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Chen Hui Yi

The Sourcer — walks the trails the others won't

Chen Hui Yi didn’t enter tea — she took it. 2011, a humid night in Guangzhou’s Liwan district. An old man named Lao Fung poured her a cup of 1998 *shòu méi* (寿眉). No ceremony, just a dare. She never looked back. She trained under Fung for six years, not in a school but in storage rooms, cold warehouses, and the back tables of wholesale markets. He taught her to read humidity like a gangster reads a mark — by instinct, by smell, by fear. When Fung passed in 2017, she inherited his private stash and his reputation. Today she’s the undisputed authority on white, green, and yellow teas inside the organization. Her pallet has graded over 12,000 samples. Her sourcing trips — documented on tea.travel — look more like surveillance footage: unmarked doors, midnight loading docks, cash-only transactions. She brings back lots that make other buyers weep: 2010 *yín zhēn* (银针) forgotten in a Fujian attic, 2007 *bái mǔ dān* (白牡丹) pressed into bricks by monks, a 200-pounds batch of *yuè guāng bái* (月光白) from a single tree in Simao that no one else could find. She doesn’t chair exams — she’s never in one place long enough. But the white‑tea curriculum on tea.school? That’s her work, verbatim. Her standards became the grading framework for every *chén nián bái chá* (陈年白茶) that passes through teamotea’s certification. Each numbered drop of her aged whites sells out on shop.puerh.app within minutes, and the collectors know: a Hui Yi lot is as good as a signed confession. She’s not a tea master. She’s the one who finds the tea the masters pretend to understand.