Anhui Dark Tea Production Begins

To understand Anhui’s tea we could think about its cuisine. Anhui’s cuisine is famous for its use of subtle spicing, often discovering a new niche of flavor between existing dishes that were already famous. The way in which its food is cooked, often by steaming or slow roasting, is known for being precise and unhurried. Anhui's people are also famous for their business prowess (as the people of Shanxi, who we’ve seen pioneered early dark tea production in Hunan and Sichuan). But where Shanxi’s tea entrepreneurs settled widely, Anhui’s citizens built their economies close to home. The peak of Anhui’s business fame is said to have been from the Ming into the Qing Dynasties, when many of its most famous teas were invented. Today as China’s third largest tea producer, Anhui Province’s tea history isn’t the oldest in China, but many of its teas have survived a chaotic time, and we wonder if there isn’t a reason. We are refreshed to hear those we meet here talk directly without trying to aggrandize Anhui’s teas. Where we disagree with local vendors, we do so on a basis of personal taste, not history. We hope Anhui can export this attitude along with its teas to the tea enthusiasts of the world.

Anhui is a prodigious producer of tea. Liuan guapian green tea, qimen red tea, and huangshan maofeng green tea were all on the official list of China’s ten best teas in 1959. That’s almost one third of the list. Anhui also produces taiping houkui, another of our favorite green teas. Huoshan huangya was the only yellow tea we had tried before our journey began (though we will soon learn that it is no longer produced as a yellow tea and many foreigners mislabel it). There is also a dark tea made in Anhui, called by some in the south of China and Hong Kong liuan dark tea. This is one of the few teas that is finished in the fall. Even now it is being steamed and packed into beautiful little baskets. Though the tea leaves used are picked in spring and prepared into maocha the same as with dark teas everywhere, Anhui’s tea makers wait until fall to package and sell their dark tea.

Autumn is here and the moon is full. The foliage is dense and the terrain steep. There is a relic of a bridge which we are slightly nervous driving across. Below and beside the bridge is a beautiful stairway of white stone that widens like a fan where it reaches the river. A public work of stone seems out of place in this backwater, one so finely built it must be a relic of the Qing Dynasty. Perhaps once boats were loaded here. There is a hoary yet robust feeling of land reclaimed from nature in the hamlet that has grown up on either side of the river. Swells of earth are held back by rough granite walls. Across the road from the few large wooden buildings are wide trunked trees and stones for sitting in patches of noon shade. Fields open where a shallow valley climbs into the hills, and farmers make their way off them to gather and sit under one of the trees to share their lunch. Something about this setting reminds us of New England.

We find an old man with a cart on the road. He must have come down off one of the logging trails. On the cart is an enormous woven plastic bag, the kind village people sometimes keep tea in. He greets us without stopping, and we pace him on the flat turn leading up to the factory, half watching for oncoming traffic, half watching that we don’t push him off the road as we talk. We pass the farmers under the tree. He crosses the road and runs up one of the driveways. His muscles bulge but he doesn’t loose momentum and vanishes quickly over the lip. We wait a moment and then follow and emerge onto a small yard. He is the father of the factory foreman and on his cart is indeed tea.

He leads us into a large building with brushed concrete floors. The first room is full of the small baskets that ancha always comes packed inside. Next is a narrow passage between thick blankets. The old man pulls one back to let us see inside. Heavy and bulging, these ancha baskets are full, and there is a slight aroma of baking. We have smelled this aroma in Wuyi where Master Gu bakes his teas. They are smoking the tea. They keep the tea warm with charcoal under this blanket for about a month, he says, to dry it. Then we emerge into a cavernous open room with only the first quarter of it being used. Seven workers are busy here. Three big pots are steaming on the left, and behind them a man stuffs logs into a concrete oven below. There is the red glow of coals on his face. Steam rises from the pots. Women arrange empty baskets on a large table before them. Two are sewing green bamboo leaves together to look like stars.

In the spring they pick tea leaves, one bud and two leaves. They fry them and roll them and dry them in the sun. This is maocha. But then they store it throughout the summer at the far end of this hall, which strikes us as strange. We know fall tea is often misrepresented as spring tea, because spring tea is usually more expensive. Why would they still be using spring tea now? Why not have two production runs? They never harvest tea in the fall, he says. They’re too busy with their other crops. But they couldn't make this tea in the spring, either. Only when the weather starts to get cold can they put the tea out under the stars and let it collect the dew that falls. Their tea lies uncovered overnight up on the mountain. Only in the fall does the temperature change enough so that dew falls heavily. It wets the tea and softens it, creating a special taste.

Just now we met the old man bringing the tea back from the mountain where it had laid out all night on a platform. They leave it out until mid morning and then collect it and bring it home. This has to be the most bizarre step in curing a dark tea that we have encountered. There is something beautiful, enchanting even, in the idea of tea leaves left out among pines under the autumn night sky, but we wonder what taste this could really add.

We try first his older teas, and they are better than those of the other factories in the area. He makes only a few styles and then special orders, some piled longer, some piled less. He makes us a new tea, produced only this year from wild trees. It’s flavor already has definition, roots. It is astringent, but expands and falls nectary over the tongue, a little like a raw puer. The liquor looks redder and smells of unsweetened chocolate. It is also a little bitter, but there is something in it that gets us talking. It tastes of loamy wood. There are levels to the taste. With our second tasting there are earth flavors, like humus, ripe soil, tingling on the tongue. It maintains a floral woody aroma mixed with the chalk of baker’s chocolate. The third steeping balances. It isn’t sweet, but it isn’t sour. Sipping this brings our eyes together. We really like this one. We tell him his teas every year get better! It feels full like it could become very complex as it ages. He says a Taiwanese customer ordered this specially made with wild leaves. He doesn’t have much extra, but he is pleased we like how he prepared this batch. He is still learning, he says.

Ancha went out of production for many years, and only really began again in 1988. When he started making it he had to ask all the old people in town. Everyone only remembered a little. He combined what they told him, and then kept trying. At first the tea he made didn’t taste good at all. He changed the method and tried again and again. Finally he and his father came up with the process that they use today. He adds, no one is completely sure how ancha was originally made, but now their tea tastes pretty good.

Listening to him talk about his attempts at making ancha we realize the tea we are drinking may taste very different from the ancha made seventy years ago. Key steps might have been left out. Extra steps may have been added. No wonder the different anchas we have tried over the years have tasted so different.

In the old times they sold this tea out of Guangdong Province. Mostly the customers were from Southeast Asia, especially from Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. He has a book, he says and brings out a magazine without a cover. We can’t see the name or when it was published. It is printed on rough paper and designed in an old Chinese style, but it doesn’t look that old. The binding is on the right, but what would today be the first page of a magazine is the last. Characters read from top to bottom and from right to left, also the opposite of printed materials now in China. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore still print characters this way, so it is probably from one of those places. It has an article introducing ancha, about ten pages long. It also refers to the tea as “liuan lan cha”. “Lan” means basket. So yet another name for it!

He asks how we came to know of ancha, and we tell him we found it in Hong Kong. We were in one of the city's many large malls, and there was a tea retailer with jars of loose teas from all over the world. One of them was labeled, liuan dark tea. The people in the store didn’t know how old it was, and we bought a small bag. It tasted really nice. The flavor had qualities unlike any dark tea we had tried. Dense, not unlike a cooked puer, but silky, smoother. Since then we have found a store selling it in Beijing, but their tea is too bitter and sour. They also called their tea liuan, and so we went first to Liuan city looking for this tea.

He tells us a little about why some people mistakenly call ancha by the name liuan dark tea. There actually was a dark tea made near Liuan city, but a long time ago. It gets mentioned during the Ming Dynasty, in the book called, Golden Lotus, for example, and later in the novel, Dream of the Red Mansion. There is no description of how liuan dark tea was made. However during the Qing Dynasty tea makers from this man's town copied them. There are some records of this, he says, and his people called this dark tea “ruan zhi cha” in the local dialect but they sold it as ancha to invoke the Liuan dark tea they were imitating. The first character of the word “an-cha” is the same character “an” as in the name of the city “Liu-an”.

(a sketch my mom made of an ancha basket we bought)