Zhou Xiang

Zhou Xiang grew up between the tea gardens of Anhua and the yellow-tea workshops of Junshan Island, where his grandmother sorted Jūnshān Yínzhēn (君山银针) buds by candlelight during the late harvests of the 1980s. He trained formally at the Hunan Agricultural University tea science department, then spent eleven years as a buyer for a Changsha export house before joining the Teamotea expert circle in 2021.

On tea.dog he serves two roles. First, he is the ethics editor — the person who decides which rare-tea listings the search index will surface, and which it will quietly refuse to amplify. Stolen lots, mislabelled vintages, fabricated Lóngjǐng (龙井) pre-Qingming claims, dubious wild-tree pǔ'ěr provenance: these cross his desk before any alert fires. Second, he is the community moderator who answers the hard questions in the forum, usually with a scan of a tax stamp or a phone call to a cooperative manager in Hunan.

His authored thread, “Ethics of the rare-tea trade — what we don’t post,” is the closest thing this community has to a written constitution. It documents the categories of listing tea.dog will not index — recently looted temple stores, undocumented pre-1980 lots without chain-of-custody, and producer names used without consent — and explains the reasoning in calm, paragraph-length detail. New members are usually pointed there within their first week.

Zhou Xiang’s tasting specialities sit in the green, yellow, and hóng chá (红茶) families. He is regularly cited on Hunan blacks — Anhua Hēi Chá aside, his palate for early-spring Gǒng Jiān and the smoke-cured Xiāng Hóng is unusually precise. For yellow teas he holds to the slow mèn huáng (闷黄) standards taught by master Liu Zhonghua at Junshan, and will gently push back on any vendor compressing the smother step to under forty-eight hours.

Outside the moderation queue he teaches a twice-yearly seminar on Hunan tea geography through tea.school, and contributes provenance notes to the puerh.app vendor verification programme. Collectors who want to understand why a particular Lǎo Cóng listing has been delisted from the tea.dog index will usually find his initials on the audit trail, alongside a short, unsentimental paragraph explaining what was wrong with the paperwork.

He answers messages slowly. He answers them carefully. He has never, in four years of moderation, raised his voice in a thread.