Amgalan Chin

Amgalan Chin grew up tracing the threads of the old Tea Road in Ulaanbaatar, where brick tea was still a household staple. His earliest mentor, a Buryat trader named Dorji, taught him to recognise compressed Shēng Pǔ'ěr (生普洱) by the sound of a wrapper unfolding — a skill that would later define his professional ear for provenance. In 2003 he travelled south to Yunnan’s Menghai county, following a route his grandfather had once walked with camel caravans, and began to understand how Wò Duī (渥堆) transforms leaf into the deep, earthy Shú Pǔ'ěr (熟普洱) he now champions.

From the misty plantations of Bulang (布朗) to the ancient tea gardens of Yìwǔ (易武), Amgalan learned to read terroir through the cup. He spent the spring of 2005 living with a family of smallholder farmers in Yiwu’s Gaoshan area, processing Máo Chá (毛茶) by hand and tasting every iteration of the kill-green. Those months furnished his reference library: a 1998 Yiwu raw cake that tasted of dried dates and wet stone, a 2004 Bulang brick whose bitterness melted into a cooling huí gān (回甘) so persistent it became his benchmark for aged sheng.

Returning north, Amgalan settled in Saint Petersburg, where he saw how haphazardly Chinese tea was represented. Shops listed 'pu-erh' without origin, age, or storage history. He began cataloguing vendors along the Nevsky Prospect and eventually convinced Teamotea to build a dedicated geo-catalogue. Today, as the continental editor for tea.place, he oversees every listing between Moscow, Ulaanbaatar, and Baku, ensuring each entry honours the leaf’s journey.

In 2024 he hosted the Saint Petersburg room opening — directory celebration, bringing together two dozen local tea houses to map the city’s Chinese tea ecosystem for the first time. He also contributed the community guide 'Travelling with a pour list — how to skip bad places', a thread that distils years of cross-border sourcing into a simple method: arrive with a shortlist of known producers, never buy without tasting, and always ask about storage. His notes on long-term ageing in cold climates appear on puerh.app; his workshops on shēng pǔ'ěr and shú pǔ'ěr maturity curves are a fixture at tea.school.