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.
