What the index actually does
tea.dog sells nothing and takes no commission on anything a member eventually buys elsewhere. The engine reads three streams — vendor catalogues on shop.thetea.app and shop.puerh.app, live auction listings, and direct notifications from roughly forty Chinese workshops who publish small-batch availability before it reaches retail — and turns that raw feed into two things a collector can act on without living at a screen: a search that already knows the difference between a 2003 Menghai recipe and a 2005 reprint of it, and a watchlist tuned narrowly enough that when it fires, it is worth answering the phone. Producer feeds are checked the moment a workshop publishes; auctions every twenty minutes; retail catalogues on a six-hour cycle. The gap between those speeds is most of what separates a find from a listing everyone else already saw.
The standard behind every alert
Not everything the crawler picks up reaches a watchlist. By our own count, roughly one in seven candidate listings is held back before it ever surfaces — a cake with a story but no chain of custody, a ‘newly discovered ancient grove’ with no village council record behind it, an ‘estate sale, name withheld’ pattern that repeats too often to be only grief. Zhou Xiang keeps that editorial line and writes the reasoning down rather than leaving it as an unexplained silence. The same discipline runs through the condition vocabulary members use before any money changes hands — nèi fēi (内飞) placement, wrapper foxing, a documented storage trail from Kunming dry shelf to Guangzhou humidity to wherever the cake sits now — words built collectively so a listing means something specific, not something hopeful.
Who reads the leaf
The roster is small on purpose. Amgalan Chin, working the Bulang–Yiwu axis from a desk between Ulan-Ude and Kyakhta, leads the aged-cake watch club and the Saint Petersburg cellar reveals. Mei Yang verifies old-bush Dāncōng (单丛) and Mí Lán Xiāng lots against her own Phoenix Mountain fieldwork before an alert ever reaches a collector. Fang Ting curates the vintage Tiěguānyīn (铁观音) taxonomy from Henan, tracing a category most collectors still overlook in favour of pu’er. Chen Hui Yi verifies aged white tea provenance out of Guangdong, and Max Grig built the cross-network crawler and alert dispatch from Berlin — the plumbing behind every search on this site. None of this scales the way a marketplace would want it to. That is deliberate. A search this specific only stays honest if the people running it can still name every listing they declined.
