Poo for tea: China's pandas brew a top drop

Costly cuppa

China’s national treasure, the giant panda, will become even more precious if one businessman succeeds in using their dung to grow organic green tea he intends to sell for over $200 a cup.

An Yanshi, an entrepreneur in southwest China, grows the tea in mountainous Ya’an in Sichuan province using tons of excrement from panda bears living at nearby breeding centres.

The first batch of panda dung tea will be sold in lots of 50 grams that will cost some 22,000 yuan ($3,500) each, a price An said makes it the world’s most expensive tea. Most people use about 3 grams of tea per cup.

An defended the steep price, saying he would channel profits from the initial batches into an environmental fund. Future batches would be cheaper, he added.

“I thank heaven and earth for blessing us with this environmental panda tea,” the 41-year-old former teacher and journalist said at a weekend event to promote the tea.

“I just want to convey to the people of the world the message of turning waste into something useful, and the culture of recycling and using organic fertilisers.”
Dressed in a panda suit to promote his tea, An invited a dozen or so guests to help hand-pick the first batch of tea at his plantation at the weekend.

The fertiliser made the tea a health boon, An said, because pandas only eat wild bamboo and absorb only a fraction of the nutrients in their food.
And pandas make plenty of fertiliser.

“They are like a machine that is churning out organic fertiliser,” An said.