Drink Orchids From the BiodiversiTea Resort

Close to the borders of Myanmar in Yunnan, China, is the TianZi Biodiversity Centre, where their sustainably managed tea forest has tall trees that filter the sunlight for the diversity of plant and animal species here. The numbers are overwhelming--no less than 500 tree species and about 2000 other plants inhabit the tea forest. Orchids abound, and so do birds, butterflies and the occasional wild deer.

Some of these orchids are used in local medicine. Others have aromatic flowers, which are edible and have been part of the mountain peoples’ diet since times immemorial. Yunnan’s mountain tea forests provide much more to local farmers than conventional tea. They offer them medicinal herbs, aromatic flowers, and rare nuts high in unsaturated fatty acids, which are essential for healthy nutrition.

They sell two types of orchid noveltea, whose sale proceeds go to preserving this ecological haven.

Gold Orchid Tea
Sold in Orchid Tea Pralines containing 5 grams of tea + orchid flowers, Orchid Tea Cakes with 100 grams in a handmade silk bag, or as Loose Orchid Tea Flowers, the Gold Orchid comes from the old tea trees on the Bulang Mountains of South Yunnan. The flowers also make delicious food and a healthy tea, used by local people to improve eyesight and calm the mind for sleep. It is likely that the high carotene content of the golden colored flowers is behind these effects.

EnerQi Orchid Tea
Is made from dried orchid stems of the Dendrobium officinale, packed loose in silk bags. This rare orchid was given this name by the first European botanists, but TianZi calls it EnergQi, to denote how it energizes people even more than the common tea leaf. And if you add a bit of the sweet root licorice, you are drinking one of the oldest recipes of a rare and potent tea that is believed to enhance your “Qi” or natural energy.