Tagged: price discovery
The Tea With a Record Price and No Market
Twenty grams of mother-tree Da Hong Pao sold for 208,000 yuan in 2005, and every "world's most expensive tea" figure since is that one lot multiplied up to a kilogram. The five sales behind the record, and why the market that set it stopped in 2006.
The London Tea Auction's Priciest Sale Was Also Its Last
On 29 June 1998, a Ceylon Flowery Pekoe from a small Sri Lankan garden fetched the highest price the 319-year-old London tea auction had ever recorded, on the same day the sale closed for good. A 2025 Guinness record for a different charity tea sale shows the pattern was not a one-off.
Why Doesn't Tea Have a Futures Market?
Coffee has traded futures since 1882 and cocoa since the 1920s. Tea, which outsells them both, has never had one, anywhere. The reason is not price stability. It is that no two lots of tea are the same thing.
How a Tea's Price Gets Set
The auction publishes a price in public. Private treaty sales do not, smallholders cannot always wait for a fair one, and Kenya split its floor to give quality a price of its own.
The Tea Auctions
How tea is priced and sold. The canonical reference on the world's tea auctions: how a sale actually works, the major centres at Mombasa, Colombo, and across India, the move from the outcry floor to the screen, and what an auction price really means.