In this era of rapidly changing information flows, people instead strongly yearn for the past. Drinking tea has always emphasized freshness, but in recent years, it has been filled with "old tea" and "old tree tea." Holding a brew of tea in hand, whenever one hears that it is from an "old tree," "ancient tree," or "old bush"... admiration immediately overflows.

So, how old is an old tea tree? How good is an old tea tree?

Tea trees are perennial evergreen woody plants, naturally propagated by seeds. Tea tree seeds fall to the ground and sprout, going through the seedling stage, youth stage, adulthood, and finally senescence. This process generally lasts about eighty to a hundred years. During this process, some tea trees withstand the tests of environmental changes, such as drought, sudden temperature changes, storms, and pest outbreaks, gaining longer survival opportunities. Those with good luck can live for several hundred or even several thousand years, becoming "old trees" or "ancient trees."

Such tea trees are either highly adaptable or robust, full of "plant wisdom." They can adjust their physiological state according to climate changes and harmoniously coexist with surrounding life forms like flowers, grass, insects, and birds—much like humans, who become wiser with age. On the other hand, as humans develop and utilize natural resources, the destruction of ecological environments and human intervention in animal and plant populations are becoming increasingly severe. For these old tea trees to maintain themselves and live and die naturally contentedly, they must reside in remote, deep mountains and forests. These places are extremely inaccessible, with very low fresh leaf picking frequency, and it is impossible to apply other agricultural techniques. Therefore, these old tea trees provide "original ecological" fresh leaves for humans.

As research on tea becomes more in-depth and extensive, people have found that some tea trees propagated by seeds produce offspring with significant differences: varying heights, leaf shapes, sprouting times, and growth rates. This is very unfavorable for large-scale harvesting and production, and the finished tea leaves are not easy to maintain stable quality. Some tea trees have advantages in certain aspects but are unfavorable for human utilization in others. Thus, breeding is necessary to improve certain characteristics of tea trees, such as enhancing cold resistance, disease and pest resistance, yield, and the content of specific components (like polyphenols or theanine). However, asexual propagation methods (like cuttings) ensure consistency in tea tree characteristics, facilitating management and harvesting. Nevertheless, tea trees propagated asexually generally have shorter lifespans, with their optimal utilization period mostly within twenty to thirty years, so they cannot be considered old trees.

Having high-quality fresh leaves provided by old tea trees, good tea-making techniques are also needed to produce a good tea. For teas like Pu-erh tea, which are more durable and emphasize aging effects, the storage process is also key to creating excellent tea.

Therefore, the so-called "old tea tree" generally has three meanings: first, it is a tea tree propagated by seeds, with good adaptability to its growing environment; second, it is older than most tea trees in the same area and in good physiological condition; third, the growing environment features harmonious coexistence of various life forms, dynamic balance, and minimal human intervention. As for whether the tree is one hundred or one thousand years old, it is not as important as marketing hype suggests. Moreover, the origin, evolution, cultivation, and tea production history of each tea region vary. A hundred-year-old tea tree may be a junior in one place but an elder in another.