We drove here from Beijing, and driving south for two days we watched the haze of Beijing thicken first when passing through Henan, and then gradually thin. It rose to hover above the highway as we entered Hubei only to thin into the humidity of Hunan's capital, Changsha city. After stumbling upon a very interesting tasting "fu" tea here we continued into Yiyang prefecture, west and south of the capital. The skies cleared as we drew near what is today one of the earth’s largest known deposits of rare earth metals - those precious commodities required for the production of fine micro-electronics. These are mined in Anhua county where there are a number of other unique geological formations. We would like to perform comparative chemical analysis of both Anhua's dark tea and the composition of the soil it is grown in, focusing specifically on the aged tea which takes on such special qualities. There is a lot to say about how the minerals in tea slowly form sugar complexes as the teas age, but we'll just leave that hint for now.
On September 24th and 25th there was a tea expo in Yiyang City, the capital of Yiyang Prefecture, which contains Anhua county. This is and became the centralized seat of dark tea production in Hunan after 1949. Production of the ubiquitous tea of Qinghai and Xingjiang Province, "fu zhuan", was practically monopolized by a few factories here, and their traditional teas have become a hot commodity of late. In the last few years we have gotten many a phone call and proposition offering such teas gathered from the farm folk of these regions, but after learning of the potential for fraud in this market we have shied away from purchases. However in Yiyang there is a museum of dark tea (opened by a Korean) which we thought to visit, and walking toward it we discovered a friend from the north of China's old capital, Xian. In that uniquely central Chinese way, after bellowing across a square and demanding our attention like thunder might, he introduced us to some friends with whom we drank and dined. We shared many old dark teas across a table, debating and appreciating, and this was undoubtedly the gem of our visit to Yiyang this time.
We drank old Yiyang Tea Factory fuzhuan from 1980; we compared it to an old Sichuan tea from 1970. We also tried an unknown dark loose tea which we collectively decided was likely from Yunnan after ruling out the other provinces. A dealer in old Yiyang Tea Factory bricks had an interesting manual produced by the Yiyang Factory itself. Here we are photos of factory authorized samples kept from each year since 1958 to 2004. The omissions of some annual production runs are intriguing. 1996 is also mislabeled 1986.
This guide is certainly not the definitive indicator for a genuine Yiyang Tea Factory vintage. Not three months ago we sat watching as a friend assisted his colleague in separating the fakes from the genuine Yiyang Tea Factory bricks of dark tea from the 1980's and 1990's in a shipment of hundreds of pounds of such tea. Fake teas have been produced so long as tea has - though the oldest of such fakes are themselves valuable. Fu tea is one of those teas categories for which fakes are neither valuable nor healthy to drink. This can often be tasted, however fake fu teas do get people sick. Tea taste, like all tastes, is a uniquely personal experience. The names of flavors we apply to real and fake fu teas are not necessarily useful. More often such names of flavors get repeated in ways that obscure the act of tasting, of feeling a tea in ones stomach, of noticing if the tea is in fact pleasing. Sometimes taste is the only way to tell a fake tea from a real tea, but in the case of Yiyang Tea Factory fu tea there are also indicators within the tea bricks themselves. The number of twigs increases in the Yiyang Tea Factory bricks over time, and the tea leaves themselves vary in quality from year to year. Yiyang Tea Factory also had special limited production teas which produced exceptional teas, which were copied even in the 1960's, such as this (below), named aptly, "the highest instruction"...
