Mengku Rongshi's formal company name is Yunnan Shuangjiang Mengku Tea Co., Ltd. (云南双江勐库茶叶有限责任公司). The Rong family's tea-making history in Shuangjiang goes back to 1935, when the first generation began producing tea in the Mengku area. The current company was formally established in 1993 by Rong Jiasheng (戎加升) — the family's second-generation tea maker, and the man who built Mengku Rongshi into the brand it became. In 1999, the company absorbed the state-owned Shuangjiang County Tea Factory and grew into a full-scale production operation.

Rong Jiasheng had been working with tea since 1966. Over more than five decades, he modernized the brand's production methods, led the team into Bingdao when the village was still largely inaccessible to outside buyers, and earned Mengku Rongshi its reputation as the “Lincang hegemon” (临沧霸主) — the dominant producer in the Lincang market. He passed away in 2023. The company is now led by his son, Rong Yuting (戎玉廷), who had already been serving as General Manager and has continued the brand on the same path his father set.

The brand holds national-level status as a Key Agricultural Industrialization Leading Enterprise. It's worth being direct about what that means: Mengku Rongshi is not a boutique workshop or a small-batch artisan label. It is a serious, full-scale production company with decades of institutional knowledge, strict quality controls, and a traceable supply chain from garden to finished cake. For buyers who care about consistency and provenance across multiple vintages, that matters.

Mengku sits at the northern tip of Shuangjiang County in Lincang, just below the Tropic of Cancer. The terrain runs from around 1,040 meters at its lowest point to over 3,200 meters in the mountains. The climate is subtropical and layered — warm enough for year-round growth, with distinct wet and dry seasons and meaningful temperature variation between elevations. This combination of altitude, humidity, and red volcanic soil produces the Mengku large-leaf cultivar (勐库大叶种), one of the first tea varietals to receive national-grade recognition in China.

Two areas define Mengku Rongshi's sourcing.

Two production practices set Mengku Rongshi apart from much of the industry.

The practical result: their ripe pu-erh tends to taste cleaner than the industry average. The heavy, muddy fermentation residue that can appear in floor-piled shou is mostly absent. Their signature ripe tea, Bo Jun (博君), was formally recognized as one of Yunnan Province's Top Ten Famous Teas — a designation earned through quality evaluation, not marketing.

Mengku Rongshi produces both raw pu-erh (sheng) and ripe pu-erh (shou). Here is an honest summary of each major line.

Every Mengku Rongshi tea in this collection has been stored in our Xi'an warehouse since leaving the factory. We've been doing this since 2000, which means our older stock has spent its entire post-production life in Xi'an's dry northern climate — never in Guangzhou, never in Hong Kong, never in any humid southern warehouse.

For Mengku raw pu-erh in particular, this matters. Mengku sheng tends to have a strong aromatic profile — the floral, camphor, and fruity notes that come from high-altitude large-leaf material. In humid storage, those top notes are often the first thing lost, replaced by a thick, heavy storage character. In Xi'an dry storage, those notes are preserved. You can still taste where the tea came from in cakes that are 15 or 20 years old.

For the ripe teas — especially Bo Jun — dry storage means the clean fermentation character that Mengku Rongshi works hard to build at the production level isn't undone by damp warehousing afterward. The tea arrives clean, and it stays clean.

There is also a simple consistency argument: Xi'an has maintained a stable, dry climate since we started this storage in 2000. We know what these teas taste like, and we know what to expect from them as they continue to age. There are no surprises hiding in the storage history.

Mengku Rongshi is a well-known name, which means fakes and unofficial pressings exist in the market. The teas in this collection are sourced through our long-term supply partner in Xi'an, who has worked with Mengku Rongshi through established channels since the early 2000s. We do not buy from secondary markets or resellers. When you're looking at a named brand from a recognized producing area, supply chain clarity is part of what you're paying for.