08/14/2026
Most tea gardens plant what the market already wants.
Jun Chiyabari went looking for tea trees nobody was growing.
In 2004, and again in 2007, a family friend of the owners — T. Shimada, who had known them since the 1960s — carried tea plants from Shiiba, a remote mountain village in Miyazaki, Japan, to eastern Nepal. Not nursery stock. Not a bred cultivar. Wild trees, gathered by hand from the mountainsides around the village by Mr. H. Shiiba himself, who came along on the second trip to see where they would live.
He died the following year. The first tea from those trees wasn't made until spring 2015 — two kilograms, sold, fittingly, in Japan. He never tasted it.
At the garden they are still called Shiiba Yama Cha, Shiiba mountain tea. Sixteen years in Himalayan soil at Himalayan altitude has made them into something that belongs to neither country: pineapple and mango rising off the wet leaf, a creamy body, a sweetness that stays long after the cup is down.
Only a handful of these trees exist in Nepal. The batch very limited every year.
Spring 2026 Himalayan Shiiba is on the shelf now. You can read the story about our Shiiba here https://happyearthtea.com/blogs/blog/himalayan-shiiba
