Tracking the year’s most significant puerh transactions, with a deep look back at the 2010 harvest on Bulang mountain
Each spring, tea.money releases the Vintage Tracker — a comprehensive survey of prices realised at the year’s most significant puerh cake auctions across Asia and Europe. The 2025 edition arrives as the market weathers a quiet shift: interest in raw puerh (shēng pǔ’ěr, 生普洱) from small-village productions has broadened, while the 2010-vintage category — particularly cakes pressed from Bùlǎng Shān (布朗山) material — has drawn renewed attention from serious collectors. This annual report documents the numbers behind those currents.
The tracker brings together data from auction houses including Christie’s Hong Kong, Sotheby’s, Bonhams London, Poly Auction, and Taiwan’s Ravenel. For each lot, we record the cake name, producer, storage history, condition notes, and the hammer price — then we normalise those prices into a per-gram metric that allows meaningful comparison across ages, regions, and wrapper styles. A small team of tea.money analysts cross-checks every entry against publicly available catalogues and, where possible, consults with the houses directly. The result is a quiet but precise ledger of the year’s transactions.
What sets the 2025 edition apart is a five-year retrospective on the 2010-vintage Bulang category. We traced every auction appearance of select 2010 Bulang cakes — some pressed by well-known factories, others by single-family workshops — and charted how their value evolved through storage conditions ranging from dry Kunming to humid Guangzhou warehouses. Resident master Fang Ting, whose palate for raw puerh has anchored many tea.money assessments, contributes a personal assessment of the 2010 harvest’s character and its maturing trajectory. Her notes sit alongside the price curves, offering a rare integration of sensory judgement and market data.
For those following a puerh collection over the long term, the tracker is more than a reference: it shows what transparent storage tends to command at auction, and how the 2010 Bulang category in particular has traded across five consecutive years. It describes what happened, not what will happen next. The report also cross-references with the deep educational resources on tea.school — their module on puerh ageing science is recommended reading — and points to specific cakes available for tasting acquisition on shop.puerh.app, enabling readers to taste the data themselves.
As with all tea.money programmes, the tracker operates without hype. The numbers are allowed to speak, the gaps acknowledged, the uncertainties noted with the same clarity as the certainties. It is published each March, in time for the spring tea-hunting season, and made available first to those who reserve a window during the campaign period.
What changes
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Receive the full digital report three weeks before public distribution.
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Access an interactive map of 2025 auction houses and lots, filterable by region and storage type.
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Book a private online tasting of a 2010 Bulang cake, presented alongside the data narrative.
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Schedule a 30-minute consultation with resident master Fang Ting to interpret the report’s findings.
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Priority registration for tea.travel sourcing expeditions in Yunnan during the spring harvest.
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A standing invitation to the private tea.community thread where this year’s registrants compare notes on the 2010 Bulang retrospective.