2013 Spring Tea Safari

Belle and I are now back in Shanghai, together with 700 cakes of 2013 Spring puer that we made in Yunnan. This year's design theme is Warriors VS Scholars, which was inspired by a roadtrip I shared with my friend & fellow adventurer Evan Villarubia. Evan spent a year riding his bike through every province in China, and accompanied me on my 2012 Lincang sourcing trip. Evan is from Louisiana but as a Chinese major & professional translator, his mandarin is competition-winning... I'll admit, even much better than mine! Evan and I were the first foreigners to visit some of those remote farms & factories in Yongde, and upon seeing my white translator, the village heads, party chiefs, and factory owners decided I must be some kind of important international tea-buyer, so we enjoyed red carpet hospitality wherever we went. Thankfully Evan is not only a good drinker, he's also read most of the Chinese classics. On the long bus ride from Lincang to Yongde, he regaled me with  tales of warrior monks, noble bandits and romantic poets. And the concept of Warriors versus Scholars was born.

We decided to use warriors for the more baqi teas from Lao Man E, Gua Feng Zhai etc, and scholars for the sweeter, more floral teas, eg. Yiwu, Jingmai. It's up to you to decide if the pen is mightier than the sword.

Mu Lan (warrior) VS Li Bai (scholar)

Here at Tea Urchin, we love to involve our friends & family and create more meaning in everything we do. From Miles' birthday cake, to my sister Elaine Su-Hui's artwork, we like to make things personal. So this year, Evan and I concepted the wrappers, my dad was enlisted to write the Chinese calligraphy for each warrior & scholar's name, and for the third year running, our friend Yue Chen provided the beautiful illustrations.

My personal favorite of the series is our Lao Man E, which features Lu Zhi Shen 鲁智深, otherwise known as "the flowery monk" for the tattoos which covered his body. Lu Zhishen was famous for being incredibly strong but rough, a terrible drunk who got into trouble but later redeemed himself. Which perfectly fits the character of our Lao Man E don't you agree? Especially this year, as we've blended bitter & sweet leaves together, giving the tea more kick, making it more "ba qi" 霸气 as we say in Chinese.

Before starting our tea business, Belle and I could not have imagined that 99% of our pu-erh customers would be male. But that's how it is, and this year's wrappers were designed with you in mind. So if you thought our manga designs last year were too cute and not manly enough... well you should have no such complaint now ;)

The beginning of this year's Spring harvest in Yunnan was marred by heavy rain in Yiwu, which washed out the first batch of early spring material. A related hailstorm in Bulang, damaged the first flush so badly, some farmers reported losing 80% of their expected early spring yield. But then the weather got better, and the teas from the first 2 weeks of April were fantastic, with clear skies, strong sunlight, and the occasional overnight sprinkle. But the tea growers life is ruled by the vicissitudes of weather. As the first flush ended, and the second flush failed to come, farmers were soon praying for rain. In the end, they got too much again, and the tail end of the season was ruined by heavy rain brought about by Cyclone Nargis in neighboring Myanmar.

We were lucky to get enough tea for our pressings during the period of good weather, and whilst we were there, everyday was sunny & dry.

Good morning Lao Ban Zhang!

Prices this year continue to rise. With the growing urbanisation of China, we have increased wealth and interest in pu-erh as an investment and hobby. This trend still has many years to run, so I don't see prices collapsing 2007 style any time soon. And yet, prices in Yiwu have tripled in just 3 short years. This year, many of our favorite areas like Lao Ban Zhang, Lao Man E, Gua Feng Zhai and Wan Gong were 30% more expensive compared to last year. So we had to expand our range & hunt for high quality material from villages off the beaten track. We found some beautiful tea gardens around Yibang, Bulang and Mengsong, with tall, clearly ancient trees growing in forest clearings. More distant groves are now accessible via motorbike, and we had a lot of fun riding dirt tracks into the jungle, looking for tea trees.

One of our best finds of the season was in Baotang where the trees are large & ancient, and growing in biodiverse, organic gardens.

Just one of many ancient giants in Baotang, Mengsong

Gram for gram, ancient tree puerh is still attractively priced versus the finest grades of wulong, dancong or longjing, but for those of us who have been collecting cakes for several years or more, the prices today certainly make us wish we had stocked up more when we first discovered this wonderful hobby! Who knows, at the rate things are going, maybe 5 years from now, we'll be shaking our heads and saying the same about todays' cakes.

On the positive side, rising tea prices have improved the life of the farmers dramatically. More and more are living in concrete two storey houses now. In Lao Ban Zhang, a family can make $150,000 US dollars in un-taxed profit a year, and many have bought a second home in Menghai. They are also investing in better equipment, such as these expensive bronze woks that spread the heat out better, burning less leaves.

Bronze wok in Lao Ban Zhang

But with sudden wealth, comes other problems. In villages like Bangpen, Bakanoi, and Mannuo I heard stories of alcoholic fathers, drug-addicted sons, and farmers gambling away the money they just earnt. Unfortunately for the Lahu, these problems seem to be particularly endemic amongst their people.

Someone likes their drinkies! At least they're into recycling though!

We drank our fair share of alcohol on this trip too. One of the highlights of this trip was a dinner banquet we had in Manla, with Mr. Tang, the host of a Guangdong TV show about tea culture. After a few bottles of baijiu & beer chasers, the whole table was singing rousing old folk songs.

Our friend Caroline, who runs the The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, and two of her colleagues, joined us for a tour around the backcountry of Yibang. We found some incredibly tasty tea growing inside the forest there, and around Manzhuan, which we will revisit in the near future. Currently, the dirt track from Xiangming up to Yibang is shockingly bad, but it's being resurfaced & cobblestoned, and with greater access, the prices will be going up in the coming years. Stock up on your Yibang now.

A week later, Paul, aka twodog from white2tea, and Peter from Pu-erh.sk joined me on an exploratory trip up into the lesser known villages of Bulang.

Pasha, Pyotr & Evgeny in our secret Bulang tea forest

We met in Lao Man E, but due to the shitty roads, Peter & Paul only got in around midnight, so they didn't get a chance to see much of what is, still my favorite place in Bulang. The next day we set off for the Sang Kan or "new year" festival in Bulang town. We were hoping to see the kill-green wok frying competition, but it turns out the organizers weren't that organized, and the program was a bit of a shambles. Nonetheless, it was great to see everyone wearing their traditional clothes for the event, and we drank some nice XinBanZhang tea, and met the current village head of Lao Man E.

Hani minority girls in their colorful ceremonial costume, Bulang township

The current mayor of Lao Man E in his Bulang ceremonial dress

Next we headed off to Mannuo, right along the border with Myanmar. The road was bone dry and red dust filled the van, coating our cameras, clothes & luggage. We passed through massive taidicha plantations, with cattle grazing the grass between the hedgerows of tea.

When we entered Mannuo village we found many large, ancient trees growing in & around the village, with some of the largest leaves I've ever seen.

Large leaf varietal Mannuo kucha

But the trees in the village were all coated with dust, and had already been picked clean. We visited a nearby grove of 100+ year old trees, but the soil had been tilled bare and there were no shade trees. Too much sunlight is not good for tea, ideally you want about 6 hours of direct sunlight a day. I was looking for kucha to use in blending, as I'd already picked up a sizeable quantity of sweet Bulang tea, but despite stopping in at 4 different places, I didn't find any tea that passed muster. The electricity was out, and we had to convince strangers to light a woodfire for us so we could boil water the old fashioned way. This took a long time, and the local water was tainted with a fine clay silt. And then just as we were beginning our tea tasting, the boiling hot water caused Paul's improvised gaiwan to shatter, which is always a bad omen, so we gave up and headed out of town having spent the better half of the day sampling unwanted tea.

Twodog's gaiwan technique left something to be desired

We did however meet an interesting medicine woman from Myanmar. She had walked across the border with a blanket full of miscellaneous pills, ointments and tinctures, and had set up shop underneath a stilt house in the center of town. A couple of old women smoking long reed pipes had gathered around to buy pills. Nearby, the village boys were having a waterfight, practicing their skills for the upcoming water splashing festival.

Buying medicine in Mannuo village, Mt. Bulang

Further up the mountain in Daokang, we stumbled across a party for several of the village boys who were entering the monastery. For the Blang people, it's an important rite of passage, and all boys are expected to serve at least a few months as Buddhist monks. Cattle were being slaughtered, and everyone was reluctant to show us the tea fields, but there was plenty of cheap, locally made moonshine to be imbibed. It was only day 2 of a 3 day celebration, so whilst the locals were trying to pace themselves, they were keen to see the visitors catch up. Eventually the 28 year old village head gave us an educational tour of the village & surrounding tea gardens, a mix of super bitter, old trees and young plantings of a new, sweet varietal developed by the Menghai Tea Institute.

Dao Kang Tea Monks

Poor Peter had bad diarrhea & jetlag from his arduous flights in from Slovakia. To his chagrin, nobody knew where Slovakia was, or even what Slovakia was, so he had to settle for being Czech during his time in Yunnan hehe

Dysentery is a terrible thing to have when you're forced to eat strange spicy foods, drink raw maocha all day, and the nearest clinic is over an hour's drive away. In villages without electricity, or toilets, it's a nightmare to clamber out of a smoke filled hut in the middle of the night, and make your way into the forest to dig a hole. The last thing Peter needed was for our tiny, valiant breadvan to break down, which of course it did...

Our driver Ah-Hong with Bulang residents of Man Xin Long village

Descending from Manxinlong along a steep sandy track barely as wide as the car, the brakes over heated and failed, and the English speaking puer world almost lost 3 of it's finest. We had to get out and walk more than once, as the mountain got the better of the car. To top it all off, we got some tainted petrol in Bulang, and as evening fell, our driver had to thrash the engine to get any power. Engine howling like a banshee, brakes uncertain, Paul and I high on corn ethanol, clutching our sacks of maocha (Peter clutching his stomach), we hurtled through the dark mountain forest with only our headlights for illumination. Boy were we glad to arrive back in Bulang town in one piece... and the car? Ah-hong later had the whole engine replaced.

Peter and Paul out for the count in Mannoi Lao Zhai

Life on the tea road can be rather hard. And when the going gets tough... some take naps... whilst the tough take photos, and all the good tea ;)

Jokes aside, the three of us endured some hard travel for just a few kilograms of tea, most of which is going into a private pressing to commemorate our joint expedition. If you're lucky, we just might share some samples with you!

The superb forest tea that Belle and I picked up on this trip, has now been blended and made into a very tasty cake that has all the hallmark Bulang bitterness, but with a complex mid-range and a delectable top note of sweetness. We chose old trees growing in forest near the Myanmar border, and you can definitely taste that forest spirit in this tea. Whereas there's been extensive logging and land clearing on the Chinese side of the border, the Burmese side is completely covered in virgin forest, and that creates breathtaking clouds of mist, that rise up the mountain each morning. Hand-processing in the remote villages of Bulang is not as good as Yiwu but we've ensured a clean, bright taste, without any burnt or smoky flavors. We even deliberately left some huangpian in there, because it enhances the thickness & sweetness. Each cake has been carefully wrapped in hand-made Dai paper, hand printed in New York by my sister Elaine Su-Hui. The colorful splashes are inspired by the ceremonial headdress worn by Bulang women.

Tea Urchin 2013 Bulang Beauty

We're really excited about this Bulang Beauty. It's our first Bulang blend, it's beautiful & completely hand-crafted, and (we hope) not too pricey at $79 for a 357g cake. We know a lot of you liked the hand printed Xikong and Mangzhi cakes we made last year with Mr. Gao Fa Chang but felt the price was a bit out of reach. Well, this cake is for you. We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it!