai is on a national stamp, will the tea get expensive? Should they stock up?

Honest answer from a tea maker: a stamp honors a cultural landscape, not any particular cake. What decides a cup is the grove, the season, and the hands that processed it — never whether the mountain appeared on paper.

Our own two Jingmai teas make the point. Duxie Tianshang is the spring cake, all lifted orchid fragrance. Dangqi Huichun is an autumn raw pu-erh from 2015 — eleven years old now, its full autumn character softened into something deeper. Which suits you is a matter of taste, not headlines.

One set of stamps, one cup of tea

I am not a stamp collector, and this article says nothing about collecting value. For someone who makes tea, the issue reads more like an official letter to the world: an old way of farming — putting tea back inside the forest, instead of replacing the forest with tea — is worth taking seriously.

I will buy one set today at the post office anyway. Not to keep as an asset. So that when I brew Jingmai for a guest at my worktable, there is one more object I can point to: this mountain, this cup — they are both on it.

How did you first hear about Jingmai Mountain — through tea, or through these stamps? Leave a comment below.

Sources

1. State Post Bureau of China, official notice on planned issuance quantities of the Cultural Landscape of Old Tea Forests of Jingmai Mountain in Pu'er special stamps (September 10, 2026): spb.gov.cn
2. Xinhua, On Jingmai Mountain, Tea Fragrance Spans a Millennium (September 17, 2023): news.cn
3. Yunnan Provincial People's Government, Jingmai Mountain Ancient Tea Forest Cultural Landscape Successfully Inscribed (September 18, 2023): yn.gov.cn

This article is about tea culture only; it is not advice on stamp collecting or investment.

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