Two Crops on Lincang’s Slopes

Fresh tea leaf and a ripe coffee cherry begin very different journeys. In Fengqing, the history of Dianhong centres on making black tea from the local large-leaf tea plant. A provincial agriculture account places Feng Shaoqiu’s trial production in 1938. The episode marks the development of a particular tea product, within a region whose tea cultivation has a much longer history.

Coffee follows another chronology. A provincial agricultural report traces Lincang experiments to the 1950s and describes the later expansion of commercial growing. Its 2025 account identifies five concentrated growing counties and 290,000 mu of high-standard bases. These dated figures show the scale of an industry taking shape across several places, rather than the output of one estate.

The Dianhong craft sequence moves through withering, rolling, the stage traditionally called fermentation, and drying. Leaf is the working material from beginning to end. Coffee processing works instead with fruit and seed: sorting and flotation separate lots before subsequent processing, while roasting belongs to a later transformation of the bean.

The coffee report describes investment in controlled processing and specialty lots, linking the slope to equipment, grading and wider markets. Beside it, Fengqing’s tea history shows another relationship between local plant material and organised production. The two drinks meet in a contemporary agricultural landscape, but the work that brings them to a cup remains distinct.