Hilltop Fuding White Tea

In the little mountain village where everyone shares the name Zhang there are more children than usual, everyone having come home for the fall festival, up from the low lying cities along Fuding's coastal shelf. The old couple we call grandma and grandpa (nainai and yeye) are with their younger son, a construction worker in the nearest city. He leaves soon after we arrive, catching a ride on a passing motorcycle. We have brought a crate of peanuts from Hunan for him, but he cannot take them. Tomorrow we will visit him in his city while fixing Nainai's gas stove in which the magneto has stopped working.

Tea season is over but we decide to make a little dark maocha out of fall tea because the earth at a farm we visited in Hunan looked surprisingly similar to that here, with orange rocks and soil. The tea variety used there also had tough large leaves not unlike the fuding dabaihao variety here. It is an experiment, but with so many of this village's tea trees left to go wild, we wonder if we might not be able to source dark tea from this town which we could use to make qianliang or even fuzhuan. Nainai doesn't like dark tea, but neither does she bat an eye. She has nothing better to do, she says, grabbing a basket and leading us up the hill to an expanse of tea bushes lined by pines to the south and deserted tea trees west. She quickly fills her hands with pickings of the fine green leaves growing from the tabletop. This they will prune off anyway, she tells us. When we say we want the lower leaves, she shakes her head. She tells us not to pick the leaves from where the stem is red because that will hurt the tea tree. We compromise picking an assortment from a terrace of bushes gone wild, while she runs like a lawn mower up and down the tabletopped bushes. We return home with about a kilogram of leaves, which she says would make us two yuan if we sold them to the local tea buyer, who is a family member of the mayor (no wonder everyone is leaving). We start a fire under Nainai's wok and fry the leaves about five minutes. We take turns flipping the crackling green pile while trying not to burn ourselves on the hot iron. The steam that rises from them smells wonderful, but too little time frying and these leaves will become red tea. Too long frying and they will be green. At one point there is a change in the wonderful fragrance, and we shift the pile out onto a flat woven bamboo platter. We again take turns leaning into the steaming pile to roll the leaves until they look like noodles. This wet mass is then pressed into a heavy ziplock freezer bag, and the air squeezed out. The bag is then set on the stove top to keep it warm while sitting until two pm tomorrow. It is bright and sunny then and the tea can be spread out to dry in the sunlight. By nightfall it isn't completely dry but the smell that rises from the wide flat basket is neither red nor green. Leaving it under the porch until morning, we can finish the drying tomorrow.

We take a walk up and around the hills looking for the Ye Zhu Hua, wild chrysanthemums in bloom now, but Nainai tells us the fallow fields where it grew have been plowed under in order to plant a new cash crop used in Chinese medicine and alcohol production. The flowers that once grew here made the sweetest flower tea we have ever tried. Chrysanthemum tea is the most popular flower tea in China, and we liked drinking those before we tried the flowers Nainai collects in the fall. Hers are truly wild, and she would wander the abandoned terraces to pick them where they grew among the grasses. Their taste was not just full and sweet when steeped in boiling water, it was so much better than any other chrysanthemum tea that we have since stopped drinking it. She gathered so little each year, that one of our goals on this trip was to gather and dry the seeds so that they could be spread to other hills in the area. It was partly this flower tea and partly the bursting hot peppers (which Nainai and Yeye also refuse to eat) that made us think anything grown here might just taste incredible. Over the years we have discussed trying to grow various cash crops in this magical soil and pristine environment, and the near poverty that Nainai and Yeye live in would make any additional income welcome. We settled on perennials such as exotic hot peppers and Italian herbs. However, there is a downside to the pristine remoteness of this village. In the spring we had planted not just the South American peppers and Italian perennial spices, but basil, tomatoes, carrots and other vegetables, however wild pigs savaged most of these, and because we asked for no pesticides to be used the unusually diverse insect pests decimated the rest. We will have to return to the drawing board when considering our dream as to how to make this edenic paradise solvent. Where the patches of wild chrysanthemums had taken root, now grow some Chinese medicine which the pigs and pests do not destroy. Tea trees and food crops too are being replaced by this plant.

Hiking in these hills we do find more and more abandoned groves of the large leaved, dabaihao, white tea trees. Seen here is a "textbook" perfect miniature canyon shaded most of the day, gathering all the erosion and forest decay, and filled with dabaihao tea trees over two meters in height. This would be a treasure to any teamaker in Wuyi, the heart of intellectual tea. Could there be something to make of it being abandoned here?

Fujian October Festival

All day we head east across Jiangxi, past its white buildings with their red roofs. As night falls a full autumn moon catapults into the sky above the highway before us. Fireworks strobe our journey throughout the night. The moon will not be larger than this at any other time of the year, the first day of the autumn festival, the night that the moon is closest to the earth. We are going to visit Nainai and Yeye, the old couple that makes some of the sweetest, brightest, white tea in China. Their bubbling voices give us the kind of emotion usually reserved for close family, but as Nainai says, we are family now because of the number of holidays we have spent together.

Was it four months ago we helped them pick the last of their spring tea? At that time we also planted Italian perennial spices, carrots for Nainai’s ailing eyes, and we tried various experimental methods for arresting erosion where a road has just been cut through one of their tea fields. We’ll arrive exhausted but with an added plan this time for making dark tea with their fall tea leaves!

140 Year Old Tea

A Jingyang fuzhuan brick made 140 years ago. While we did not try it, we do now await the day that we can try such an old a fu tea from the city that made fu tea famous. As with so many things the quality of the product has decreased with time. Before 1953 the best fuzhuan tea was harvested and rough processed into a dark maocha in Hunan after which it was transported to Jingyang Shaanxi, just north of Xian, where a strange fungus grew on the tea. This tea became wildly popular on the Tibetan plateau where arguably the first tea connoisseurs emerged. Not unlike the making of special teas, after 1953 the process for propagating the "jin hua" microbiology was "perfected" and the center for Fuzhuan production was relocated closer to where the tea used was grown. While this made sense in that logical, narrow-minded scientific sort of way, of course a cheddar produced in Wisconsin does not taste the same as one produced in Maine or Scotland. We learned this when we met the fourteenth descendant of a lineage of fu tea makers in Jingyang and we tried the tea that he and his father had continued to make in secret. Here he is pictured below.

These days only the cheapest throwaway tea leaves are used to make fu tea, and while we have designs to make our own with the best tea leaves we can find, it will be a long slow road back to whatever once made fu tea the name brand of its time.

As seen in this photo the apex of a tea tree's shoots have what is called "hong geng" and "lu geng", "red stalk" and "green stalk". The color of the stalk from which the leaves sprout indicates its age, and usually in Anhua the green-stalk leaves are used to make (higher priced) red or green tea, while only the red stalk leaves are used for dark tea. There are many reasons proffered for why the best leaves are not used to make qianliang logs. The most popular of these is that younger leaves have too much caffeine and other high-energy polyphenols within them, which will combust under the incredible pressure exerted on the leaves when squeezing them into a qianliang logs. This process takes about seven men with large levers pulling on bamboo cords.

That a qianliang is made with summer tea leaves known to be less flavorful has always struck us as unfortunate, to say the least. So when we met a surprisingly candid tea maker with forty years experience (far right), we asked if it was truly impossible for young spring tea leaves to withstand the pressure of the qianliang process. He said that such qianliangs can and have been made. It is true that when using young leaves a qianliang must be compressed more carefully and by a skilled team, but using high-energy spring leaves is not really a problem. The problem is that this is too expensive for current market conditions. In the past these were made and they likely will be made again in the future. For now profit maximization forbids it.

Qianliang's are massive amounts of tea, which while expensive (ranging from 2000-4000 yuan per log or US$ 400-600) when this is divided by their weight of 37 kilograms the price is still quite cheap when compared to that of puer and other teas.