About the author
Shana Zhang - Co-founder of the International Tea Academy, shareholder of Wild Tea Qi and a certified tea master by the International Tea Masters Association, Shana grew up in a tea family that owns two tea plantations and two tea factories in Yunnan, China. She has a deep and unique perspective of the tea industry from the Chinese side of tea culture and business. She worked for her family's tea company, which is the largest tea export company in Yunnan province, where she was responsible for international sales, tea quality testing, fair trade certification, IMO organic certification, plantation inspection and other responsibilities. Her clients have included some of Europe’s and the United States’ largest tea companies.
She was professionally trained within China in Chinese tea ceremony and as a professional tea taster. She currently is a shareholder of Wild Tea Qi, which is a tea company that is distributed worldwide. She manages the buying operations, tea farmers and plantation inspections, package design, and international sales. She joined Wild Tea Qi as part of her mission to help protect China's quickly dwindling natural environment, as the guiding spirit of integrity in support of Biodiversity tea and preserving the original tea artisans.
Shana and her business partner J.T. Hunter, deep experience in the Chinese and international world of tea and they are ready to share with you some of this insider knowledge.
J.T.Hunter – The founder of Wild Tea Qi (an artisan tea company), co-founder of the International Tea Academy, author of the controversial book Wild Tea Hunter, Executive Director of the International Tea Masters Association of China, Taiwan and Thailand. JT tirelessly searches for the exotic, wild, and ancient tree teas and master tea artisans from the Taoist mountains of Wuyishan to the remote mountains of Yunnan. He has studied with Taoist masters, Buddhist monks, and the tribal people of Yunnan in their mysterious tea cultures. He has been studying Taoist healing martial arts, meditation, and Qigong for many years.
In his tea treks he saw how many large-scale farms and unsustainable harvesting practices were actually destroying the environment and producing teas with very weak Qi energy. They were simply being mass-produced for large profits while paying unskilled workers a very poor wage. He saw how the master artisans were quickly disappearing, how the spiritual tea culture was being lost.
It became JT’s mission to help support the true artisans, support sustainable tea harvesting practices, and to make this amazing, spiritual tea culture known to the west. Thus he created Wild Tea Qi. Today, he continues his treks across China digging deeper into the spiritual tea culture in search of wild and ancient tree teas.