The maze of misty canyons and swells under rock face, buzzing forests, green water, insects not seen elsewhere, barking toads and soft red stone paths, this is a stunning park and archeological site. If you’re willing to get lost with a gps and a map there’s no telling what you might find. This is an area that has recently been depopulated, and it was making tea perhaps before the common era. Known for tea and ecological diversity, it is thought oolong tea was a style developed here, perhaps in the last four hundred years, as a way to draw the minerals out of the leaves and into nuanced flavors. But tea culture here goes back to China’s first infatuations with the plant, probably making green and then yellow and red (black) tea until finally the renown oolong, which accents the mineral microbial content of this area. The ecology predates that last ice-age, when the mountains north held back ice sheets covering the adjacent lands of China. This may have been when the northern and southern strains of tea began their grand divergence. It is a journey through time. While most of the small and remote villages have been moved out. Wuyi society has withstood tides of political change because its labor intensive tea has been well valued since before the Tang dynasty, perhaps for two thousand years. After the Tang disintegrated, Wuyi became a kingdom, the only ethnically Chinese kingdom in China during this period of chaos until it was peacefully absorbed into the next great dynasty to emerge. The history books do not mention the advances of this kingdom, and much of its history awaits the dedicated scholars that will undoubtedly come. In the cliff faces are mausoleums, often boats, resting on small ledges high above. Park guides don’t know the reason, but when a low hung cloud drifts through, and for a moment that boat floats in the mist, it is not hard to imagine the honoring of a deceased love one. There is art here, abundantly. But remember to get lost. At each designated site a local taking his or her turn selling refreshment discourages further exploration, but with a friendly word, or perhaps by engaging a local guide, getting beyond them, away from the tourists, is where the real experience begins, alone, lost, wandering among these small sand-stone canyons filled with hundreds of varieties of tea.
