Bai Mudan (Chinese: 牡丹; literally "white peony") is a type of white tea made from plucks each with one leaf shoot and two immediate young leaves. Bai Mudan is sometimes preferred by white tea drinkers for its fuller flavor and greater potency than the other major type of white tea, Bai Hao Yinzhen. The latter is made purely with leaf shoots, and so it is comparatively softer and more subtle. The typical taste of Bai Mudan is a result of both the processing and the tea plant cultivars employed in the production.

The family of tea cultivars used in producing Bai Mudan are the "Dai Bai" varieties. In eastern Fujian, the cultivar Fuding Dai Bai is used. In northern Fujian, the Zhenghe Dai Bai cultivar is used. The differences in the plant yield two distinct styles of Bai Mudan: the Fuding variety and the Zhenghe variety.

Genuine Bai Mudan is a white tea, therefore, it is a slightly oxidized tea. The plucks are sun-withered for an extended period of time and then piled briefly for oxidation, during which enzymes of the tealeaves interact with other constituents to form new materials that result in the final taste and aroma character of the tea. Depending on the weather, conditions of the pluck and the taste style requirements of the finished products, the sunning may last between 1 to 3 days and the piling between half and 3 hours.

Mu Dan (Chinese: 穆旦; pinyin: Mù Dàn; 5 April 1918 - 26 February 1977) was one of the most important poets of 20th century China. Born Zha Liangzheng (simplified Chinese: 查良铮; traditional Chinese: 查良錚; pinyin: Zhā Liángzhēng) in Tianjin, China in 1918, he matriculated the prestigious Tsinghua University at the age of 17, and graduated from National Southwestern Associated University in 1940. After having served as an assistant lecturer of English at his alma mater for two years, he joined the Chinese Expedition Force for Burma in an effort to aid the British troops there to fight off the Japanese. After World War II, he went to the University of Chicago, where he eventually earned a master's degree in English literature. He is in the same family with the famous novelist Louis Cha.^{[citation needed]}

Most of his poems were written during late 1930s and 1940s. His poetry, which is characterized by impassioned speculation, abstract sensuality, and occasionally, restrained irony, is the foremost example of Chinese new vernacular verse absorbing modern Western techniques. Indeed, Mu Dan was a professed admirer of W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. He studied their poetry at Southwest Associated University under William Empson, himself a leading modernist poet. On the other hand, the patriotism^{[citation needed]} and the compassion for the suffering and needy in his poetry fall easily in line with a great tradition in Chinese poetry.

Daniel James "Dan" White (September 2, 1946 – October 21, 1985) was a San Francisco supervisor who assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, on Monday, November 27, 1978, at City Hall. In a controversial verdict that led to the coining of the legal slang "Twinkie defense," White was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder in the deaths of Milk and Moscone. Less than two years after serving five of a seven year prison sentence, White returned to San Francisco and committed suicide. San Francisco Weekly has referred to White as "perhaps the most hated man in San Francisco's history."

Daniel James White was born in Long Beach, California, the second of nine children. He was raised by working class parents in a Roman Catholic household in the Visitacion Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. He attended Riordan High School until he was expelled in his junior year. He went on to attend Woodrow Wilson High School where he was valedictorian of his class.

White enlisted in the United States Army in June 1965. He was a staff sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division in the Vietnam War from 1969 to 1970. White had been honorably discharged in 1971.