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.
