Thread: China: World's Most Expensive Tea to Date Made from Panda Poo

Thai-ASEAN News Network - World's Most Expensive Tea to Date Made from Panda Poo



World's Most Expensive Tea to Date Made from Panda Poo

UPDATE : 10 January 2012

When one thinks of tea, they may think of sitting back and relaxing in a comfortable armchair, cozying up to a roaring fire and then indulging in a warm, chewy chocolate chip cookie. They don’t think about pandas and certainly not panda poo. But, turns out, it’s all about the panda dung. Wildlife expert and Sinchuan University lecturer An Yashi is debuting a special blend of green tea that is expected to go for as much as approximately 1.1 million baht for half a kilogram. The world's best tea currently runs around one tenth of that price. The reason? It’s fertilized using panda excrement, according to Australian website SBC.com.

Why panda poo? Panda excrement is loaded with various vitamins and minerals that come from bamboo – what pandas primarily eat. Pandas have a very poor digestive system and only absorb about 30 percent of everything they eat. That means their excrement is rich in fibers and nutrients.

According to the lecturer, those important nutrients end up in the tea through the fertilization process.

These nutrients are no joke, and Yashi claims that they are immensely powerful.

He said that just like green tea, bamboo contains an element that can prevent cancer and enhance green tea’s anti-cancer effects if it is used as fertilizer for the tea.

Yashi, who collects the dung at a panda breeding center in southern China, is hoping the discovery – along with it’s hefty price tag – will earn him a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

He's not the only one. Kopi Lupak, an Indonesian coffee, is brewed from beans that have been eaten and then digested by the Asian palm civet, a catlike wild animal. The java sells for as much as 10,000 baht per kilogram.

Translated from www.matichon.co.th; parts taken from www.abc.com