2013’s first tea hunt brought our tea society into the villages around the legendary site of the "sixth tea mountain", Liubao. Located in Guangxi province (map), east of Yunnan, this town was likely a location for taxation, just like the namesake village of what was formerly known as Puer. Old people have told us no one knows where the best liubao tea came from because today's maps have adopted new names. If anyone has any idea where we might find old maps of Guangxi province, please let us know!
The quality of tea grown on the hills here aside, Liubao was likely the location that gave this tea its legal name. After falling out of favor in concert with the construction of dams, which made continued transportation of tea from here prohibitive, the town struggled and today looks a bit like an industrial wasteland. We don’t find a single restaurant from which we wanted to eat in Liubao town, but luckily locals treat us to their hospitality. Unlike other tea regions in China, in this region the smallest villages often have dedicated tea stores prospering on the local economy. The number of different liubao teas astounds. Young and old leaves, even branches, flowers, and seeds are steeped into tea.
The favorite liubao found this year was a ten year old lao people tea, called, “little chick” because the balls of tea are the size of a baby chicken. Some have suggested it was the Lao people, whose migrations through this region, first brought tea culture/economy/history here. Guangxi tea culture goes back a long way, and many locals claim this was where the “shou puer process” was created and perfected hundreds of years ago.
Different styles of Yao tribal tea very in appearance. The basic idea however is to barbeque the leaves a little and then roll them into balls in the palm of the hand. This had a nice, clear, betel nut flavor.
This wild tree liubao is made in a similar fashion. Here are two teas from the same farmer, one six years old, one from last year. The mountain - indicated by a wave of the arm - over there – has old tea trees in the forest. The mountain belongs to a village, and some of those villagers climb the mountain each spring to pick tea and sell it to him. Customers rarely buy it, and he is happy to sell us all he has. A little smoky, after the years a cooling betel nut flavor emerges. That some teas picked in this region develop the flavor and some do not, he is insistent on, but he also admits he does not know the reason.
What looks like a block of wood from a sunken ship catches our attention in one shop. What some have called mud tea, the original tea from liubao, Guangxi largely stopped producing a half century before. We are told dams on the rivers made the transport of it south to Guangzhou nearly impossible. Chips from this log so far have been the most popular among subscribers of this spring’s Guangxi tea find. The proprietor did not know the age of the tea shown above. Indeed he didn’t know anything about Guangxi’s history of making south-east asia’s most popular dark tea. He found this tea in the home of a farmer who himself did not know the provenance or age.
Pondering whether this infusion tastes like roots or the skin of grapes, we all agree it has a surprisingly unique flavor, undoubtedly old.
Spring’s first dark tea arrived from a nearby village while we were in this store.
Sharing it with our Beijing tea friends, one told us it is a hybrid green and dark tea. Because it was wok fried on coals resulting in little green bubbles on the dried leaves’ surface it has a buttery flavor in the mouth. Our dear tea teacher Xiao Liu explained that the coals were in contact with the steel of the wok in which the tea was fixed. In singular places the heat was high enough to heat the tea leaf buds into green tea.
Notice the light green blisters on the tea. This results in an uncharacteristically soft taste to this tea, mixing the depth of a sheng dark tea with the smooth buttery taste of green tea. It will be interesting to see how this tea ages, and whether the moments of green tea on these buds do just fade, as Xiao Liu says they will.
