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.
Tea Futures Traded Once, Briefly, in 1901 New York
Coffee, cocoa and sugar all trade futures. Tea has had none since a short-lived New York contract in 1901. A physically delivered contract founders on standardization: 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.