Why we track vintages
Light through a paper window fell across the lot — a single 2003 Yìwǔ Chá (易武茶) cake, its wrapper faintly foxed, the leaves still carrying the quiet camphor note of well-judged dry storage. When the auctioneer’s gavel came down at the spring sale held in the Mandarin Oriental, the price outstripped every pre‑sale whisper by nearly fifteen percent. Collectors who had been watching the same tea on shop.puerh.app nodded in recognition, but for everyone else it was a headline without context. That moment captures why the vintage tracker exists.
Auction data for aged Chinese teas — especially raw pu-erh cakes — is notoriously noisy. One house reports prices in Hong Kong dollars per gram, another in euros per kilogram, yet another bundles three lots into a single “lot” of mixed condition and provenance. The 2026 edition of our annual report doesn‘t simply aggregate those numbers; it normalises them to a single standard, documenting every step in a methodology note first published with tea.school. The result is a defensible, repeatable picture of what the market actually paid for reference-grade teas over the past twelve months.
Inside the report you’ll find detailed entries for over two hundred vintages, each with provenance chain, storage history notes, and a link back to the original catalogue where available. Alongside the single‑sale records, we introduce median, interquartile range, and volume‑weighted average prices — metrics that tell a truer story than any one hammer price alone. Interactive charts, developed together with the tea.equipment design team, let you filter by region, storage type, and auction house, while the underlying dataset is released under open standards for anyone to verify.
Why does this matter? Because without clean, public data, the secondary market for rare Chinese tea remains a mosaic of anecdotes. The tracker turns those anecdotes into a dataset that serious collectors, small producers, and new backers can all trust. It shows, for instance, that median prices for dry‑stored Bái Háo Yín Zhēn (白毫银针) cakes from 2010 to 2015 rose eleven percent on a volume‑weighted basis, while the spread between Asian and European houses narrowed to its smallest gap in five years. Those patterns are invisible in the raw auction results; they only emerge after the normalisation work is done.
The 2026 tracker also benefits from a season of live market signals. Data from puerh.app’s own feeds already hinted at a tightening spread, but only the final hammer prices confirmed the trend. In February, a tea.events tasting of a 2003 Nánnuò Shān (南糯山) had convinced many that the market was ready to re‑rate older raw pu-erh, and the auction results bore that out. So the report arrives not as a cold spreadsheet but as the closing chapter of a year’s worth of tea community conversation — a single, calm document that says: here is what happened, here is how we measured it, and here is why it counts.
Reserve your window now, and receive the full report the moment it publishes in March.
What changes
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Auction data from Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and Paris, normalised for lot-size, condition, and currency.
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A technical note on our normalisation methodology, first published in partnership with tea.school (https://tea.school).
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Each vintage entry includes provenance chain, storage history, and a link to the original auction catalogue where available.
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Early‑access reservation includes a private Zoom walk‑through with a senior specialist from the tea.money research desk.
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New this year: median, interquartile range, and volume‑weighted average prices — not just single‑sale records.
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Interactive charts developed with tea.equipment (https://tea.equipment) for a Q4 dashboard update, with raw data released under open standards.