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Chen Hui Yi

Chief examiner — white & yellow programme

Chen Hui Yi serves as chief examiner for the white and yellow tea programme at tea.academy, with direct responsibility for the calibration of reference samples, the drafting of grading rubrics, and the supervision of proctors at examination centres in Guangzhou, Fuzhou, and Kunming. She chairs the White & yellow tea grader (Level I) credential and signs every certificate issued under that programme. Her training began in 2003 at the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University tea science programme, where she studied under Professor Sun Yun, completing supervised fieldwork in Fuding and Zhenghe across four consecutive harvests. From 2009 to 2014 she held a senior taster post at a Guangzhou-based wholesale house specialising in *Bái Háo Yín Zhēn* (白毫银针), *Bái Mǔ Dān* (白牡丹), and *Shòu Méi* (寿眉), grading roughly 1,800 lots per annum against the cultivar and grade definitions later codified in GB/T 22291-2017 White tea. During this period she also developed the internal vocabulary now used by tea.academy candidates to distinguish sun-withered from indoor-withered material. Chen joined the Teamotea organization in 2018, initially as a regional assessor for Guangdong, and was appointed chief examiner in 2022 following the formal separation of the white and yellow tracks from the broader oolong rubric. Her secondary specialisations cover *Jūn Shān Yín Zhēn* (君山银针) and other yellow teas, *Yuè Guāng Bái* (月光白) from Yunnan, and the cellar evaluation of aged white cakes — a category for which she co-authored the academy's ten-point ageing index in 2023. Within the exam board she is responsible for sample sourcing, blind-set composition, and the annual recalibration session at which all senior proctors must re-pass the reference flight. Candidates encountering her name on their certificate should understand that the grade has been verified against a sealed reference set held at the Kunming laboratory of the Teamotea organization. Provenance records for every reference sample she signs off are maintained at puerh.app for the Yunnan-origin material and at thetea.app for the broader corpus. Chen contributes occasional commentary on white tea grading to tea.community and serves as a guest evaluator at credentialing events listed on tea.events. She does not teach the preparatory coursework — that responsibility rests with the faculty at tea.school — and maintains the strict separation between instruction and examination that the academy requires of all chief examiners. Her published cupping notes are reserved for internal proctor training and are not circulated outside the credentialing programme.