The Wild Truth of Tea

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Shana Zhang - The founder of the International Tea Academy, In-house tea artisan of Wild Tea Qi. 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 the Chinese tea ceremony and as a professional tea taster. She currently is an owner 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 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. She 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. She saw how the master artisans were quickly disappearing, how the spiritual tea culture was being lost. It became Shana'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. Today, she continues her treks across China digging deeper into the spiritual tea culture in search of wild and ancient tree teas.