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What it is
The mint in Chinese herbal practice is Mentha haplocalyx — close kin to the peppermint grown in Europe and North America, and used the same way: the whole above-ground part, leaf and stem together, cut while the plant is still in leaf rather than after it flowers.
What comes out of it is menthol, and the proportion of menthol is the entire commercial argument. Two fields of mint that look identical can be worth quite different amounts, and nothing about the plant tells you which is which.
Cut at midday, in the heat, when every other crop on this site is harvested at dawn or in the dark. Mint is the exception, and the reason is the same reason the others are not.
Terroir
The ground it grows on
Taihe sits on the Huang-Huai plain at 33° N, in the buffer between a warm temperate climate and a subtropical one — flat, open, and mild at 14.9 degrees a year.
Read note ↗Processing
From field to jar
Cut at noon in July, distilled without stopping. Everything about the timing runs against instinct, and all of it is about holding on to the menthol.
Read note ↗Grading
How it was judged
Colour, stem ratio, and the smell of a crushed leaf. Then one number that decides everything, and it is the reason Taihe was once called the country's barometer.
Read note ↗In the tradition
Mint itself is old in Chinese practice, catalogued for a very long time and stocked in every cabinet. Taihe as a place for it is not: the county began planting in the late 1970s, and inside twenty years it had become the largest production base in the country. Both things are true at once, and the second is the more unusual of the two.
What's in it
Contains menthol, menthone, and menthyl acetate.
This page describes a plant and its place in Chinese herbal tradition. It is not a description of what our products do, and nothing here is medical advice.
