White Tea in Fuding 2014

The domain of Fuding stretches from the sea shore across a coastal plane and up into mountains reaching 2000 meters in altitude. Spanning marshes and tangled forests, the defining characteristic of Fuding's terroir are the streaks of vibrant orange clay produced by lichens consuming the underlying igneous stone.

This year's wet weather allows us take a break from picking tea buds to explore the range of Fuding's environs. Usually higher altitudes produce better teas, but Fuding's coastal white teas can be excellent as well, especially when aged. Here, by a cove where seaweed is farmed, we find sixty year old bushes on the steep hillside opposite a temple. While this year's tea was dried too slow, the briny wind leaves an exciting component to its flavor. We look forward to returning next year when we can purchase green leaves ourselves and dry them gently in our hotel room.

A few hours drive inland Fuding's white mountain tea has also been plagued by sporadic storms. The weather this spring has been unusually cold, with snow over the new year and frosting until two weeks ago. This means the tea buds are smaller, which itself is not so worrisome. A dearth of sunny days, however, has been a deal breaker for early white tea: all is either oven dried or reddened due to prolonged drying.

While we remain in the mountains it mists and rains five of the week's seven days.

With a day's picking farmers gathers at nearby crossroads to sell on into the supply chains of factories large and small who have the ovens required to dry the tea. While oven temperatures are kept below 50 degrees centigrade, this still flattens the brightness that we look for in the best fresh bai hao yin zhen (white hair silver needle). Locals say on years like this there is only hong hao yin zhen (red hair silver needle).

Shade dried too slow or heated in walk-in and specialty coal-fired ovens, none of the teas have the almost citrus splash of vibrance that makes Fuding's white tea China's best.

Both make infusions which exhibit flaws. Shade dried tea steeps (L) darker and harder tasting - erring into the red tea spectrum. Oven dried tea steeps (R) greener and buttery tasting - erring into the green tea spectrum.

A proper white tea, dried in the shade, consistently, over four days, will be lighter in color still, white even, and its taste is almost no taste at all, but something that just falls away, effervescent, light behind the eyes, flirting, with an after-breath of sea and pine.

One Picking of One Cháwáng by One Woman

Puer Jǐngmaì Cháwáng

So much affects the flavor a tea infuses into water: each year's weather; where a tea grows; who fixes it; who prepares it; how it is stored; even who sips it. Over the years we have worked to decrease these variables so we might learn the taste of one earth and one tree.



We found one solution to this problem in western Yúnnán at a village that has been largely unimproved for sixty years. Shown here, the village leader's house in the foreground and the temple beyond, they flank a tightly woven, almost cosmopolitan network of alleyways in this dimple of hilly woodlands at 1500m.

The grandmother is taking care of her child's child's child's child, and very happy to see us. She says it is the first time a foreigner has come to her home.

The village's tea grove is splattered with tea trees of all ages. As with most of the old tea groves in Yúnnán the oldest trees were planted by the Bùlǎng tribe long ago. Because tea trees germinate only with difficulty new trees have sprouted slowly over the centuries creating a dappled tapestry with younger trees populating the fringes and older trees within.

We pass men picking tea above us on the path to grandmother's tree. They balance precariously on surprisingly lithe branches that bend and sway beneath them.

Grandmother's tree is not only the oldest in her village's grove, it also is of special renown because it has what locals call "eyes". While a century ago all the tribes performed detailed rituals and sacrifices for their tea trees, now Jingmai is one of the only areas where the tribes still perform yearly public and personal offerings to many of the tea trees.

In half a day this tree's spring shoots, two leaves and a bud, are picked clean, yielding two kilograms of dry tea when, in another day, they are fried and rolled and sun dried. We are lucky there is no rain!

For fun the granddaughter, done picking tea, puts on her ethnic festival costume and bounces on the limb of one of her family trees. (In this case both grandmother and granddaughter are ethnic Bùlǎng.) We are happy, too, continuing to build our collection of a Jingmai dark tea, picked at first blush from one tree by one woman who herself fries, rolls, and sundries it just for us! That's pretty special. And we can drink it anytime at home, comparing it with years past and forward, and even against the other famous tea mountains of Yúnnán and further afield.