The world’s rarest tea is worth more than it’s weight in gold.
I am an avid tea drinker, but since I drink it so much I tend to gravitate towards the cheap shit, instead of spending my life savings at places like Teavana. Lets face it people, we are drinking leaves and water.
At $10,000 a pot though, original Da Hong Pao tea is possibly the world’s most expensive tea, as a single gram is priced at $1,400 making it more expensive than gold.
According to a Chinese tea master named Xiangning Wu, the reason this tea is so expensive is that there are barely any Da Hong Pao trees left. Tea makers journey to the trees in the Wuyi mountains and pray to the tea god Lu Yu for new shoots every year. The leaves are wiped with goat milk as they grow, then baked and left to gain flavor for up to 80 years.
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Unfortunately, even the last Da Hong Pao bushels stopped producing new growth years ago, which is why the tea, said to have medicinal properties is so expensive.
I don’t know if I could bring myself to ever pay that much for tea though, no matter how medicinal it is. I can think of several other medicinal things that are a lot cheaper, and easier to procure.
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