About Ernan White Tea

Ernan White Tea was founded in 2014. It makes Fuding white tea from the family’s gardens: Silver Needle, White Peony, Gong Mei and Shou Mei, with a few wilderness and winter-leaf teas. The leaf is sun-withered for more than forty hours, sealed for about a year, then pressed into cakes and sealed again. The name comes from the four characters carved over the family gate at West Kun, 世笃二南: generation after generation, faithful to the Er’nan, the two opening sections of the Classic of Poetry.

Ernan, born Kong Nairong in Fuding, Fujian, in 1980, is a 74th-generation descendant of Confucius. At fifteen he entered the Chan gate, and for twenty years he lived in robes: study, meditation, calligraphy, martial arts, and always tea. He came to serve as abbot of E’feng Temple in the mountains above Fuzhou. In 2014 he took off his robes, married, raised a family, planted tea with his own hands, and founded the house. He also paints in oils and writes calligraphy and poetry; in 2025 he presented his solo exhibition The Original Mind in Ink at Rajamangala University of Technology Krungthep in Bangkok. He serves as President of the Thai-Chinese Education Development Association. The story tells his life in full.

In the last years of the Qing dynasty, Ernan’s great-grandfather made tea his livelihood in the mountains of Fuding, the county China calls the home of white tea. The craft passed from grandfather to father to son. The family village, West Kun, is known as the first village of Confucius’s descendants in the south. The gardens sit at 500 to 800 metres and spend most mornings in cloud; the family retreat stands among them. See Fuding and Fuding white tea.

Since 2019 Ernan has kept a white tea and Chan arts house in Chiang Mai, Thailand: a bamboo pavilion he designed himself, a studio, and a few rooms for guests. The aged cakes are poured there, and guests come for tea sessions and stays. See Chiang Mai and Visit.

Clouds and Mist in a Cup of Tea (茶汤里的烟云) gathers Ernan’s poems, calligraphy and oil paintings in one bilingual volume, with 33 poems in Chen Shan’s English translation and prefaces by Wang Linhai and Snow-Mountain White Phoenix. It is available by enquiry. See The book.

The house keeps its teas as an archive of vintages rather than a catalogue: 101 teas, from a 1980 Tieguanyin to the most recent spring, most of them Fuding white tea, each recorded with its year, kind, season and storage. Twenty-seven have their own page. See The Tea Archive and aged white tea.

There are no prices on this site, and nothing is sold from a cart. For a tea, a tasting, an allocation, a gift, a painting, a stay or the book, use the Enquire button on any page or write to ernan@thesilknet.com. The reply comes personally, in English or Chinese, usually within two days. Houses, hotels and companies: see For Houses & Collectors.

For writers and editors: the house is Ernan White Tea, in Chinese 二南白茶; the founder is Ernan (二南), born Kong Nairong (孔乃容). Founded 2014, Fuding, Fujian, China; tea house in Chiang Mai, Thailand, since 2019. The English on this site is a working translation pending native review; the 33 poems carry Chen Shan’s published translation. Press enquiries: ernan@thesilknet.com.