Chinese Tea Malaysia (Zhi Bao Enterprise)

Zhi Bao Enterprise was founded in 2011 to bring Chinese tea culture to a wider public, and its site still tells of its first shop in the Kuchai Lama Entrepreneurs Park in Kuala Lumpur. Today it trades from 43-02, on the first floor of Jalan PJU5/12 in Dataran Sunway, Kota Damansara, with business hours from 11am to 11pm. It specialises in pu-erh, white tea, Liu Bao, Liu An and Hunan dark tea, with oolongs and Yixing teapots alongside, and it is the Malaysian distributor of the Da Dian Hao pu-erh range, which has its own sharing corner in the shop.

Visitors are welcome to sit for a tea tasting, which is how a shop like this should be used: the online catalogue lists cakes and bricks by batch, producer and year, from a 2013 Da Dian Hao raw tuo at RM 100 the 100 g and a 2017 XiaGuan raw cake at RM 80 the 357 g to Da Dian Hao ripe cakes from 2018 and 2016 at RM 148 and RM 208. The Hunan Fu bricks are the curiosity: a 1995 ZhongCha brick in a 20 g cut and a 2012 JiuYang brick in 65 g, both at RM 38, and a premium jasmine at RM 35 the 100 g for anyone who wants something lighter.

The website is a priced catalogue rather than a checkout: each product page shows the price and points to the shop's marketplace listings, and delivery charges, including East Malaysia by weight, are quoted by phone. The shelf is narrow by design, so there is no green or oolong range to speak of online; for those, the Purple Cane outlet at 1 Utama is the other tea address in Petaling Jaya. For anyone building a pu-erh cupboard, this is the one.