The Tea Urchin

A few of my favourite pots

2012-02-26T07:35:00.004-08:00

I've been messing around on Pinterest lately, originally because I was curious to see what all the fuss was about, and secondly because it's actually a neat way to virtually collect "Terrific Teapots".

I've also been exchanging emails with some very keen teaware collectors, including a certain Mr. Harris who asked to see some of my favourite pots. So here they are:

First up is Red Breasted Robin, a tiny Taiwanese fellow with a gargoyle for a lid handle. He likes Taiwanese Oolong, and has recently devoured a medium roast LiShan TieGuanYin, and an Alishan insect-bitten oriental beauty. He has all the rustic patina of an antique, yet it's all in the glaze, he is in fact a 2011 creation. But his dimunitive size is perfect for drinking alone. Cutest of all, he has an airhole just beneath the gargoyles bum.

Red breasted robin

Then we have the Xishi siblings. The oldest child is dedicated to shupu, but had to be triple boiled and reset after our last trip to Yunnan because somebody forgot to empty out the spent shu inside. Repulsed & horrified by the nuclear green mould that greeted our return, I immediately dumped the contents out, and missed the opportunity to photograph the first sentient life form to grow inside a teapot.

The middle Xishi child radiates natural beauty from showering everyday with ancient tea tree shengpu extract, whilst the youngest child stubbornly refuses to gleam at all. It is however, the only duan ni pot in my collection, so has a special place in my heart... for now.

Xishi siblings

Pumpkin is a recent acquisition, less than 6 months old, but she is the work of a master, and I had long admired her perfectly balanced curves before my bank account finally caught up to my pot lust. Belle was quite jealous when I brought her home. Made from the highest quality yixing clay I've come across, she is already glowing with a lustrous shine. Not just a pretty face, she has 3 stamps on her curved interior - no mean feat - and does a damn fine job of making tea for 4.

Pumpkin

I was planning on introducing more of the tea urchin family today, but Belle is impatient to watch Supernatural, which does not air in China and can only be watched on the computer. As little Miles has been extraordinarily cranky & difficult today, I must appease the woman. So much for the finer things in life!

A tribute to Miles

2012-02-21T07:35:00.000-08:00

Ok so this is pretty cheesy, but Belle & I thought it would be cool to do a commemorative bing to celebrate the birth of our son. Seeing as he's a dragon baby 龙头, and was named after Miles Davis, we've gone for a jazz inspired theme that's a little east meets west. The colour themes are inspired by old jazz LP album covers, and the dragon's hands are pointing at 9:43am as that's exactly when he was born. We plan to sit on these cakes until Miles turns 21 years old.

What do you guys think? Which colour do you like best? Which puer village do you think best represents the spirit of a bebop dragon?

A new tea urchin...

2012-02-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

So if you’rewondering why I haven’t posted in awhile, here’s a very good reason:

A newly born tea urchin with his grandmother!

Our babyboy Miles was born into the world January 26^th, which coincidentally is Australia Day. Belleand I are overjoyed with this cute new addition to our family, but are also a little tired. We were racing to get our websiteup before the birth, but Miles decided to come two weeks early, so the TeaUrchin online shop launch has been postponed once again.

It’s been 4months since I returned from the Autumn tea picking season in Yunnan, ladenwith 13 boxes of great tea, but also with substantial tea debt. Seriously, who hastea debt? With a baby on the way, and tea creditors waiting for payment, it wasa financial reality check that only had one solution - my return to a full time job in advertising. It hasn’t been easy, earning money to fuel my teaaddiction. There was a period of 3 weeks where I spent every waking hour atwork. We’re talking 80 hours a week with no days off. I never dreamt I wouldwork so hard, to pursue the simple enjoyment of tea. The strange thing is, whenyou work everyday, for several weeks in a row, you lose track of what day it is.You mark time only by deadlines. In its own strange way, this kind of work is aform of meditative mantra. One attains a selflessness outside of time… untilthe feeling of sudden chest pain reminds you that dying at your desk isseriously uncool.

There aremany advertising folks who dabble in tea, and many tea folk who dabble inadvertising. Both are intellectually rewarding fields. Yet advertising as a profession has fallen from grace. My vegetarian artist sister once accused me of selling out to become a yuppie, enriching myself through the propagation of unnecessarywants & illusory needs. But having struggled three times in my life to make money doing what I love, I find advertising is a most precious haven, attracting dreamers, philosophers & creators, people of great imagination who mightotherwise never enjoy a middle class life. Many of us dream of one day being theself-actualized artist, producing inspired works of the heart, freed from thewhims of clients & practicalities of budget. Which is why I’m still determined to bring the Tea Urchin to life. Itis a labour of love that I will unceasingly work on, until I am an old man withmore puer than years left to live.

Rained out in You Le 攸乐

There wasmore rain this past Autumn than normal, and many producers did not bother to makethe trip for this reason. The consensus was thisSummer (traditionally the rainy season) was actually drier than Autumn. Apassing shower or two is not a bad thing, but longer periods of rain swells theleaves with water, requiring longer wilting times and making sha qing moredifficult. When wok frying, it is hard to dehydrate the thick woody stemsenough without burning the thin edges of the leaf. But if you don’t fully fixthe stems, they will continue to oxidize and turn reddish brown, or even worse,turn mouldy, ruining the entire batch.

But forthose of us who were patient enough to wait for the clouds to clear, there wassome good tea to be had. Belle & I waited a week in Yiwu, before we got 5days of good weather. It takes a minimum of 3 consecutive sunny days beforegood maocha can be made. Even so, we were only able to find 8-10kg of good teaon each visit to the villages, and had to come back a second time to top up. Iwas hoping to make 3 boxes of DingJiaZhai, but just couldn’t get enough maochafor the 3^rd box. When quality is this scarce, the little guy is morelikely to produce a quality batch. Anyone seeking volume would have to blendwith rain-affected tea, or tea from another village.

On the road to Gundagai, I mean Gua Feng Zhai

Luckily wehad a four wheel drive pick up, thanks to some tea friends we met in Jinghong, so we were able to traverse the muddy roads and visit Youle, DingJiaZhai,Mansa, GaoShanZhai, LuoShuiDong, and GuaFengZhai. We also spent a week with Mr.Gao, visiting tea farms in his home range of Yibang, Xikong and Mangzhi.

In all, wereturned to Shanghai with some fabulous cakes, lovingly packaged with originalartwork drawn by my friend & colleague Yue Chen, a young game designer who grewup in Yunnan, studied in the UK and now lives in Shanghai.

莽枝 Mangzhi cake produced by Mr. Gao for The Tea Urchin

Our favourite cake from this Autumn trip - Gua Feng Zhai 刮风寨

With thehelp of some more friends Eric & Hank, we are slowly putting together ouronline shop. It is now pretty much built, but we only recently discovered itisn’t easy to take good looking product photos, so there is a bit of a learningcurve to overcome before we can officially launch. Until then, we welcome emailorders.

We spent 2months in Banna, Simao & Lancang in 2011, this year I’m looking forward to visitingthe Lincang region for the first time. I’m very grateful to my wife Belle, who soldieredthrough our Autumn sourcing trip despite being 5 months pregnant. She bravelyendured many kilometers of bumpy roads & sleeping on the hard floor of farmers houses. With meat &dairy at a scarcity, for protein, she had to eat insects & tea eggs. Sodespite what you hear about Shanghai girls, they are beautiful enough to beprincesses but also tough enough to be peasants!

From Chinawith love,

Eugene& Belle

In the garden of eden

PS. Yes that is a tea tree! The venerable mother tree in Bangwei, Lancang region. And if you look closely enough you just might make out Miles, the 5 month old baby bump.

郑四隆 Zheng Si Long factory, Yiwu

2011-11-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in an earlier post, Belle and I carried our Lao Man E maocha halfway across Banna, so we could press it at 郑四隆 Zheng Si Long factory in Yiwu. We were also here to see 季海 Ji Hai from 海浪号 Hai Lang Hao, who had been introduced to us by Belle's teacher in Shanghai. Ji Hai is an old customer of Zheng Si Long, and comes here every year to press his cakes.

As you can see from the mountain of maocha below, they process a lot of tea for a small family business. This factory really is no bigger than the average suburban house. Kinds of make you wish you could do this in your backyard huh?

A mountain of maocha

In the photo below you can see how a large pan of fresh leaves (foreground) is reduced in volume by the process of sha qing (wok-frying to kill-green) to produce mao cha (background).

Shaqing puer with electric wok

I'm not a huge fan of the electric wok. An electric wok produces a more consistent temperature than a wood fire, so less leaves are burnt. As it doesn't produce smoke, the tea won't have the "yan wei" (smoky flavour) that many tea drinkers find off putting. I however, find the electric wok to be artless & cold, and makes me think I am in Hangzhou, not Yunnan. Maintaining a wood fire takes skill, and usually requires a second person dedicated to this task. The wood fire may add smoke, but it also adds charm, crackle & character. The higher risk of burnt or smoky flavors makes good tea produced over a wood fire, even more worthy of appreciation.

After wok-frying, the leaves are scattered over pans for sun drying. You can see the drying racks above the heads of the workers. Sunlight passes through the transparent PVC sheeting, cheaper than glass, but in my opinion, not as good as direct sunlight.

The process of scattering maocha to dry is called "li tiao"

Some of the tea is lucky enough to be put outside on a tarp where it catches the sun's rays in all their glory. On a good clear day like this, the freshly processed maocha can completely dry in one day, shrivelling up into fragrant black & white twists. If the weather is overcast, it can sometimes require up to 2 days to completely dry. The longer drying period adversely affects the tea's taste, which is why the price of maocha goes up & down according to how many sunny days there are. When it rains, no one makes maocha, and all the producers can do is wait for the sun to come out again.

Direct sunlight is the best for drying maocha

After the maocha is dried, tea sorters have to meticulously pick out all the "huang pian" (old yellow leaves). When picking tea leaves, the farmers will sometimes pick off old leaves to encourage regrowth. Even when picking 1 bud & 3 leaves, it is not uncommon for the 3rd leave to turn into huang pian during the sha qing process. These old leaves need to picked out one by one, and put into a basket. This is strangely meditative work, and it is quite pleasant to spend hours picking out the old crispy leaves. These leaves are not wasted, but sold for as little as RMB 5/kg to make huang pian bricks. Belle and her mum love to boil huang pian - it comes out deliciously sweet. But as gu shu often sells for RMB 500/kg, you can see why some producers are quite happy for the huang pian to be left in!

Picking out the "huang pian" (old yellow leaves)

Next, the maocha should be tossed in pans to separate out the broken leaves, dust & fannings. At Zheng Si Long, this is still done by hand. As this is quite time consuming & back breaking work, I imagine it's only done for gu shu material, and only if the customer is particularly picky, like me.

Separating the dust & fannings

The tea that bites the dust

Naturally, not all the broken pieces & dust are removed, but it does make for a cleaner tea liquor, and better looking leaves. Just as a lot of whisky evaporates through the cracks in the barrel, I consider this "the angel's share." But in China nothing gets wasted, and I imagine the discarded fannings ends up combined in cheaper "yiwu zheng shan" bings (yiwu mountain, no specified village), or is used in shou pu production. So if you ever detect a whiff of bitter Lao Man E in a sweet Yiwu tea, now you know why ;)

Master of the steam, bag & twist

I like how Zheng Si Long's employees wear hair nets & gloves. It's a small hygiene factor that reduces the chance of hair ending up in your bing. As you can see the floor is also well swept and the workers are not dripping sweat. The stone presses used by Zheng Si Long are also larger & heavier than those used at other factories. Smaller workshops I visited only use 2 rows of 4 stones. By using 3 rows of 5 presses, the bings are under the stone press for longer. This results in a tighter compression, and slower maturation.

Stone presses used in Zhen Si Long's puer manufacture

Not all tea is created equal!

There is a rumour that tea pressed by pretty girls tastes sweeter and deserves to sell at a much higher price. I can confirm that this is definitely true.

The importance of well-used bags cannot be overstated. Good bags are used season after season, until they become tea-stained and resemble delicious pancakes. These bags are well-used because they have passed the test of time, and produce evenly shaped, round bings, with a good, tight, well-packed consistency. Also, I like to think their repeated use imparts the slightest of flavours, from the bag, to the cake, a subtle signature of the factory's quality manufacture & heritage.

Shade drying Tea Urchin 2011 Spring Lao Man E

After a period of shade drying, I removed the bags and let them soak up some unadulterated Yiwu sunlight. Even on a beautiful day like this, ours were the only cakes not being put in the drying room or 烤房 "kao fang". I have heard cakes dried in a "kao fang" taste different from those dried in the sun, but have yet to experience this first hand. Personally, it just feels better to know your tea was naturally dried, as tradition & nature intended.

Yep, that's the shit eating grin of a proud new puer parent!

The Lao Man E leaves are fatter and less stringy than Yiwu leaves, which are known for their long stems. The neifei for this small run were all hand written on hand made paper. Thankfully, the ink did not run during the steaming process.

Our Lao Man E cakes sun drying in Yiwu

Zheng Si Long is a family owned business with a long tradition, and the current head of the family is 郑必能 Zheng Bi Neng. I gave him some of my Lao Man E to try, but as with most people in Yiwu, he believes Yiwu tea is the best drink on earth. He gave me a cake from 2006 to prove it, and signed his name to commemorate our meeting.

A collectors item, signed by 郑必能 Zheng Bi Neng of Zheng Si Long

郑必能 Zheng Bi Neng's name roughly translates as "definitely can do!" or "nothing is impossible." I guess his father was not the kind of man to take no for an answer! It is a good way of explaining why he is such a friendly & sincere man, who gives good service to his customers. Next time you drink a Zheng Si Long or Hai Lang Hao, think of Zheng Bi Neng & his family.

Yours truly with 郑必能 Zheng Bi Neng

Da Mengsong 大勐宋

2011-10-28T23:54:00.000-07:00

The mountain of Da Mengsong lies to the south east of Bulang mountain, right on the Myanmar border. This place could very easily have been part of Burma, except the People's Liberation Army garrisoned the mountain to guard against Nationalist Chinese forces who had retreated to Burma. There were still border clashes here up to 1976. We were here to visit Chong Kyongwon, and the Hani host family who help process his tea.

As you can see from the photo below, the trees in Da Mengsong are huge, and grow on a steep slope. Climbing in and out of the thicket of branches to get to the fresh buds is not easy. Even an experienced picker can take the whole day to harvest just 3 trees, yielding 10kg of fresh leaves.

Picking tea high in the trees, above the clouds

Above photo taken by Chong Kyongwon - one of many great shots you can find on his naver blog site. Not an easy site to navigate if you can't read Korean, but once you click into an article, the menu on the left hand side allows you to browse his older posts.

Crickets in the tea leaves

Leaves will get crushed & stifled if left in the pickers basket all day, so those leaves picked in the morning are laid out on a plastic mat to wither. The warm, damp blanket of leaves attracts crickets & other insects, that have to be picked out before wok frying.

Epiphytes growing on the tea trees, look like dragonfly wings

I always find it comforting to find other plants growing on the tea trees. But the farmers pick these off, as they believe too many parasites sap the tea's strength.

Tightly bound puer cannonballs

In the darkness of a Hani family's living room, we took turns to steam & press maocha into bings. In the photo below the girl in the white T-shirt is doing the job of weigh & steam. She then passes the tin steamer can to the bag & shape technician, who has to quickly press the steamed leaves into a tight disc shape, and whip the loose end of the cloth bag into a tight knot.

Steaming & pressing puer bings

Pat the leaves down & knot the bag

Holding the center of the bag tight with your left hand, you use the base of your fist to flatten the leaves, rotating the disc quickly with the right hand so all sides get evenly pressed. The open end of the bag tapers to a long tail that needs to be wrapped into a coil at the center of the bing. If the cloth bag is not shaped & tied tightly enough, the bing will end up oval shaped instead of round. Maybe he's just being kind, but Chong Ge says his customers don't mind an oval bing, as this imperfection is proof it was hand-made!

Shaped & ready for pressing!

Foreign labour "press-ganged"

It's not often you get to see a Korean and an American making puer together! Kneeling on the stone press, one's whole body weight is used to tightly compress the tea cake. The pressed cake is put outside to dry, whilst still in the cloth bag. After an hour, the bing should be dry enough to peel off the bag without disturbing the leaves.

Freshly pressed cakes drying in the shade

These cakes are made from fat, bitter, buds collected from wild tea trees in DaXueShan and AiLaoShan. Chong Ge believes shade drying is better than drying in direct sunlight. He says direct sunlight is too hot, and only dries the outside of the bing, causing the center to develop mould. Shade drying allows osmosis to draw the moisture out of the center of the bing.

Bamboo shoots & fried tea leaves for dinner

Pressing cakes is a tiring, repetitive task, but a great way to work up an appetite! Luckily, eating in Yunnan is about as organic as it gets. We enjoyed many local dishes made from wild plants and free range mountain chickens, washed down by a few too many bottles of beer. Thanks to Chong Kyongwon for inviting us to DaMengsong and teaching us how to make cakes by hand, the old fashioned way!

Weird things I've eaten in Yunnan

2011-10-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

7 years of living in Asia has slowly rid me of my food phobias. When I was a kid and didn't know better, I loved to eat the steamed chicken feet served during Saturday morning yumcha. Now I find the wrinkly skin and little knuckles disgusting. Yet over the years, I've slowly forced myself to become a more adventurous eater, adding live drunken shrimp, chicken cartilage, duck intestine, solidified pig's blood, snake soup, and other exotic delicacies to my list.

I reasoned with myself, if I can eat raw oysters, why not snails? If I've eaten sardines & anchovies, haven't I eaten fish eyes already? And aren't prawns just a giant insect that lives in the sea?

During my last trip to Japan, I ate raw baby squid, raw chicken heart and raw horse meat (the squid was by far the hardest thing to swallow, because it was the fishiest taste imaginable, multiplied by a thousand). Needless to say, when insects were served for lunch during the Dai "open door festival", I did not shy away.

Only a generation ago, few families could afford to eat meat every day. Insects are an abundant source of protein and are surprisingly tasty, once you get past your cultural taboos.

Bamboo Grubs

These deep fried bamboo grubs are crispy and not disimilar to french fries. Most of the taste comes from the grease they're cooked in, rather than insect juices. They're much more disgusting alive, when you cut open the bamboo segment, you'll see hundreds of the fat grubs squirming around, covering the entire surface of the bamboo walls.

Wasp larvae ... with cute little eyes!

These raw wasp larvae are surprisingly dry, waxy and squishy, like a super sized booger. Biting into them for the first time, one is surprised by the explosion of bug juice. It's mild tasting and kind of buttery but there's something about raw bug juice that just makes you want to retch. Just pretend you're Bear Grylls and smile perversely instead of grimacing.

Adult wasps & pupae

By comparison, the pupae & adult wasps are chewier, and more seafood like. I guess the hardened carapace makes all the difference.

Wild rat meat

I'd eaten a few spoonfulls of this greasy, gamey meat, before it occured to me that the tiny crunchy bones sticking out of the meat chunks, were too small to be anything I was familar with.

"What is this?" I asked my host, noting the mysterious meat was too red to be a bird. "Eat first, I'll tell you later" he replied. That's never a good sign. My mind went from "quail" to "rodent" in an instant. "Is it a squirrel?" I asked hopefully, noting you'd have to kill a lot of squirrels to get this much meat.

"No, it's rat" my host offered helpfully. "Big forest rat."

"Ooh!" I breathed a sigh of relief. "Wild rat." That makes it all better.

As my host had shot this wild rat himself, I had to eat a whole lot more, to show my appreciation. "I wonder which tea I should pair with this rat?"

The Tea Eater

How is Puer processed differently from other teas?

2011-10-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

After reading one of my recent posts, “Learning how to identify gushu & make maocha”, Lew Perin (of the invaluable Chinese tea lexicon Babelcarp)asked me how the processing of Puer differs from Oolong, and if the kill-greenor “sha qing” process for Puer, completely stopped enzymatic activity, or justslowed it down?

Lew's question got me thinking - because puer continues to oxidiseafter wok-frying, perhaps sha qing for Puer is carried out to a lesser degree than for other teas? I set out to do some investigating. Chemistry was not my bestsubject in school, and I am certainly not an expert on the biochemicalreactions that take place inside the tea leaf during processing. But I wassurprised to find that most tea firers also can't describe exactly what goes oninside the leaf! Just like you don’t need to understand DNA & cell divisionto make a baby, I guess you don’t need to understand the details of biochemistryto make good tea. But if there are any scientists reading this article, pleasedo contribute your thoughts & corrections.

Above: traditional puer shaqing method

The consensus opinion of the tea experts I asked, is thatsha qing is slightly different for each kind of tea, as the temperature andtime in the wok has to be adjusted according to the size and thickness of theleaves. For example, oolong leaves are smaller and thinner than Puer, soshaqing is done at a lower temperature and with a smaller load of leaves.

But the purpose of sha qing for all teas is the same – frying at high temperature arrests enzyme activitycausing oxidation. But regardless of the kind of tea, it is impossible to fullystop oxidation. Sha qing cannot “fix” or preserve the leaf for alleternity, but it does for all intents & purposes pause the chemicalreactions within the leaf. This gives the tea maker time to applyadditional steps that shape the final flavour & aroma of the tea. Forexample, the following step of “rou nian” or rolling the leaves involvescrushing the leaf cells, mixing the remaining juices, and starting a new set ofchemical reactions.

Above: traditional puer rounian method

The key point is that sha qing for Puer is not deliberatelyleft incomplete or somehow less “finished” than for other types of tea. Infact, sha qing for all teas is a delicate balancing act, between not burningthe leaves, and not under frying them. Under fried leaves will turn reddish brown duringthe final rolling & drying stages, and the keen puer drinker will notice anundesirable red tea (hong cha) liquor & flavour creeping into their shengpu.

It is also important to differentiate oxidation that occurspre and post sha qing. Strictly speaking, oxidation is just a chemical reactionbetween organic compounds that are already present in the leaf & oxygen inthe air. Logically, the oxidation of freshly picked leaves laidout to wither is a completely different kind of chemical reaction than the slowoxidation of a finished puer cake, simply because the type & quantity of enzymespresent in the leaf are different. A lot of the confusion may stem from thisuse of the same word “oxidation” for two rather different chemical processes.Labelling them “primary oxidation” and “secondary oxidation” might help toclear things up.

Secondary oxidation: 5 year old, stale, brown longjing leaves

On the subject of secondary oxidation, everyone knows that teathat is not stored in an air tight container will slowly oxidise & go stale,and fresh, grassy flavours will turn to musty, woody flavours. What makes puer teaspecial is that it also develops interesting flavour characteristics through microbialfermentation (发酵 fa jiao). One puer retailer,Hojo, has even suggested vacuum sealing puer in foil bags to minimise further oxidation and accentuate the fruity, earthy flavoursassociated with microbial fermentation.

But why does puer's flavour mature through oxidation & fermentation,instead of just going stale?

Both puer & oolong tea go through similar steps of sha qing & rou nian. The key difference is that after sha qing & rou nian, Puerleaves are put outside to slowly sun dry (晒干 shai gan), whereas oolong teas are ovendried or roasted at high temperatures (烘干hong gan / 烘焙 hong bei). I have been told theslow sunlight drying process for Puer, preserves more chlorophyll, theaflavins& thearubins in the leaf, whereas the high heat used to dry Oolong breaksdown chlorophyll into tannins. If this is true, it is sun drying, not wok-frying that really setsthe scene for puer’s unique maturation & aging.

Lew, I hope that answers your question!

Spreading puer leaves out to sun dry in Jingmai

Industrial ovens for drying oolong leaves on sale in Wuyishan

Chong Kyong Won - The Bear Grylls of Puer

2011-10-21T22:39:00.000-07:00

You meet a lot of interesting characters on thetea road - adventurers for whom tea is a journey, vendors obsessively huntingthe perfect leaf, curious backpackers of the unspoiled, anthropologists ofdisappearing cultures, and eccentric drifters who have found acceptance in thevillage. A mysterious power drives them all to live life off the beaten track,to visit the remote villages of Yunnan.

Chong Kyong Won in Da Mengsong 大勐宋 April 2011

Chong Kyong Won is an ex-Paratrooper, snowboardtrainer, and a Korean puer pioneer. He has lived in Yunnan and studied Puerproduction for the past 6 years, travelling to each and every mountain in hisfamous red Jeep with cow bells dangling from his flood lights. His offroaddriving skills are amazing & terrifying at the same time. He finds a trackwhen there is no road, and somehow traverses the deepest ruts & narrowestgaps in one constant skid & slide, with barely a bump felt inbetween.

Chong Kyong Won's signature red jeep

I cannot speak Korean, and Chong Kyong Won’sEnglish isn’t great, so our common language is Chinese. For this reason, I refer to him as “Chong Ge” or older brother Chong.

Chong Ge’s blog has inspired many otherKorean puer devotees to follow in his footsteps, and is worth checking out forthe photos alone. There are now so many Koreans making puer in Yunnan, it isnot uncommon to see Korean signage in the tea villages. But if you clarifythat you are talking about the Korean who wears Aini ethnic clothing and drivesa red jeep, everyone knows Chong Kyong Won.

When Chong Ge arrives in a village, the children immediately recognise him. His generosity is well-known. He lives with the tea farmers, and in return, gives them Korean cosmetics, digital cameras, and scholarships for their children. He even paid for their first bathroom, complete with a flushing squat toilet. He told us when he first started visiting Da Mengsong 大勐宋, there was no bathroom in the village, only the "scenic toilet" (风景厕所)

One time in the middle of the night, he had to visit the "scenic toilet" with only a flashlight & a roll of toilet paper in his hands. He walked up the hill away from the village, found a stick and dug a hole. Before he had finished his business, a wild boar emerged from the darkness and chased him up a tea tree. He tried to beat the boar away with a branch, but to no avail. Pantless and stuck up the tree, he had to wait until the wild pig had finished devouring his faeces before he could retrieve his trousers. Back at the village, the tribes people thought this was hilarious. "Next time you're in trouble, just whistle for help!" they advised him.

Sure enough, the next time he heard strange rustling sounds whilst using the "scenic toilet", he whistled loudly for help. Several excited dogs from the village quickly appeared and chased the wild pigs away from the scene. "Oh, so this is what they meant. What a great system!" thought Chong Ge, only to watch on in shock as the dogs returned and set about devouring his faeces.

This was just one of many colorful stories Chong Ge told us about his life on the tea road.

With his military experience, eccentric costume, and extreme driving skills, ChongGe is a larger than life, action hero. “My name is puer cha”, is how heintroduced himself on our first meeting in Jinghong. Later, in our secondmeeting in Da Meng Song 大勐宋, along the Myanmar border, he toldme “I was born Korean, but I am Akha” (“Akha” is what the Aini tribes peoplecall themselves in their own language).

Chong Kyong Won "I am Akha"

ChongGe’s philosophy to making puer is to look for people with ancient trees, honesthearts and no machines. He started out making puer for his own family, inparticular his elderly mum. Korean’s believe bitter tea is good for health, andChong Ge spends a lot of his time collecting bitter, wild, tea buds to pressinto cakes & make "cha gao" (茶膏 tea paste slowly created by distillation over 7days & nights). It takes 100kg of wild tea to make just 5kg of cha gao.Instead of dissolving the paste in water, he gave each of us a small slice andinstructed us to suck on it like a lolly. It was extremely, unpleasantlybitter, and turned my mouth black. But apparently, it’s very healthy and goodfor fighting colds!

Wild tea buds used to make Chong Ge's cha gao 茶膏

Tea made from the wild buds is distilled for 7 days until it becomes a paste

ChongGe’s knowledge of each mountain’s virtues is astounding, he knows where to findthe oldest trees, which villages blend in tai di or spray pesticide, and how theteas will age. He drew me a map from memory, detailing his favorite mountains.“Jingmai has really good fragrance and cha qi when young, but graduallydepreciates after the 3rd year. Nannuo, on the other hand, gets better andbetter after 3 years.”

“Youhave to be ahead of the crowd” he advised me, “All the bad practices follow.”

Inone experiment, he strapped puer to the roof rack of his car, and drove fromYunnan, to Tibet & Beijing, via the old tea horse route, to document howpuer traditionally would have aged along its journey. “In the old days, theystrapped 60kg of tea to each horse, and they walked 30km a day, restingwhenever it rained.” He didn’t add horse-sweat in his experiment, but he diduse traditional bamboo wrappings. Whenever it rained, he stopped for a few daysto sun dry the wrappers, then put them back on again.

“Iwas a tea horse in my past life” he said matter of factly.

Chong Geused to own 3 Harleys & a Yamaha, but he sold them all to fund his Puerexpeditions. Through his #1 ranking naver blog & google panorama photos, hebecame a puer celebrity in Korea. Now he has some Korean investors backing him, he can afford to live in Yunnan all year round, producing 200kg of puer a year from 10 differentlocations. He stores his tea in 4 highrise apartments in Xiaguan & Kunming,chosen for their dry climate & wind. “I’m not in it for the money,” hesays, “I want to be a legend after 20 years.”

In my mind,he is already the Bear Grylls of puer. Whilst there is a lot of “hu you” (忽悠 boasting) on thetea road, Chong Ge is the real deal.

Drinking cha gao with Chong Kwongwon, Nannuo, October 2011

From Lao Man E with love

2011-10-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

Like many venturing intothe wild world of sheng puer, I started with the palatable, easy to drinkmountains - Yiwu, Nannuo & Jingmai, before discovering the wonderfulcomplexity of Bulang. My first experience drinking Lao Ban Zhang was anepiphany in cha qi & hou yun. Despite the price, the hype, and the fakes, Iwas blown away. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, my heart pounded, andmy palms broke out in a sweat. 20 minutes after drinking, I still had alingering sweet aroma in my throat, and felt curiously high whilst walking downthe street. Why was this tea so potent & powerful? A new frontier in my teajourney had been revealed, and I was going to explore it.

Fromthe beginning, Lao Man E was sold to me as the ugly stepsister of Lao Ban Zhang- a lesson in bitterness, a crude & spiteful old crone, producing moregrimaces than smiles. The fragrant xiangqi and sweet lasting huigan of herbeautiful sister, have been beaten out of her with the ugly stick.

LaoMan E is the Laphroaig of single origin puer. An acquired taste that separatesmen from boys. An outlier that challenges your understanding of what tea shouldbe.

Perhapsthis is why she is both easy and difficult to love.

Inthe guileless way an ugly dog can win your heart, Lao Man E is a tea you growto love, the more time you spend with it. Full of conflicting flavours andaromas, there is always the potential of a new discovery each time you drink.The more you pay attention to it, the more it loves you back.

Forthis reason, I was excited from the moment I set eyes on the Bulang village of LaoMan E (老曼峨).

Lao Man E - love at first sight

Farmore picturesque than the eyesore of Lao Ban Zhang, who’s charm has beenbulldozed over and stamped out with concrete, Lao Man E is a more gentle mazeof blue tin-roofed structures. A large buddhist temple, with golden chofahs,dominates one end of the village skyline, the barren quadrangle of the localschool defining the other.

We arrived in the late afternoon, as the tea pickersreturned from nearby hills, baskets brimming with luminescent green. Smokedrifted lazily from cooking fires, as we drove slowly down the village’sconstricted laneways. Dogs & children darted down the road ahead of us. Inthe darkness under each house, men toiled at giant woks, clouds of steam risingfrom the tumbling leaves.

Myanmar workers frying Lao Man E spring leaves in the evening

Maintaining the right temperature is critical

Wepaid our respects to the outgoing village head, who was still fulfilling hisofficial duties even though a new mayor had been voted in. Tea was brewed in alarge soot covered kettle, which we greedily slurped down. We were introducedto his house guests, a middle-aged traditional Chinese medicine doctor afflictedwith unrequited love for the headman’s young daughter, and a white hairedJapanese man who took photos of us and withdrew to his room without so much assaying a word.

Thenext day we hiked up the mountain to pick tea. Free ranging over our host’sgarden, we greedily climbed the biggest, tallest trees.

Picking tea requires good balance

Thereis something magical about Lao Man E’s tea gardens. Its trees are tall andsplendid. The view from the top is amazing.

"Cha Guo" - tea seed pods growing in Lao Man E

Iwas very impressed by the local girls. Climbing muddy mountain trails and 5mhigh trees in high heels is no small feat!

"High heels"

Backat the village, our freshly picked leaves were spread out to wither. We sampledsome maocha from a wild tea tree. It was bitter and harsh, yet full of complexflavours that made it very interesting. Like a symphony orchestra tuning up, theflavours were at first raucous and not quite in harmony, yet after a fewsteeps, resolved themselves into a pleasing composition.

Nextup was a maocha that had been fried in a wok coated with wild beeswax. Aninteresting concept, but not so good in the execution. The wax coats theleaves, and mutes the rich cacophony of flavours one expects of a true Lao ManE.

Then we tried 3 different maocha samples that were sweeter than normal Lao Man E.Whilst still carrying the trademark LME bitterness, the unexpected sweetnessbrought it one step closer to a Lao Ban Zhang experience. The leaves from thesesweeter trees were traditionally blended in, but thanks to Taiwaneseadvisors, it’s now possible to buy standalone, sweet Lao Man E. There’s onlyone problem, of the 3 "tian cha" samples we tried, all faded after 6 steeps.

Afterdrinking the sweet tea, we tried 3 different batches of bitter tea ("ku cha"). The maochafrom the bitter trees, suffered from another problem. These delivered in spadeson bitter & smoky, and had staying power beyond 10 steeps, but were missingcomplexity & variation. Knowing that Lao Man E could be simultaneouslybitter & sweet, led me to crave that complication in the first few steeps.

Soit was back to the tasting table, to determine which bitter tea bestcomplemented which sweet tea, and in what proportions we should blend. Wewanted a strong traditional start with a surprisingly sweet highnote, Lao Man E’strademark bitterness & cha qi kick, and enough staying power &complexity to round out the drinking session.

Needlessto say, a few hours later, we were very much high on chaqi and full to the brimwith tea. A secret formula had been arrived at, and it involved blending insome of the wild tea tree to provide some complexity across all 10 steeps. Theonly flaw in our plan was the liquor was slightly brackish. The prime suspectwas maocha dust. We put the whole family to work, flipping giant pans ofmaocha, to shake out the tea dust.

Shaking out the tea dust & fannings

Onemore round of tasting proved the mix was just right, and the flavor was aswonderful as predicted. But the tea was still slightly murky! What could it be?

Wespeculated that the tea might have overheated during withering. Perhaps toomany leaves had been layered on top of each other and the leaves on the bottom stewed in their own sweat. Or perhaps it had been a particularly hot sunny day and the picker had stuffed too many leaves in their basket, this can sometimes cause the leaves at the bottom to stew. The slightly brackish water could also be due to the leaves not being separated properly after rou nian, or not being turned evenly during the sun drying "shai gan"stage so some leaves took too long to dry.

Apart from the slightly muddled liquor,we were still very pleased with the full flavor of our first blend, so we bought 10kgand pressed it into 500g bings for further research & personal drinking.

The perfect pick: 1 bud, 3 leaves. Note the fingers calloused from sha qing!

Asfor the tea we picked ourselves? Our gracious host processed the maocha toperfection. Because we so meticulously picked the best looking buds, the maochalooked stunning. I pressed most of it into a 1kg commemorative cake which takespride of place on my tea shelf, but I can’t bring myself to break it open. Alittle maocha was leftover for drinking, but unfortunately it’s all gone now.

Making your own puer bing is a wonderful experience that I encourage every tea lover to try for yourself. Once you’ve made tea with your own hands, you’ll find yourself reaching for it everytime you have guests, because it is a tea with the personal touch, a tea who’s story is intimately entwined with yours.

Our freshly pressed Spring 2011 Lao Man E bings

Belle & I pressed our 2011 Spring cakes at the Zheng Si Long factory in Yiwu.

Ji Hai, the masterful producer behind Hai Lang Hao, generously let us cut the queue and interrupt his own run, to get our small batch done. Carrying 10kg of maocha through Jinghong during Po Shui Jie (泼水节 the water splashing festival) was one of the stupidest & most stressful moments of my life! Marauding gangs of frenzied water splashers threatened to drench us and our maocha at every turn. Finally, we managed to get a taxi to the bus station. Even once we were on the bus to Yiwu, our precious cargo of tea was not safe. Children lining the road shot at us with pump action water guns, and adults riding on the back on the trucks, threw buckets of water through the open bus windows. But the gods of tea were on our side, and we eventually made it through to Zheng Si Long unscathed.

My tea mules DP & Belle, loaded up with 10kg of LME's finest maocha

As this was just a small test run, we won’t be selling this tea, but if you are interested in getting a sample for your own learning, please drop me an email at theteaurchin@gmail.com

Begging for leaves in Lao Ban Zhang

2011-10-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

Lao Ban Zhang is widely regarded as the "King of Puers". This dusty village in the Bulang mountain range, near the Myanmar border, produces some of the priciest puer in recent years, especially since the Chen Sheng factory came to town in 2007 and signed contracts to buy up the entire annual supply of most family farms. By monopolising supply & ramping up prices, Chen Sheng (陈升茶厂) became infamous amongst the puer community. In China, a tradition of lavish gift giving (some call it graft) requires the recipient to be at least vaguely aware of the value of the gift, so every gift category requires a highly recognizable, highly priced pinnacle product. For French wine, it's Chateau Lafite. For puer tea, it's Lao Ban Zhang. Ultimately, it was a win-win for both Chen Sheng & the Lao Ban Zhang villagers. Everybody got rich. And the remote village of Lao Ban Zhang became a holy destination for Puer pilgrims, even though the bumpy dirt track into town is so not luxury.

Young tea plants on the dirt track leading into Lao Ban Zhang

On arrivalin Lao Ban Zhang we were stopped at the village gate bya guard who made a precursory check of our vehicle, to make sure we were notsmuggling in any outside maocha or fresh leaves into the village. This was abit of a farce, as everyone knows the locals bring in tea from surroundingareas at night. If we had bought maocha in Hekai, I wonder if they would havemade us leave our vehicle at the gate?

The main gate of Lao Ban Zhang, where guards check for outside maocha

The firstbuilding past the gate is the famous Chen Sheng factory, with its largeconcrete patio overlooking the whole town. Then the freshly paved concrete roadwinds down into the valley, in-between construction sites, newly vacant lots& shabby old shacks that suddenly seem out of time & place. It’s prettyeasy to see which families own the most trees from the size of theirrenovations.

Lao Ban Zhang ground zero - blue roofs indicate new wealth

We hadlunch with Ge Er 戈二, one of the growing number of villagers who isnot contracted to sell his tea to Chen Sheng. As the price of LBZ maochacontinues to skyrocket, many households are breaking contract to sell direct toprivate buyers descending on the town. There is a rumor circulating that this is all part of Chen Sheng's nefarious plan to drive prices further up, whilst still controlling the bulk of supply. I recently discovered that Chen Sheng are planning to emulate this model in Nannuo mountain, where they have already planted signs for their future factory.

Lunch in Lao Ban Zhang, with local baijiu for the brave!

We polishedoff a bottle of baijiu with Ge Er in a local restaurant, but getting him tipsystill wasn’t enough to convince him to sell us some of his maocha. “I’m alreadyworried I can’t fulfill my current orders this year,” Ge Er sighed. “There’s morebuyers than there are tea leaves!”

I guess it’sonly fair that loyal, large-order customers get priority over strangers whocome knocking on the door. And at RMB 1,600/kg, I wasn't in the market for a large order anyway! Ge Er politely put me in my placeand agreed to sell me some if I put an advance order in and came back nextyear.

Spent Lao Ban Zhang 2011 Spring leaves

Back at hishouse, we at least got to drink some of this years harvest, sitting on the roofof his garage with an nice view over the village. Even this free sample was not easy to come by - after we finished it, there was no more forthcoming. I felt this was a bit stingy, compared to the generous sample bags given away at other villages. Like lining up for an hour to get into Louis Vuitton in Paris, begging for leaves in Lao Ban Zhang is a humbling experience. LBZ is a town where buyers are price insensitive, and the locals earn an average of RMB 300,000 a year. We were out of our league, and treated like poor tourists.

Lao Ban Zhang - a village in transition

A fistful of dollars - check out the downy white hairs!

A large tinshed built in front of his house sheltered 100kg of fresh leaves which Ge Er had laid out on the floor to wither. Because of the recent rain, he estimated it would take4.3kg of fresh leaves to make 1kg of maocha this year. We admired the finewhite hairs coating the leaves, a LBZ specialty.

A small fortune in LaoBanZhang maocha

On theother side of Ge Er’s house, large mats covered in maocha were drying under overcast skies. Itusually takes 5 hours to dry, but it suddenly began to drizzle. “Quick!” Ge Eryelled, “Everyone help to bring the maocha inside!” We hustled into action,almost falling down the steep stairs of his hut, then struggled to roll up& lift the heavy mats with their valuable cargo. It tooks us a few minutesto get all the tea inside the shed, where most of the available space wasalready covered in wilting leaves!

Hustling to bring the maocha inside

Flushedwith baijiu and the sudden exertion of moving a small fortune in tea, we satdown and started a 2^nd session with a Nannuo bing that one of Ge Er’scustomers had pressed. I was the happy recipient of a free bing, only to discover in subsequent tastings, that the tea has a weird chemical taste, that could be pesticides or simply the result of being stored in the car for too long! I’ve since broken up this cake andconsigned it to soaking up the smells of new clay pots.

The tainted Nannuo bing

In the end, I was able to pick up 3kg of LBZ spring maocha from another source, just enough to make a tong of 357g cakes, with enough maocha left over for months of frivolous drinking. Reflecting back, I admire Ge Er's refusal to sell us any maocha, as it suggests he’s a man who does the right thing by his customers, not the greedy, unscrupulous type of dealer one might expect, given the easy money that's flooded the village in recent years.

Footnote: This visit took place in early April 2011. I have heard the price for LBZ spring maocha this year reached a record breaking RMB 1,900 / kg!

He Kai Ancient Tea Garden

2011-10-09T04:21:00.000-07:00

Notentirely satisfied with the trees we had seen in Yiwu, we set out to visit theancient tea gardens of He Kai (贺开 but pronounced "Hor kai" in Banna), 75km south west of Jinghong. Leaving Yiwu, we drove down through Jinuomountain & Jinghong city, then back up the other side through Nannuo &Menghai. We passed through the paddy fields of Menghun on a bumpy dirt track,then slowly wound our way up He Kai mountain, our little van rattling &shaking violently all the way.

Paddy fields in Menghun

Feelingthoroughly shaken up from the arduous journey, it was a relief to finallyarrive in He Kai. Little black haired pigs roamed freely amongst 3-5m tall teatrees, with thick, robust trunks that rose a meter out of the ground beforebranching out into a leafy spray. Compared to the over picked, pruned &wispy trees we had seen in Yiwu, it appeared as if we had arrived in gu shuwonderland. Despite being at 1,400-1,600m elevation, He Kai is still considered semi-tropical and has thousands of old tea trees ranging from 100 - 800 years old.

Unfortunately,the local Lahu tribes people only pick the tea, most of the maocha production is done at several “chu zhi suo” (初制所 maocha processing workshops) operated by Hani minority and Han Chinese traders. These workshops buy fresh leaves from the farmers at less than RMB 30/kg, and process them into maocha, selling them onto puer buyers likemyself for RMB 150-300/kg (remember it takes 4kg of fresh leaves &labour to make 1kg of maocha).

According to Rishi (who neglected to credit The Leaf), Fair Trade programshave funded road hardening, toilets & temples, but the key to improvingpeople’s lives here is surely to train them to process & market maochathemselves so they can capture a bigger share of their tea’s true market value.

Lahu tea pickers lining up to sell their fresh leaves to the maocha factory

As wearrived a local Lahu man was trying to offload a bag of leaves he had picked.He seemed dazed as if he’d been smoking opium, his clothes weretattered & dusty, but he wore an incongruously flashy red hiphop cap,raked to one side. The “chu zhi suo” manager turned him away because he hadpicked too many old leaves, and the leaves had been in the bag too long, andwithered too much. The man barely put up a fight, and just shuffled off intothe distance with his unwanted leaves.

Laying out maocha to dry by the side of the road

Maocha wasspread out to dry on a bamboo platform by the side of the road, but the constantpassing of motorcycles & pickups kicked up a lot of sandy dust that nodoubt ends up in the tea. Sure enough when we entered the “chu zhi suo” tosample the maocha, we found it lackluster, with low contrast in the leaves, andvery weak fragrance. When thrown into the air, clouds of fine dust flew fromthe tea. It was simply too unappealing to buy, even at the cheap price of RMB150 / kg.

An elderly Lahu woman sells her leaves to Zhen Wei Hao maocha factory

Hiddenamongst the trees, we came across a more professional chu zhi suo owned by“Zhen Wei Hao” (臻味号). Several tea tourists had pitchedtheir tents on the verandah and were picking & processing their own maocha.A steady stream of tea pickers turned up to sell their freshly picked leaves.These were laid out to wither on 3 long tables with a ventilation fan installedunderneath. They weren’t firing any tea when we visited, but outside on largebamboo mats, maocha processed the day before, was soaking up the sun, away fromthe dust of the road.

Zhen Wei Hao's maocha processing facility in HeKai

He Kai's ancient tea trees actually form a canopy

Thesurrounding tea garden was astounding, the ancient trees in He Kai stand tall& proud, forming a dense canopy of leaves. Their sturdybranches support orchids, lichen & other epiphytes. They are excellentexamples of healthy, organic, gu shu tea trees.

Epiphytic orchids & bromeliads

Branches dripping with mosses & lichens

This tree named 西保四号 is older than 600 years.

With the little blackpigs going about their business underfoot, He Kai’s ancient tea garden is amost charming & photogenic place.

Pigs roaming the tea garden

On the downside,we saw many farmers using motorcycles on the walking tracks up through thetrees, leaving deep ruts that are causing erosion. In some parts the path hasdeepened into a one foot deep crevasse.

Motorcycle track through HeKai tea forest

And forsome reason, the maocha did not impress. We drank several batches at Zhen WeiHao’s facility but still were not inspired to buy. The tea lacked fragrance, ordepth of body to speak of. Perhaps it was because it had rained recently, andthere was too much water content in the leaves. I wanted so much to like thetea, because the trees were amazing and the price was good, but we left emptyhanded.

Magnificent gushu leaves reduced to tasteless maocha

New roads in He Kai

It was timeto move on. Newly bulldozed roads laced into the distance, but people here are still accustomed to walking kilometers to getanywhere. Strung out along the road were colorful Lahu kids withdyed hair walking home from school. We passed by one village of ramshackle huts with corrugated tin roofing and a few brick outhouses. Overhead electricity cablesand a few solar water heaters were the only sign that we were in the 21^stcentury.

Lahu kids walking home from school

Lahu Village in He Kai

We passedthrough the village of Bang Pen (帮盆 often pronounced & spelt as Ban Pen), stopping briefly to pick up some maocha samples. The Lahu villagers here seem to be doing a little better, perhaps because a lot of their tea successfully makes it way into Lao Ban Zhang cakes ;) I noticed several had built small PVC glass houses for sun drying maocha, and a large maocha processingfacility that was attracting buyers in big SUVs.

Puer factory in Bangpen, Bulang mountain range

But it aswe drove closer to Lao Ban Zhang (老班章 or LBZ), the true economic impact of puer driven investmentbecame clear.

First wenoticed the tea shrubs by the side of the road starting to look very stressed & over picked. Many wereclinging grimly to the edge of a precipice, roots half exposed where the road had been widened.

Tea tree roots exposed by road widening in Lao Ban Zhang

Then the disfigured village of Lao Ban Zhang came into view, huge chunks of hillside had been carved out fornew housing & roads. One wonders how many tea trees have been lost in the process. The village is going through a construction boom, withwhite cement walls & blue ceramic roofing defining the new architectural style. Many homes alreadyhave a pickup truck and several motorcycles parked outside. The contrast between Lao Ban Zhang and Hekai could not have been more stark.

New landscaping in Lao Ban Zhang

Construction boom in Lao Ban Zhang

This rapid modernization is ugly but inevitable, as much as those of us living in the first world selfishly want the few remaining tribal villages to preserve their environment & traditional way of life, the modern conveniences of machinery, large concrete homes & paved roads have an irreversible appeal. It is interesting to ponder that even though Lao Ban Zhang's trees are commercially over exploited & sometimes blended, they still produce better tasting tea than He Kai's ancient trees, and therefore bring dramatic wealth & progress into the farmers lives.

Is this primarily an outcome of better maocha processing & marketing? How much genetic & environmental advantages could Lao Ban Zhang trees really have over nearby Bangpen?

To becontinued in Part 2: Lao Ban Zhang…

The dying craft of hand made paper

2011-09-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

Belle and I wanted to use hand made Dai paper for our Puer packaging.

There is one small, quiet village in Menghun county, Xishuangbanna, which still specializes in the traditional cottage industry of hand making paper.

Stirring stick & vats for paper making

The raw material is bark from the mulberry tree, which is soaked in water to make it soft, then boiled & blended into pulp.

Bales of mulberry bark waiting to be pulped

Fresh pulp

The pulp is dissolved into a tank of water, which needs to be stirred vigorously, until the paper particles become suspended.

Agitating the pulp & water mix

Wire mesh, held in a bamboo frame, is lowered into the solution, and gently lifted out. A thin layer of paper fibers accumulates on the filter, as the water drains through.

The paper particles catch on the wire mesh held in this frame

The paper frame is put out to dry in the sun. So simple! And friendly to the environment! Unfortunately, only the old folks make paper these days. Their kids are all working in the factories of Menghai and Jinghong. Will there be another generation of traditional Dai paper makers?

Paper drying under the sun

Happy paper makers!

Fresh off the press

2011-09-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

A wonderful old printing machine

Handmade Dai paper coming off the press

One of six designs for our first puer collection

Tea Urchin neifei ready for pressing!

Pressing Puer in Man Zhuang

2011-09-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

Drying maocha in Man Zhuang village, Xiangming

I had heardthat the village of Man Zhuang 曼庄 was one of the best places to buy pure gu shu near Yiwu. Man Zhuang (sometimes misspelt as Man Zhuan) is one of the 6 famous tea mountains of ancient times (六大茶山), and produces some exceptionally fragranttea, because their old trees grow organically surrounded by natural forest.Apart from a little weed cutting with machete, these 200 year old trees live in balancewith the lichen & insects. So we made the 2 hour trip from Yiwu's main town, rattlingover 55km of cobblestone & dirt track, to see these trees for ourselves.

A shelter amongst the tea trees

Like a lotof the famous tea villages, Man Zhuang is surprisingly small. The village iscomprised of only 28 families, who share 50-60mu of old trees split into parcelsof land on the east & west sides of the mountain (elevation 1,250m). Theypick 5 times a year, including winter / rain tea, yet only produce 100kg a year. Their 2011 maocha was selling for RMB 400/kg. I asked the farmers if it would be better for the trees &the value of their tea if they only picked 2 or 3 times a year. They said theycontantly pick throughout the year to maximise the growth of buds, and reducehuangpian (which only sells for RMB 10 / kg).

"Ba Jiao" - small, sweet bananas

Litter on the track

We walkeddown through the village to see their tea garden. Every household was sundrying maocha in large pans, propped up on every elevated surface. Passingthrough an outcrop of “ba jiao” banana trees, I was disappointed to see plasticrefuse & tin cans littering the dirt track. But 200m further down, and we emergedinto a clearing where roughly 100 trees 2-3m high were growing on a steep slope,surrounded by natural forest.

Man Zhuang's tea trees, growing in the forest

Compared tothe 100 year old plantation bushes we had seen in Yiwu, these were stand alonetrees growing in a less landscaped environment, but they were still rather thin& wispy, with long tall branches growing vertically up to give them theirheight. They appeared somewhat denuded, relative to old trees I saw on Nannuo& Bulang. Perhaps due to the constant picking they endure. Unlike theanimist tribes such as the Jinuo people on YouLe, who venerate their tea treesand sacrifice chickens to them, the Han Chinese who settled in Yiwu are knownfor pushing their trees harder. So whilst I wasn’t terribly impressed by ManZhuang’s trees, we at least got a good reference of what passes for a 200 year old tree.

Typical Man Zhuang tea tree trunk (purportedly 200 years old)

Lichen lichen everywhere

Back in thevillage we met Zhu Ke Cheng (朱克诚 ) a solid rock of man who looked more like a rugby player than a tea producer. He told us he used to be so muscly, nobody believed he sold tea fora living. I asked him if he was a wrestler or weight lifter. “No, but you’re onthe right track,” he replied. “I was trained as an athlete, but you’ll neverguess which sport.”

It turnsout Mr. Zhu was a rifle shooter in China’s Olympic team.

Born inChuzhou, Anhui, he didn’t go to school as a child, as he couldn’t understandmandarin! Mr. Zhu now runs a tea house in Dong Guan, a factory town inGuangzhou famous for its palatial KTVs & saunas. Every year he comes toYiwu to press cakes under his private label “Cheng Pu Tian Xia” (诚普天下), which hestamps with the Beijing Olympics icon of a rifle shooter.

On hiswrist was a heavy Tibetan silver bracelet, a popular accoutrement with puer producers. Around his neck, hung a veryexpensive Huang La Shi (honey wax stone) necklace that he drove 1,000km toJiangxi to buy. He bought a solid pieceof rock and had a factory polish it down to make the beads. Like many in theChinese tea business, appreciation for gu shu is just one aspect of a wider culturalappreciation for traditional Chinese art & craftsmanship.

Zhu Ke Cheng (朱克诚 ) of Cheng Pu Tian Xia (诚普天下)

Mr. Zhu told me that there is too much fake gushu in Yiwu, especially in MaHei, which he claims blends more tai di thananywhere else & sprays too much pesticide. “If you want pure gu shu youhave to run around too much.” He prefers to come to ManZhuang each year, wherehe lives with the farmers for 50 days each season. “It’s not comfortable,” hejoked. “There’s no fast cars or pretty girls!”

Mr. Zhuonly makes “da shu” (big tree) tea from trees that are 3-5m tall. I think thereis a certain logic to preferring tree height & size over purported age. He toldus the wispy trees we had just seen were not the best. The other side of themountain is better. “I don’t like trees that have been pruned to encourageregrowth. The huigan is not as good as free, tall, ancient trees” heexplained.

Mr. Zhuprocesses his tea with an Yi minority family that lives in ManZhuang. We sat in their courtyard, with the sunblazing down, and sampled tea they had picked 2 days ago. It had a clear lightyellow liquor, and tasted soft, buttery, but bland. Mr. Zhu explained freshlypicked leaves had low cha qi (tea energy) and xiang qi (fragrance), especiallywhen overcast & humid. “This needs to be put away for awhile.” he said.

In a small cottagenearby, workers were pressing cakes from 2006 maocha that he had got stuck with when the market collapsed in 2007. Themaocha had been stored in the rafters of the farmers house in Man Zhuang allthis time, a sign of their strong, trusting relationship.

The maocha was unceremoniously dumped into a large heap on the polished cement floor. The workers then used a large hand scoop togather up a bamboo pan’s worth at a time, which in turn was used to fill the tin steaming cans. The technician weighing out the portions wore a facemask & hair cap to prevent contamination of the maocha (first time I've seen this at the cottage industry level), but the steam &press guys didn’t, I guess because once the tea is in the bag, there's no human contact until the drying stage.

Weighing & steaming maocha before pressing into bings

Stone pressing puer cakes in Man Zhuang, Yiwu

We wereinvited to eat lunch with Mr. Zhu and his kind host family. We were served a delicious vegetable soup, with rice, tofu, eggs & fish. “Good teamakes you happy, healthy & comfortable.” Mr. Zhu said. “Our mainresponsibility as producers is to ensure there is no pesticide in the product.” This is why he is driven to only make gu shu cakes, and stays with the farmers to supervise the entire process from tree selection, picking, processing & pressing. I learnt from Mr. Zhu that tea made from the twigs of the tree is the most nutritious, and that leaf hairhas the most polyphenols. He advises his customers to store his tea for 3 yearsbefore drinking, as he believes the tea is in an awkward transitionstage before then. Like many producers who prefer Yiwu to Bulang,his ideal tea is sweet, with “sheng jin” (生津 salivation inducing effect). He avoids ku cha (bitter tea), because it reminds him of Chinese medicine.

Zhu Ke Cheng's private label "Cheng Pu Tian Xia" 诚普天下

Afterlunch, we hassled Mr. Zhu to let us try the 2006 tea he was currently pressing.He generously pulled a few cakes off the rack but warned us it hadn’t completely driedyet, so not to expect much fragrance. We enjoyed it nonetheless and bought a few cakes as souvenirs. Mr. Zhu is old school and doesn't believe in selling online, but if you’re ever in Dong Guan, you can visit hisshop 诚普天下 in 东莞市南城区宏远宏景中心A9号铺 where this cake sells at RMB 600 for a 400g bing. As I have 3 cakes in my collection, you can also contact me for a free sample.

Interestingly, Mr. Zhu thinks the protected "1,000 year old tree" we saw in Luo Shui Dong was at most 400-500years old. He believes the oldest tree in Yiwu is less than 600 years old and in Gua Feng Zhai.

Yours truly with Zhu Ke Cheng

View Tea villages of Yiwu in a larger map

A teacher we all can learn from

2011-09-20T20:51:00.000-07:00

Mr. Gao frying leaves with his bare hands

I spent several days with Mr. Gao in his home in Yiwu, drinking his tea, and listening to his stories about the local tea industry. Mr. Gao is a native of Xi Kong village, in Yi Bang, where there are many old tea trees, some over 1,000 years old. He served me a 2011 spring gushu from Yi Bang that was exquisitely soft & sweet, with no bitterness or astringency at all. This was followed by a 2009 spring gushu from Xi Kong that was everything I look for in a tea – clean, fresh & flavorfull, with a hint of aged taste, and that salivation inducing effect that the Chinese call “sheng jin” 生津.

Mr. Gao's 2006 private pressing of 1,000 year old Xikong trees

He then cracked open a 2006 cake made from 1,000 year old trees he picked in Xi Kong. He steeped this for an extra long time, almost competition style, as this is the best way to detect differences in tea. The concentrated 1,000 year old Xi Kong tea was very bitter at first, but mostly at the back of the throat, and the bitterness faded away very quickly, and without any astringency. Lastly, for an extreme comparison, he served a tai di cha which he had also picked near his school & processed himself. Mr. Gao told me he only processes tai di cha to teach his guests how to taste the difference between gu shu and tai di. The tai di cha had a nice floral aroma, but it was bitter with a strong astringency on the tongue, and an unpleasant hairy feel in the throat. We continued to drink the 1,000 year old Xi Kong tea, enjoying its amazing hui gan from the 8^th steep through to the 20th.

Clear felling natural forest cover in Yiwu

As a prominent local spokesman & puer enthusiast, what concerns Mr. Gao most, is the loss of natural forest cover. To raise living standards, the Government is releasing land on the cheap, and encouraging farmers to plant rubber & banana plantations. Farmers buy virgin forest at low prices of 8 RMB per mu (roughly $20 US dollars per acre). The trees are clear felled and the land scorched & terraced, before planting the new cash crops. “They are burning our national treasure warehouse!” Mr. Gao exclaimed.

Young banana plantations in Yiwu

As with the pace of development all across China, Yunnan’s forest are disappearing fast. With a widening gap between rich industrialized cities and rural poor, the Government is encouraging farmers to move to the cities, so small family land plots, can be consolidated in larger, more efficient farms. This also helps to compensate for China’s poor welfare system, as family members that move to cities to work, often provide financially for the family back in the village, and eventually pull more family members to come live & work in the city. The Government wants to bring the rural population out of poverty, because providing economic development and preventing social unrest is their key mandate. But the changes in land management policy are more economic in nature and have not taken into consideration the long term environmental effects. I have seen the same thing happen in Malaysia and Indonesia, where in a few generations, monoculture palm oil and rubber plantations have replaced much of the natural rainforest. It pains me that something as dear to my heart as puer, is under threat from lowly commodities like rubber & bananas!

As a prominent local citizen, Mr. Gao believes the books & articles he’s written have influenced the Tea Research Institute’s policy to recommend farmers keep 12 native trees / mu. These trees provide habitat for birds & spiders that reduce insect pests, and their leaf fall prevents weeds. But encouraged by rising tea prices and cheap government land, many tea farmers have also cleared forest to plant dense monoculture “tai di cha” (terraced plantation tea), which he believes is contributing to making the air too dry & creating an explosion in pests. These stunted plants then need fertilizer to grow, and pesticides to kill the bugs. “The roots of a tea plant are roughly proportional to the plant’s height.” Mr. Gao explained. A 7-8m tall ancient tree, will have developed a root system that reaches 7-8m deep. Tai di cha is grown from cuttings, with shallow root systems that reach only 1-2m deep, limiting the minerals they can draw on, so the tea is more bitter and astringent. “The tea has no natural taste!” Mr. Gao sighs.

In 2008 Mr. Gao published an open letter to the premier Wen Jia Bao, that attracted the attention of several journalists, who were coming to Yunnan and wanted to interview him. But the government handlers told the journalists Mr. Gao had gone crazy, and was unreachable, in hospital. “I’m not crazy,” Mr. Gao laughs, “The society is crazy!”

I really admire Mr. Gao’s passion for puer, and his dedication to protecting the environment. He wants to preserve the natural beauty of the landscape, and encourage tourism. In a country where being an outspoken critic can have repurcussions, Mr. Gao is a brave & indispensable man.

Learning how to identify gu shu & make maocha

2011-09-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

There are many villages surrounding Yiwu, that supply the maocha that gets pressed into Yiwu puer cakes. Tea produced in Yiwu is generically labeled “Yiwu zheng shan” but more recently, producers of single origin gu shu cakes have started promoting specific villages like Luo Shui Dong, Ma Hei, Man Zhuang & Gua Feng Zhai by proudly printing the village names on the front of the cake. Whilst there is a lot of plantation tea in Yiwu, these small villages are known for having some excellent “gu shu” or ancient trees. Luo Shui Dong and Ma Hei are relatively close to Yiwu town and can both be covered in a single day, but Man Zhuang and Gua Feng Zhai are each 2-3 hours drive away.

Our wonderful guides, Echo & Ah-Hong from Banna View, introduced us to Yiwu’s local school teacher, Mr. Gao. Apart from teaching maths & science, Mr. Gao is also responsible for protecting the chastity of the teenage girls who stay at the school dormitory! We shared lunch with Mr. Gao, who has also written a book on Puer’s history, and produced a popular map of the Yiwu area, showing the location of each tea producing village. Short, sun-browned & stocky, Mr. Gao is an outspoken but loveable local character. Each year, he picks & hand processes his own maocha, and presses his own cakes for personal consumption. He doesn’t wash or rinse his leaves, because he knows it’s all organic and very valuable. “The only way to drink perfect tea is to make it yourself,” he says jokingly, “Even Hu Jin Tao doesn’t drink tea as good as this.”

Mr. Gao showing us a 700 year old tree in Luo Shui Dong

Caterpillars eating tea leaves

Mr. Gao took us to see a 700 year old tea tree, halfway along the cobblestone road from Yiwu town to the nearby village of Luo Shui Dong. I was impressed by the height of the tree, about 15m tall, but it looked sickly, and was growing out of the mountain at an awkward angle. Its foundation had been shored up with a retaining wall & some metal poles, as it was in danger of toppling over in a landslide. Nearby, some other old trees had reached 3-4 meters in height, but the vast majority was still shrub height bushes, about 100 years old. Mr. Gao pointed out some caterpillars that were fattening themselves on tea leaves. “No pesticides used here.”

The village of Ma Hei, Yiwu

Dog & Monkey in Ma Hei

We drove on to Ma Hei village, where I photographed this monkey & dog, fighting over a cracker. Whilst I felt sorry for the captive monkey, its good to know there’s still some running wild on Yiwu mountain. We checked out some bright green leaves wilting in the shade. Mr. Gao showed us how to identify gu shu (ancient tree) tea leaves by looking at their texture, rubbing them between your fingers, and eating them raw. Old tea trees produce thicker, more leathery leaves that don’t easily come apart when you rub them. And gu shu buds should be white & shiny. When you chew them, the flavor is very bitter but there is also a strong sweet fragrance, and the juice is relatively easy to swallow. Tai di cha (terrace plantation tea) is also bitter but with a strong, lasting astringency on the sides & front of the tongue, and the juice is harder to swallow.

Gu shu mao cha

When examining maocha, the colour of gu shu leaves tend to be more highly contrasted with a bright white hairy bud/tip surrounded by a grey, open leaf wrapper, with dark black stem & leaves. By comparison, tai di cha is almost all black, due to the use of fertilizer, the leaves grow quickly and the buds have less white hairs.

Gu shu or Tai di?

It was Mr. Gao’s opinion that the batch of wilting leaves we were examining was approximately 30% xiao shu (small tree), and 70% da shu (big tree). Because big trees grow amongst smaller, younger trees, they are often picked together, and the leaves mixed up in the picker's basket. Some farmers will do separate gu shu and xiao shu pickings, if their customers pay a decent premium, but for most, it's easier to pick all their trees at the same time, and sell the blend as gu shu. There just isn’t enough gu shu material to meet market demand, and with so many buyers, you not only need to be able to tell the difference, you need to have strong relationships with the farmers who own gu shu trees. I had heard from other puer buyers that Ma Hei farmers now use pesticide & fertilizer to boost yields. But as we stood there critiquing this batch of Ma Hei tea, a large, multi coloured beetle crawled out of the leaf pile. “We call this guy the tea boss” Mr. Gao explained. “If he’s around, it’s a good sign!”

茶老板 Cha lao ban, "the tea boss"

The terms "Xiao shu" (small tree) and "tai di" (terrace plantation) are often interchangeably used, but they should be given separate meanings. "Tai di" connotes high intensity farming, with the entire slope cleared & terraced to plant hedgerows & use of pesticide & fertilizer. But in many gu shu growing villages, there are also new tea plantations which are too young to be called gu shu (ie. less than 100 years old), but they aren't exactly "tai di" either. Many of these plants are growing next to old trees, in a bio-diverse forest clearing, with lots of space around them, not all are sprayed & fertilized. In the future, they will grow into "gu shu", until then we should call them "shen tai xiao shu" (naturally grown small trees)

There is also a lack of formal definition for "gu shu." Some say "gu shu" should only refer to trees over 300 years of age, that is left to grow tall, and not pruned back. But in reality, most "gu shu" trees are cultivated, which entails annual pruning to encourage regrowth & lower branches for easy picking. A lot of "gu shu" on the market comes from trees as young as 100 years old, some of which is as short as 1.5m high. But a 100 year old tea tree growing in the wild can also grow higher than 3m high. Eventually the government will legislate what classifies as "gu shu." Until then, let the buyer beware!

In a dark hut, we watched a local Ma Hei woman & her daughter in law “chao qing” tea leaves picked earlier that day. The chao qing process (“frying to kill green” in English) involves wok frying the leaves at high temperature to fix the tea enzymes & stop further oxidation. The giant, black wok, is heated over a wood fire, which some say gives traditionally produced maocha a slight smokiness. Once the leaves are thrown in, you have to constantly scoop & flip them in a rapid spin cycle using your hands (most wear gloves, but Mr. Gao showed us how to do it with bare hands). It can take up to 8-10 minutes to finish the frying, depending on the size of each load. The trick is to turn the pile fast enough so the leaves don’t burn on the bottom or side of the wok. Even after withering the leaves still weigh several kilos, and to keep them turning using only your hands is tiring, back breaking work. But when done properly, the end result is so much more satisfying than maocha produced by electric shaqing drum.

“Faster faster!” Mr. Gao pressured the young girl, who looked really tired & grimy, “You’re going too slow!” She gave him a pained look, wiped her sweaty brow with her wrist. But he was right, when we examined her output, the leaves were slightly overdone, some were even burnt black.

Mr. Gao is well known around here, as he has taught most of the kids in Yiwu at one point or another, but his advice on how to hand process maocha is not always so welcome! I asked Mr. Gao why he doesn’t teach more youngsters how to fry tea properly. “Kids these days have no patience,” he grumbled, “They’re lowly educated and have no ambition. Even my own brother doesn’t always listen to me!”

Dinner in Ma Hei - ku suan on the right

We had an interesting dinner of “ku suan” (bitter bamboo shoots) on a hilltop overlooking Ma Hei. Thunder & lightning flashed in the distance as the sun began to set, and it began to rain as we drove back to Luo Shui Dong, where Mr. Gao asked his god daughter to show us how chao qing should really be done.

Mr. Gao's god daughter frying leaves in Luo Shui Dong

Adding a little water to the wok, she energetically turned the leaves with her hands, switching to thin bamboo spatulas for the larger loads. “These are the same tools my mum used when she was my age” she told us proudly. “You have to keep frying until the leaves feel like dry, soft rubber - no longer sticking together.”

Wok frying tea leaves

Bamboo spatulas for wok frying large loads of tea leaves

We each took turns frying a wok full of leaves, trying our best to emulate her technique. Bent over the hot wok, I began to sweat immediately. You have to scrape the bottom of the wok each time, and my fragile city slicker fingers began to burn, despite the woolen gloves I was wearing. My arms quickly tired from the constant circular motion of the spin cycle, and I found it hard to keep all the leaves in play, whilst maintaining the consistent rhythm & pace demanded by my teacher. My great respect for tea firers multiplied in those few short minutes!

A tea firer's beautiful black & blistered hands

Mr. Gao’s god daughter showed us her hands, black & blistered from constant contact with the wok. Her shoulders and arms were built up from frying tea day after day. “It’s impossible to make tea and look beautiful” she joked, laughing heartily.

Learning to "rou nian"

Her father squatted on the ground nearby, kneading & rolling the freshly fried leaves on a bamboo tray. With seemingly effortless movements, he rolled the ball of leaves around & around, fingers splaying wide to gather errant leaves back into the ball. This circular kneading motion called “rou nian” looks easy but is hard to master. The trick is to apply enough pressure to bruise & break the leaf walls, whilst rotating the leaves in a tight ball so they are evenly processed & tightly curled. The tight curl makes them look better when pressed into a bing. He let each of us have a go, laughing as we struggled to keep the warm, sticky leaves together.

Cleaning the wok

Finally, the day’s harvest was processed, and it was time to clean up. Mr. Gao opened the tap above the wok and began scrubbing it vigorously with a reed brush. A huge billowing white cloud of steam shot up as the water evaporated. The fried leaves were evenly spread out to dry on tarpaulins laid out over the floor. If all went well, and tomorrow’s skies were clear, they would be put out to “shai gan” (sun dry). By now, it was already 10pm and everyone was visibly exhausted. But we were thrilled that we had been taught to fry & roll kilos of such valuable gu shu leaves! The warm welcome and tea education we received in Luo Shui Dong is a memory I will treasure forever.

Reed brush used to clean wok

Mug-steeping tea in Ma Hei

Tea Picking in Yiwu

2011-09-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

Yours truly in Yiwu, April 2011

The township of Yiwu is 120km to the east of Jinghong. A modern highway cuts through Jinuo mountain and makes the journey to the base of the Yiwu mountain range short & direct. But once one leaves the highway, it’s a different story. The road narrows to two lanes, climbing through young banana & rubber tree plantations. With no bridges to cut across valleys, the ascent to 1700m is one long and winding road full of hairpin turns & spectacular views. Reflecting Yiwu’s importance in the tea trade, the road is at least paved all the way, not like the potholed sandy tracks leading up to other famous tea villages. Yet with a steep drop off on one side, no guardrail, lane markers or street lights, it is a journey to be made in the daytime, preferably with a driver who knows every bend & makes good use of their horn on those blind corners!

Miao people selling fruit on the road to Yiwu

We stopped to buy some fruit from these impoverished people from the animist Miao tribe, who had been relocated from Yuxi in Jinuo mountain, to look after the banana trees. The trees & land don’t belong to them, and they live on an incredibly steep slope like mountain goats. Despite their hardships, they generously tried to give us a lot more fruit than what we had paid for!

Yiwu town's main road

The modern township of Yiwu is a simple affair, with a few unremarkable two and three storey shop-houses, built around one main road. We arrived just before lunch, but the restaurant staff were all busy making maocha. It seems during the peak production period in early Spring, it’s all hands on deck to make the most of good weather. We sampled some of their tea, but the tea smelt off, and picking through their maocha, we found a lot of burnt leaves. They were also using a machine to “rou nian” the tea (bruise & roll the fried leaves after wok frying), not a good sign in a village famous for its hand made gu shu.

View of old Yiwu village from across the valley

Yiwu primary & middle school

School girls watching the boys play basketball

The more charming, ancient village of Yiwu is located on a nearby hilltop, just below the local primary & middle school which sits atop the crest of the hill. There is no senior high school here, kids that want further education have to be sent to Jinghong. When we arrived at lunch time, the school kids were playing basketball & dodgeball in the quadrangle. An old woman sat beside a cobblestone lane, picking huang pian out of a tray of maocha.

Picking out Huang Pian (older yellow leaves)

Stone steles in the Yiwu tea museum

Adjacent to the school playground is the town museum, basically two small rooms filled with dusty ancient stone steles, recording the town’s history as an early puer trading center. Han chinese traders first arrived in Yiwu in the 17th century with an imperial decree to collect & export tea from the surrounding 6 famous mountains. The stone steles record production quotas and tax levies, as well as the family names of the early settlers. Unfortunately during the cultural revolution, many of these were deliberately broken up and buried, to avoid retribution from red guards hunting for rich land owners.

Chickens everywhere

Many of the town’s people are descendent from those original founding families. They still produce puer today. Trays of maocha lay drying outside their front door, propped up on bamboo poles. Mother hens and their brood of chicks pecked and scuttled about underneath. I caught one rooster crowing & preening himself on top of one tray of maocha, and couldn’t help wondering if the close proximity with animals leads to the occasional “surprise” in the final product.

Now that's what I call You Ji Cha!

Being built on a hill side, Yiwu offers a great view of the surrounding tea fields. Cobble stone tracks wind between village buildings sunbaked & cracked with age. We peeked inside an old house and were invited to take a look around. Upstairs in the attic, old farming implements and household items were arranged on a bench. Two puer bings were drying on the windowsill. The proud house owner explained her family had been living here for hundreds of years. Truly, a house built on tea.

We stopped in at a guesthouse and asked the owner if she’d take us to see her family’s tea trees. Her elderly father sat on the stoop, with a huge disfiguring scar right across his eye. He told us a bear in the forest mauled him, many decades ago. With the sun about to set, we took off at a brisk pace, crossing the valley to where tea bushes grow 1m high, in rough, straggly rows, interspersed with other tree species. Our guide Ah-Hong pointed out many edible wild fruit & flowers that grew there, and we had a great time picking fruit as well as tea. Large camphor trees rose up above the tea bushes, a natural deterrent against insects, although some say their presence naturally scents the tea too. Also hidden in the tea garden are ancestral tombs, evidence of the close relationship between the tea farmers and their trees.

The spring flush

Lichen covered branches

Some of the bushes were growing from thick stumps about 15cm wide, and the branches appeared to have been heavily pruned, keeping the bushes around 1-1.5m tall. I heard this tea is still sometimes sold as “da shu" (big tree or arbor tea), as the stumps are over a hundred years old. Nearby, some stumps showed no sign of regrowth and appeared to have died. Our guide explained when a tree gets sick or damaged, they sometimes cut them back to give them a chance to regrow. Another explanation is the farmers deliberately cut back the old trees, to make them easier to harvest and to encourage them to grow faster & produce more leaves.

Aphids disguised as caterpillars

The tea trees were covered in lichen, and we spotted an abundance of hairy white aphids gathered on one plant, a good sign that pesticides & herbicides are not used here. The aphids gather together to disguise themselves as caterpillars, but they jump in all directions when touched.

Tea pickers returning from a hard days work

It was a fantastic afternoon. As we made our way back to the village, young kids in muddy clothes fought a mock gun battle with sticks. Village dogs ran past us, busy on their own secret mission. We were over taken by a sprightly group of tea pickers, their legs covered in blue binding to prevent insect bites & scratches, their cane baskets brimming with the day’s harvest.

After wok frying, comes "Rou Nian" (knead & roll)

Warm & sticky leaves

Back in the village, we watched local women wither, fry & roll the fresh leaves. It takes 4 kgs of fresh leaves (sometimes 4.3kg if it's rained) to make 1 kg of maocha, and the leaves have to be withered first to make them a little sticky & prevent them from shredding during the sha qing (wok frying) process. After being prevented from photographing the “state secrets” of Menghai, it was refreshing to see first hand how the villagers grow & harvest tea, then produce the maocha. For our first day in Yiwu, we could not have asked for more.

Farmers daughter doing her homework

Chickens fighting

Inside the Menghai Tea Research Institute

2011-09-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

Driving through Menghai

The surprising thing about Menghai is that it is pretty much flat. Driving west from Jinghong, one must first ascend Nannuo mountain, before entering the Menghai plateau. The other surprising thing about Menghai is that it’s very populated. Buildings & townships dot the plain. From the highway, you see more vegetable plots & houses than tea farms or factories.

Menghai township

I was here to visit the Menghai Tea Research Institute, which is usually off limits to tourists, but my wife’s teacher in Shanghai had contacted tea friends in Yunnan, and arrangements had been made. We were greeted at the entrance by Mr. Liang Ming Zhi (梁名志), the deputy director of the institute, next to a cute guardhouse fashioned to look like a giant teapot.

World's cutest guard house?

Mr. Liang seemed caught off guard by our visit, as if some unnamed superior had suddenly delegated the task of entertaining the foreign tourists to him.

Given tea’s significance to the Yunnan economy, I was expecting a bustling, state of the art facility. But in reality, the menghai tea institute is a sleepy government outpost, a shadow of its former self. Set within huge grounds on top of a gently sloping hill, the gardens are well maintained, yet eerily absent of people. The many white washed concrete buildings on the grounds attested to an era when hundreds of government employees lived on the grounds.

Statue of Lu Yu outside the main building

Mr. Liang explained the institute was originally founded in 1938, but since the end of the planned economy, the institute has funded itself by selling tea grown on its land. They are in effect, a state owned model farm, producing puer, red & green tea under the institute’s name. Today, they have 120 staff, including 30 pickers, and a research center in Shanghai. One of their big successes in recent years was the development of a new purple bud varietal “Zi Juan” (紫娟) that is particularly effective at lowering blood pressure.

Purple bud varietal “Zi Juan” 紫娟

We entered one of the buildings, which resembled an old school building, filled with silent, empty classrooms. Upstairs, was a large tea room with an assortment of heavy wooden furniture & fading trophies in display cases. A thin layer of dust coated everything, and the thin sunlight entering through the musty windows gave everything the appearance of age. I had the distinct feeling of stepping back in time.

Two middle aged women appeared and began to silently prepare tea. As the electric kettle rumbled & rattled away, I began to ask Mr. Liang questions about the institute’s research work.

Mr. Liang explained shou pu was invented here in the 1970’s, mainly for export to Hongkong and Malaysia, where drinkers were accustomed to a strong storage taste. Whilst farming & cross breeding new strains is their main preoccuptation these days, the institute has also experimented with new processing methods for red tea, and Shou Pu. One recent experiment involved using man made bacteria to improve the pile fermentation process used in Shou Puer production.

In recent years, rising living standards in China have led to a corresponding increase in meat consumption, which Mr. Liang believes is driving demand for Puer as a digestive. I asked where I could find research data on puer’s claimed health benefits. He replied that the French first published research on tuocha’s health benefits in the 70s, followed by the Japanese who discovered it lowered cholesterol & aided digestion. He told me Shanghai Hua Dong University, and Guangzhou’s Jilin university had both carried out domestic studies, but was rather sketchy about where I could find these elusive papers. If any of you readers have come across such research, please do share!

Whilst the English found ancient trees in Assam, India (hence the big-leaf varietal is called “camellia sinensis assamica”), the institute believes the Indian trees descended from Yunnan trees. And there are many counties in Yunnan which claim to be the true origin. According to Mr. Liang, the oldest living tree is in Fengqing, north of Lincang, where there is a 3,000 year old mother tree. I asked Mr. Liang how they determine the age of old trees, without cutting them down. He explained measuring the girth of the trunk & taking core samples is one method, but many of the ancient trees have rotted or empty cores, with new growth growing around the dead core. So tree age is also estimated according to how many generations of villagers have lived there. He gave one example of the Hani tribe who have been living on the mountain for 80 generations, so it is estimated their tea trees are 800 years old.

Due to human propagation & natural adaptation, today there are 47 recorded big leaf varietals and over 1,000 sub varietals. Knowing that China’s food security issues have encouraged the Government to fund genetic engineering of crops, I asked if the institute maintains a seed bank or genetically engineers tea. I was surprised to hear there are too many gene combinations, and big gaps in tea genome mapping. I guess the official answer is “no, but we’re trying!”

Finally the water finished boiling, and we were served the institute’s house brand of 2008 shou pu and a Yunnan green tea called Fo Xiang 佛香 which the institute cross bred from large and small leaf varietals, producing a more concentrated brew than green teas from the north of China.

Fo Xiang 佛香

Mr. Liang elaborated that the institute has maintained a cross breeding program since the 1970s, but it relies on manual pollination by hand. The cross breeding program is not focused on yield increases, but disease & pest resistance. The main disease they are trying to combat is tea blister blight (茶饼病) – a cancer like growth which affects older leaves, especially in high humidity. The biggest pest to tea plants is the small green leaf cicada (小绿叶蝉) which is usually controlled using chemical pesticides, but the institute is trying to develop a varietal with pest deterring sap.

Reminded of my conversation with Mark from Zhi Zheng tea, I asked Mr. Liang if deforestation is leading to climate change that affects Yunnan’s tea. Mr. Liang confirmed that climate change is having an impact, but he didn’t have any data and seemed reluctant to say more on the matter. He did say the institute believes educating farmers on the benefit of organic farming is the key, as it is too impractical to legislate & police every farmer individually.

My final controversial subject for him, was on the rapid growth of terraced plantation tea, known in China as “tai di cha”. Mr. Liang said most tai di cha is grown from cuttings taken from a mother tree. Although plants grown from seed produce better tasting tea, the results are unpredictable, so the institute still advises farmers to propagate from cuttings, which results in consistent buddings & appearance, easier for machine harvesting & processing. They also advise farmers to grow at least 12 non tea trees for every 1 mu of plantation tea, as this biodiversity encourages spiders which reduce the pests. Camphor laurel trees in particular, are a popular choice as their tree oil evaporates into the air, and naturally repel insects.

Our interview over, we took a slow ambling walk around the institute grounds, but were blocked from seeing the tea farm itself, separated by a 2m high concrete wall. Much to our disappointment, we were not allowed to see the experimental plants or the institute’s collection of different varietals, only the purple bud Zi Juan growing outside. However, at one point where the wall dipped into a gully, I did spot 1-2 acres of tai di cha, with no large trees growing inbetween. It seems the institute does not always follow it’s own advice!

A glimpse of plantation tea behind the banana trees

12 non tea trees to every 1 mu (one sixth of an acre)

We bid farewell to our host at the factory gates, ending our official visit with an awkwardly formal photo. Several commemorative & official plaques clung grimly to a rusty metal wall, like medals on an old war veteran. Whilst the glory days for the institute may be in the past, I am very grateful to Mr. Liang for accommodating us & patiently answering my questions, and I thank our Shanghai tea friends & their connections for making this visit possible.

Yours truly, Mr. Liang in the middle, my friend DP on the right

On the road back into Menghai town, we passed some school kids yelling and pointing excitedly at something by the side of the road. We pulled over to take a look, and glimpsed a large snake slithering off into the tea bushes. Our fearless driver Ah-Hong made an effort to locate the snake and herd it back in our direction so we could take photos, but to no avail.

Snake!!!

The road through Menghai

Watermelon vendor in Menghai

Making maocha with Zhi Zheng on Nannuo Mountain

2011-09-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

Mark serving tea in Zhi Zheng's shop in Jing Hong tea market

An Englishman in Jing Hong

Mark Turner is one of the few foreigners who calls Jing Hong home. He is the British half of Zhi Zheng tea, a producer of organic, hand-made, ancient tree puer. Zhu Ge, his business partner, is a white haired Beijinger with connections in the entertainment industry.

Zhu Ge serving tea at Zhi Zheng's maocha processing facility on Nannuo

Freshly made maocha being laid out to sun dry

Zhi Zheng recently set up their own maocha processing facility on Nannuo shan, to better control the quality of maocha production by buying fresh leaves directly from farmers & hiring an experienced technician to hand-fry the leaves to perfection. It also functions as a guest house for their VIP customers, a colourful bunch of tea enthusiasts who scour the nearby villages in hunt of the best leaves. We visited their guesthouse in Nannuo and met some of Zhi Zheng’s Beijing customers who had driven for 3 days from Beijing, just to buy direct from Zhi Zheng’s network of local farmers.

Picking the 2011 spring flush on Nannuo mountain

Mark spent many years studying Taoism in Malaysia and has lived in Jinghong for 5 years. He has lived through the construction boom and seen the climate change as farmers clear land and switch to new, more profitable, crops. Yunnan is basically one big crumple zone for the Himalayas crashing into Asia, with huge variations in elevation creating a variety of climates along its mountain ranges. This is why Yunnan has the highest bio diversity & ethnic diversity in China. Unfortunately, as the rainforest in the lower lying regions has been cut back and replaced with bananas & rubber, there is reduced mist & rainfall for the tea trees higher up the mountains.

Garbage surrounding a sign which says "do not throw garbage here"

The tea farmers are not entirely innocent victims. As Puer has risen in popularity, farmers have cleared forest & even cut down some of their ancient tea trees to make way for new homes & higher density, higher yield plantations, boosted with fertilizer and pesticides. It is a familiar lament, but Mark brought it home with another troubling indicator closer to home – that you can’t find monkeys on Nannuo mountain anymore. Worse still, some farmers are cutting their trees in half to encourage regrowth & make them easier to harvest. I personally saw many trees that fit this description in Yiwu, where many of the bushes grow out of 300 year old tree stumps. For those interested in reading more about environmental changes impacting Yunnan’s tea trees, Andrew Stein, a Fullbright scholar who blogs for Wild China is well worth following.

Elderly tea picker on Nannuo Shan

Back in town, we visited Zhi Zheng’s cosy shop in the heart of Jing Hong’s tea market. Mark served us two of Zhi Zheng’s teas, refusing to tell us anything about them, until we had drank & formed our own opinion. The tea tasted great but I couldn’t place them. I discovered the tea I liked best was actually Zhi Zheng’s 2010 Bulang Autumn Charm (秋韵 "Qiu Yun" RMB 390), which was the 3^rd time in recent tastings that I had preferred the Autumn harvest over the Spring. Very interesting…

A beautiful cake for sale in Zhi Zheng's store in Jing Hong

Mark explained Autumn maocha prices now set the price for the following spring, and can be more expensive than the previous Spring. 2011 spring prices for Bulang maocha ranged from RMB 400-800/kg, depending on the village. Nannuo used to be much cheaper, but because it is only 30min drive from JingHong, its gets more tourists than Yiwu or Bulang. The tourists buy directly from the farmers, and have driven prices up from RMB 240 to 400/kg. So expect prices for gu shu to continue to go up, especially with the new Jing Hong airport opening soon, allowing more flights in. All the more reason to stock up now!

In this semi-autonomous region, I was fascinated to hear how land is inherited & apportioned by the village head. Typically a family might have 3-4 patches of land on different parts of the mountain, making it hard to keep watch around the clock. One can only imagine the system of village justice used to identify thieves & punish them. Mark told me many of the farmers have hand made guns for hunting, I guess these weapons are equally good at dissuading tea poachers!

Freshly picked leaves being brought into the village for processing

I asked Mark about the rumors of maocha being smuggled in from cheaper, neighbouring regions, in order to sell it at a profit in higher priced villages like Lao Ban Zhang. Mark said the supply chain can only be truly transparent if you live with the farmers and pick & process the tea with them. There are very few producers who do this, as it severely restricts the number of regions you can cover in a given season. So ultimately, a lot of maocha is still bought on trust, and your ability to taste pure gushu maocha from those blended with younger trees. Ever the philosopher, Mark asked us “Does it really matter where it’s from? The real question is the tea any good?”

Does a name like “Bulang” really guarantee a consistent, characteristic flavor profile? Bulang mountain consists of many smaller peaks, and trees from different parts of the mountain, can have very different flavor, influenced by genetic mutation, soil, sunlight & shade. Even trees 3-6m apart can produce dramatically different flavors. So how can you tell if what you are buying is the real deal? You need to train your palate & build strong relationships with your suppliers.

Fresh Nannuo maocha

The farmer’s technique in turning fresh leaves into sundried maocha is another critical influence. Not only must the trees be good, but the farmer must also be highly skilled in hand-frying & kneading fresh leaves into maocha. It’s easy to over fry the leaves, which produces a burnt cabbage taste, says Mark. Hopefully they don’t over harvest their trees too, as unhealthy stressed teas produce weaker tea. Lastly, the density of the pressed tea affects oxidation & how it ages, which is why if you compare an aged maocha to an aged cake made from the same batch of material, it will taste different.

A lot of the tea we had drank so far in Bana had been underwhelming compared to what we had drunk in Kunming. Mark’s view is Bana stored teas have suppressed xiang qi (fragrance) compared to Kunming, perhaps because the humid climate in Bana doesn’t allow the tea aroma to fully open up. When tea is moved from Bana to another city, the climatic change in storage will again affect the tea. Resting the tea for 1 month will allow it to acclimatize before drinking.

We headed across the road to a Thai restaurant for lunch, where Mark surprised me with some new facts about shou pu production. Whereas single mountain gu shu is highly prized among sheng afficianiados, Mark says good shou pu requires a variety of material from different mountains otherwise the tea tastes flat. He also told us shou cha is made in 1 tonne batches, and that the pile loses weight during the process, which is why good material (ie. gu shu) is rarely “wasted” in making shou cha, as it will shrink and sell for a lower price.

Mark's water container & serving gourd

I learnt a lot from Mark. He was very open & generous with sharing his knowledge. If you are ever in Jing Hong, the Zhi Zheng store is well worth a visit. I particularly like how their still water is stored in an earthenware pot, and scooped out by hand, using a large gourd. Mark has experimented with many different kinds of water, and recommends water from a volcanic source. Of all the branded mineral waters, he recommends Volvic for its neutral pH. Avoid alkaline water, which makes the tea tastes more astringent.

Zhi Zheng's new guesthouse / maocha factory on Nannuo

The toilets have some creative flair!

Yours truly, doing some tree climbing on Nannuo's steep slopes

Tong Qing Hao commemorative Puer

2011-07-23T01:33:00.000-07:00

Tong Qing Hao 同庆号 has over 270 years history. Founded in Yiwu in 1736, it had its heyday during the Qing dynasty. More recently, it has been resurrected as the industry leader in premium puer gifts - the Chinese president Hu Jin Tao has gifted Tong Qing Hao to Gordon Brown, Dimitri Medvedev, and Queen Elizabeth! Interestingly enough, Medvedev got the biggest gift – two 357g cakes, compared to the Queen's 288g couplet. I have heard that the Russians are big buyers of Puer, I guess more so than the English!

Tong Qing Hao is about as commercial as Puer gets. Their small but beautiful showroom is set in a beautiful garden in the heart of Jing Hong, with little private tea tasting rooms separated by streams full of koi.

On arrival, we were assigned a female guide, who explained the company history, using a series of billboards planted along the walkway. Some of the photos were a bit exaggerated, with a large group of supervisors in white lab coats & face masks, poring over leaves.

Making state gifts is a serious business!

Still using the same logo after all these years

I love Tong Qing Hao’s iconic logo, showing a dragon chasing a horse, with a pagoda in the background. Our guide explained the dragon represents the universe, the pagoda represents mankind, and the horse represents the earth. Supposedly, the logo shows the 3 of them coexisting harmoniously, but then why is the dragon is spewing fire onto the horse?

Each bing wrapped lovingly by hand

Entering the manicured, tropical garden, we found a single storey brick building off to one side, with sharp, golden, upturned Dai gables. Behind large glass windows, we could see a steam & press production line with electric powered machine presses, and a separate packing room with 6 women in head scarves hand wrapping the finished product. Not quite big enough for commercial production, it’s a sanitized model showroom for tourists.

Manual wooden press, electric machine press in background

The observation room was strangely empty of product, but contained an interesting wooden contraption for visitors to make their own bings. This novel wooden press requires the operator to stand on one ond of a wooden lever and jump up and down like an angry chimpanzee. I guess its easier for the novice than gyrating on a stone press. It is certainly less dignified!

We decided to press a commemorative cake for fun. Pressing a 400g bing cost RMB240 for their 2010 Yiwu plantation tea (or “Tai di cha” 台地茶), approximately 5 times the cost of raw material, but it’s all about the experience!

Dedicating the neifei

Before pressing the cake, we were given pens to dedicate & sign our names on the neifei. Then came the fun part, scooping maocha into the steamer tin. To make a 400g cake you have to put 412g of maocha into the steamer. I had heard about this 3% loss of weight before, and was pleased to find out it was true.

Weighing up 412g

Steaming... about to wrap the cloth bag over one end

Tying the knot

Jumping up & down like a chimpanzee

Proud puer parents

After pressing our bing, it was taken away to be dried in the "hong gan" 烘干 room, or drying oven. We would have to wait until the next day before we could wrap it in paper.

As a maker of gift sets & commemorative bings, Tong Qing Hao is famous for its beautiful & innovative packaging. They use bamboo, wood & woven reeds to create hand crafted gifts worthy of a head of state.

Tong Qing Hao's flagship giftset

Some of the packaging was reminiscent of swiss chocolate my Dad brought back from a business trip when I was a kid.

Chocolate? Soap? Or Puer?

Although quite a few producers do this, I always get a kick out of seeing the manufacturer’s logo actually branded into the bamboo skin of each tong.

Now that's good branding!

Reed baskets for your puer bings

Afternoon tea with a Puer Master Blender

2011-07-17T05:44:00.000-07:00

Tong Xing Hao Factory in Menghai

As the Tong Xing Hao factory workers finished work for the day, we settled down in the office to drink some tea & eat rockmelon with the manager, Chen Jie (陈金秀), or “older sister Chen” as we called her.

Chen Jie was only 16 when she started working at Dayi, back in the days when it was still a state owned enterprise. She was trained as a blender, responsible for getting the mix of raw materials just right, to produce famous recipes such as my favorite Dayi shou pu recipe 8592.

She described working in a warehouse full of boxes of maocha. Her job was to classify maocha coming into the factory, and to select the right amounts of each type for blending. The raw materials would then be put on a cart and sent off to be processed.

Chen Jie (wearing the blue apron)

It was a thrill to sit with Chen Jie and hear stories of Dayi in the 1990’s. She told us how Guo Yan, who now runs MengYang GuoYan (勐养国艳) was then nicknamed “xiao mei nu” (pretty girl). When Dayi was privatized in 2004, more than 50% of the staff left, and Guo Yan left to help Ruan Dian Rong start her “Six Famous Mountains” brand in Kunming (六大茶山). The rest as they say, is history.

Now in her fifties, Chen Jie has a 27 year old son who works in the public security bureau. Her younger sister married the boss of Tong Xing Hao. Under Chen Jie’s guidance, Tong Xing hao now makes replica 8592 and 7542, which we greedily slurped & sampled. We also drank a “zao xiang zhuan” (red date brick) made from similar material to Dayi 8592. It did indeed have a distinct red date flavor. Chen Jie explained that prettier grade 3 leaves were used on the surface for appearance, but taste bitter. Grades 9 and 10 are larger leaves added to provide sweetness.

8592 "zao xiang zhuan"

Homage to 7542

I felt like I was in the presence of living history, but Chen Jie was just amused that foreigners had come all this way and were so excited to meet her. She laughed heartily after each sentence, pleased that we appreciated her work.

The Puer factories of Menghai

2011-07-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

Yunnan, China, April 2011

JingHong airport

We were welcomed in Jinghong, the capital of XiShuangBanNa autonomous prefecture, by a wave of unexpected tropical heat. The warm humid air engulfed us as we stepped off the aircraft, like a mother welcoming a child. The sun beat down bright from above, causing us to squint as we surveyed the fading airport building with its single baggage carousel. Two girls dressed in tight fitting Dai minority costumes cursorily checked our baggage tags, as our guide waved to us from the other side of the security barrier.

Welcome to Banna! Sweet Banna! I sniffed the air, hoping to catch a whiff of puer, above the dust & fumes of the city.

Jinghong, like the rest of China, is modernizing fast. Large two storey villas with gold-tipped thai gables line the freeway to Nannuo Shan. “Dai villagers relocated to make way for the new airport” explained our guide. We drove rapidly through open fields, past greenhouses filled with exotic flowers and huge lumberyards stacked with planks of Myanmar’s finest. Our little white van strained to live up to it's Star Trek badge - it’s thin metal frame vibrated & lurched with each change of gear, the occasional bump in the road sent a shiver up the spine.

Our heroic little rental van

In the distance, farmers set fire to their fields, grey smoke merging with the heavy cloud cover. Lying across the back seat with my shades on, watching the plains flash by as hot dusty air flew in the open window, I felt excited. I was on route to target, a puer hunter in a Huey, legs dangling out the chopper door.

As we began the 1 hour ascent to Menghai, we were saddened to see entire mountains shaved bare of their natural forest cover, replaced by endless rows of skimpy rubber saplings & banana trees. The denuded earth, flushed in response, with rich outcrops of red clay bursting out along the floodplain.

The red soil of Menghai

Rustic tea tasting hut at Lang He

We arrived in Menghai, at the Lang He factory (郎河茶场). The factory owner Mr. Yang came out to greet us. He used to sell lights in Hunan but moved to Yunnan in 1996 to make Puer with his father in law.

We climbed up into a faded wooden hut bearing the sign 品来品出 (come & have a taste). The stairs creaked and the floorboards bent under our weight. Old jars of tea & yixing pots were stacked everywhere. The perfect tea room to enjoy our first puer in Menghai.

A bing of Lang He's "Arbor Silver Needle Sheng Pu"

Lang He's "Old Tree Gold Leaf Shou Pu"

Sitting on wooden benches, we drank a smooth shou pu made from golden tipped leaves, followed by a shengpu made from a "silver needle" variety, then a huang pian with a distinct ginseng aroma. Breaking the cake open I noted some fibrous strands of what looked like rope bonded inside. As we left the tasting hut to begin our factory tour, Mr. Yang treated us to an urban legend of one girl who found a gold ring embedded in her puer cake. He explained how easy it is for foreign objects to get into the tea, especially during the shai gan (sun drying) and wo dui (artificial fermentation) process, when the tea is lying on the ground for long periods of time.

Outside the main warehouse women were meticulously sorting through freshly arrived maocha, seperating out sticks, twigs and nuts by hand. In their waste pile I saw some reeds, ribbon and tree leaves, even a tear away plastic band from a cigarette pack. Inside the factory, workers are not allowed to smoke or wear perfume, as the smell can get into the tea.

Shou pu is Lang He's specialty, Mr. Yang believes there's more art and personal influence in making Shou than Sheng, and he always supervises the fermentation process himself. He explained it takes up to 2 months, but he wouldn’t elaborate on his process or let us take pictures inside the factory grounds. "Wo dui is a national treasure" he told us, with a glint in his eye.

A Taiwanese couple were in the sampling room, selecting out maocha for their production run. Little paper bags of maocha covered the entire table and spilled out across the floor of this tiny room. A worker stood waiting outside with two identical looking trays of maocha. Mr. Yang and the worker began to compare the two trays, and it became clear that Mr. Yang was not impressed with the one on the right. “It’s not up to scratch!” he bellowed. “Look at the colour! It’s lacking brightness! Anyone can see they're not the same!” We watched fascinated, as the worker tried to defend his meager maocha. Finally, the two trays were merged into one, and the difference became painfully apparent.

Next, we visited the pressing & packaging facility. The 4m by 2m drying room was windowless & fantastically dark & moist. A single ceiling fan was the only decoration in this miraculous metal womb. Heating pipes hidden underneath the metal sheeting warmed the room. Large coins made from Shou Pu were strewn across the floor like dark lumps of coal. We filled our lungs with the rich luxuriant smell of damp puer, before moving on to a large white room with a 6m high ceiling. We admired the stamping machines with wooden molds for making mini-tuos and bricks. The large electric presses stood idle, but nearby cane baskets filled with more puer coins & bricks paid silent testimony to their minting efficiency. Mr. Yang gave us a grisly reenactment of how he came to lose his finger tip whilst pressing puer.

Next door, 5 young workers were sitting on the floor, surrounded by wooden racks of dried puer cakes. They methodically wrapped each cake with paper, folding with unbelievable speed & accuracy. When they had a stack of 7 wrapped cakes, they put the stack between their feet, and expertly bundled it up with sheets of dried bamboo skin & baling wire.

I was in seventh heaven. Everything felt light & heady, as if in a dream. Soon I would be pulled back into the real world. I became anxious about making a mental recording of my surroundings. After months of planning & dreaming about this trip, I was finally here! In a puer factory in menghai, surrounded by these amazing sights & smells. I had even brought 2 cameras, but I was forbidden to take photos! What a tragedy! My trigger finger itched to take the shot.

Thanking our gracious host, we jumped back in the van and rushed off to 同兴號 Tong Xing Hao, arriving just as the workers were finishing their shift. Unfortunately once again the factory manager begged us not to take photos. “State secrets!” she whispered mischievously.

State secrets!

In the dark, unlit factory, a shaft of daylight shot in from an open barn door halfway up the wall. Two workers shoveled maocha in from the loading dock, filling the air with tea dust. The loose maocha slid down a chute to a bench where 2 women packed it into large 10kg bags. Nearby, one steam & press station was still operating.

Steam & Press production line

A continuous jet of steam shot out from 5 small holes drilled in the table. A tin can filled with maocha was put over the steamer for approximately 20 seconds, causing the mass of tea leaves to immediately sink down, losing half it’s volume. A neifei was thrown in, then a cloth bag rolled over the top of the steaming can. A quick flip of the can and the steamed leaves were in the bottom of the cloth bag. The tin was then removed, and the cloth bag holding the steamed tea, passed to a bemused old man. Holding the tail end of the bag in his right fist, he deftly rotated the solid mass of tea with his left hand, continuously pressing the tea into a disc shape using the bottom of his fist. When satisfied with its density, he quickly curled the open tail end into a tight knot at the center of the disc.

Stone weights to press puer bings

A third man then took the bing and placed it under a large cylindrical stone press. Standing on top of the stone with his hands on his hips, he began to gyrate, grinning like the Cheshire cat. The stone press rotated with his feet, until he almost completed one revolution.

I shot from the hip, capturing a lot of blurry, out of focus rubbish

“Please don’t take photos” said our guide.

A mountain of puer gold!

English Treasure map of XiShuangBanna

Continued in "Afternoon Tea with a Puer Master Blender"

Why so quiet?

2011-06-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

It’s been a busy couple of months since I lasted posted a blog article. Belle & I went to Australia in March for my cousin’s wedding, where we devoted a few days to hunting out good tea in Sydney. We then spent most of April in Yunnan for the spring tea picking season. We learnt the entire process of making puer - picking, wilting, frying, rolling, drying, steaming & pressing the leaves ourselves. We made lots of new tea friends and fell in love with Xishuangbanna. We can’t wait to go back! But we also ran perilously short of money. Since returning to Shanghai, I’ve started freelancing full-time, which is exciting & challenging but not leaving much time for blogging.

Belle manning our stall at Central Studio's spring fair in Shanghai

Luckily Belle is taking over the helm to realize our dream of opening our own tea shop. We rented a stall at Central Studio’s spring market, which gave us a lot of learnings about our potential customers and what they like. Best of all we met some fellow small business owners who gave us good advice on how to get started. More importantly, everyone saw how passionate we are about tea, and word of mouth has brought new opportunities. We are now helping Bike + Friends put together a unique tea offering for their newly opened café bar in Shanghai. We’ve also found a web server and a designer to start building our online shop. So whilst the blog has been silent, behind the scenes Tea Urchin is sailing along at quite a nice clip.

But sadly, I won’t have time to write the long blog articles I used to write, so I’m switching to a photo narrative style to share our recent stories. I hope each picture speaks a thousand words. Enjoy the ride!

Let’s rewind back to March.

Sydney through the eyes of a tea lover

When one thinks of a tea house in Sydney, images of high tea at the Queen Victoria Building or Strand Arcade come to mind. But Chinese tea culture is also beginning to find a place in modern Australia. I set out to rediscover my hometown, by hunting down some new tea experiences. First stop was lunch at the 天仁 TenRen teahouse in Chatswood. Whilst TenRen is a popular Taiwanese chain that can be found throughout Asia, the Sydney version is a friendly, family run affair with an outdoor garden hidden out back, and an interesting selection of tea flavoured snacks & drinks.

Puer infused beef brisket noodles at TenRen teahouse - delicious!

After lunch, we visited the Chatswood branch of T2, a fun, colourful tea emporium that started in Fitzroy Melbourne, and now has 8 stores spread across Australia. T2's design agency has done a stellar job on the visual merchandising & store design. I can never walk into a T2 store without buying something.

The retail genius that is T2

It's never just one purchase at T2...

Despite carrying a huge range of teas, the staff are well trained and passionately pitch each tea to you as if it were an exotic holiday. Unfortunately, you can't actually try any of the tea in-store - what a missed opportunity! But we spent an hour talking tea with the shop assistants, and took home some Rooibos, Yerba Mate, Chai, French Earl Grey, and 2 house blends - Autumn and Green Rose.

Herbal Tisane selection at Australia's famous tea emporium - T2 / Tea Too

I was happy to see they even carried some Puer, albeit in the form of mini tuo's mislabelled as "Tou Cha Black Bud". I was given a free sample as a reward for correcting their pinyin.

T2's "tou (sic) cha black bud"

The black bud dissolved quickly in water and was rather tepid for my taste, but that's missing the point. T2 is all about the retail experience - great design, cheap & cheerful novelty teas & impulse buying. I got to try Rooibos African bush tea for the first time. It produces a deep red liquor that tastes surprisingly light & sweet, but the thin, desiccated twigs float & make for a challenging pour if using a gaiwan.

A close look at Rooibos - sweet African bush tea

Note to self: next time use a filter!

Rooibos - a fortune tellers delight

T2's Autumn blend – green tea, orange, rose & raisins

I was told T2's Autumn blend is one of their best sellers. It looked so pretty, so tempting, I had to give it a try. But like so many blends, it's more of a tea soup than tea. The tea flavour was pushed into the background, drowned out by a cacophony of astringent citrus & sweet raisin & rose. For me, the enjoyment was purely visual.

2011 - the year of the rabbit

Next stop on our tea tour was the newly opened White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale, where we enjoyed the collection of Chinese contemporary art, and shared a pot of Rose Oolong in the Tea Shop.

Pretty in Pink: Rose Oolong

Set in an old knitting factory, the White Rabbit tea shop is beautifully put together, combining Chinese antique furniture, old birdcages & modern art, but the tea itself was disappointing. The rose oolong was bland and flavourless after one refill. On the other extreme, the aroma of the milk oolong was so overpowering, it smelt like infant milk formula. Nevertheless, it was heartening to see Chinese tea culture establishing itself in the heart of parochial Sydney.

Bird cages hanging from the ceiling of the White Rabbit tea shop

We also spent an evening admiring my Aunty Susan’s antique collection, including yixing pots, porcelain tea boats & Malaysian peranakan furniture exquisitely in-laid with marble & mother of pearl. I leave you with some of my favourite pieces:

The Art of Kungfu Tea

2011-02-28T09:32:00.000-08:00

My weapons of choice for gongfu practice

Longquan: home to swords & tea cups
I’ve been using a variety of hand made Longquan celadon cups for the last few months, and they’ve quickly become my favourite choice for a Puer session. Longquan 龙泉 is a town in Zhejiang province 浙江 famous for sword & celadon production since the Song dynasty. The weight & thickness of celadon teaware makes it a good pairing for dark soupy teas like ripe puer. Jing de zhen porcelain just doesn't retain heat as well and is more suited to delicate oolongs. Moreover, Longquan celadon slowly develops patina with use, as the glaze cracks and tea stains colour the cracks. The cup with 2 fishes (above right) reflects 3 months of daily use. Submerge these cups in water when not in use, to get an even pattern of large & small cracks. To increase contrast, and prevent build up of tea stains in the cracks along the rim, you should give your cups a quick brush with toothpaste or baking soda once a week.

I particularly like the minimalist designs of the 叶家 pottery studio, and their hand crafted flourishes.

Delicious glazed crackling

I often find myself contemplating my teaware like they're stone pets or some kind of inscrutable companion. Observing their slow evolution from white unblemished porcelain into tea-fractured masterpieces makes them all the more intimate. Enjoying the accumulation of patina on these sturdy cups & my yixing pots has become part of my daily relaxation ritual. After dinner each night, the family will gather around the cha pan and discuss the day’s events & appreciate tea. The practice of Gongfu cha has brought us together, where the TV used to rule all.

It’s funny how a simple ritual can come to rule your life.

Shanghai School of Tea Arts

My wife is taking a 茶艺师 “tea ceremony master” course at the Shanghai School of Tea. The Chinese government takes this ritual very seriously! To get Level 1 certification you need to complete a 3 month course, with 2 full days of lessons twice a week, and there is a practical as well as computer administered exam at the end. There are 3 levels to complete before becoming a master of the tea ceremony.

The best thing about it is now we can have gongfu fights over the cha pan each night.

Future master of the tea ceremony... FIGHT!

What is gongfu cha? 功夫茶是什么?

To westerners, gongfu cha seems fiddly & time consuming. Instead of using a large teapot, gongfu cha practitioners seek out tiny yixing teapots barely the size of one coffee cup. Why would you use such a small teapot to serve so many people? The answer is simple - steeping the tea leaves repeatedly in short bursts prevents them from over steeping, and allows guests to appreciate the evolution of the flavour & aroma over 10 or more steeps. It also reminds us that the finer things in life require more effort to make & should be enjoyed slowly.

“Gongfu” in relation to tea ritual, means “complicated” or “full of work”. If you spend a lot of effort & concentration to make a cup of tea – it’s gongfu cha. I like to think gongfu cha also retains a spiritual connection to the other kind of gongfu - the martial art of wushu, with its codified forms & elegant, purposeful motions.

Making tea with bamboo, wood & clay instruments, adds a soulfulness that elevates tea beyond the realm of mere beverage. There is something primitive & elemental in gongfu cha. I love the ritual of breaking off the leaves, pouring the boiling water inside & outside the teapot, and watching the steam evaporate off the yixing clay.

In my mind, Gongfu cha is not about unnecessarily complicating things, it’s about giving simple things more meaning. Evoking culture through ritual, reminds us that life is a game we can enjoy as deeply as our mind allows.

Setting the stage

First we must set the stage correctly. Remove unnecessary items from the cha pan & surrounding table, as if clearing your mind of distraction. Of course there may be some items that absolutely belong on the stage, even though you don't actually use them to make tea. Putting everything in its place is about ordering the mind before one starts. The idea is to achieve a serene state of mind, which can only enhance what the tea imparts.

But there’s also a more rigorous side of gongfu cha. There are a few deceptively simple looking movements in the Chinese tea ceremony that are actually quite hard to master. Let’s start from the beginning…

First step is to measure out your tea leaves and invite your guests to appreciate the dried leaves. Whilst they’re doing this you can warm your teapot or gaiwan. This step is called "tang hu" 烫壶 if you’re using a teapot, and "tang bei" 烫杯, if using a gaiwan. Pour a third of boiling water into your chosen vessel and roll it slowly so the hot water warms the sides of the vessel evenly. Of course you could just fill the vessel completely with boiling water, but then it wouldn’t be gongfu cha would it?

Discard the water and place the tea leaves in the gaiwan. The hot cup will bring out the fragrance of the dry tea leaves. You can then invite guests to "wen xiang" 闻香, or smell the aroma from the gaiwan lid.

The next step is called "run cha" 润茶 which means “moisten the tea.” There are two elegant motions to complete this step.

Big Circle, Little Circle
The first motion is "xuan zhuan fa" 旋转法or “the circle technique” and is used when pouring boiling water into a gaiwan. This step allows the tea leaves to awaken, unfurl, and release the xiangqi “fragrance”. It is also informally referred to as “big circle, little circle” – imagine drawing an anti-clockwise spiral with the boiling water until the gaiwan is about one third full, or just covering the leaves. If you pour left handed, you should pour clockwise. Why? The hand motion is designed to welcome guests. You want to beckon them in, not flick them off.

This is my favourite motion for its obvious symbolism and the great deal of concentration it requires to draw a perfect spiral. I like to practice it again when pouring tea from the "gong dao bei" or fairness cup into the guests cups.

Phoenix dips its head three times

The next movement is a key moment of showmanship in preparing green, red, yellow & white tea. It is a beautiful movement called “fenghuang san dian tou” 凤凰三点头 or “the phoenix dips its head three times.” Imagine your arm is the neck of the phoenix, and the kettle is the head. Your pouring hand must rise and fall three times in a graceful melodic movement that adds “qi” to the water and makes the tea leaves dance in the rolling water – an especially beautiful sight when preparing green tea in a glass vessel. It's all in the wrist, you have to adjust the angle of the teapot slightly as your hand rises & falls, so the water stream does not break when pouring. It should look effortless & graceful, but it's not as easy at it sounds!

Water evaporating from an yixing teapot

Making Puer or Oolong teas

When making heavily processed teas like oolong or puer tea, there are some additional you can use.

First, do a flash rinse of the leaves, called “xi cha” 洗茶 or "washing the leaves". It’s good hygiene to wash your tea, flush out some of the chemicals & dust.

When pouring hot water into the teapot, instead of “phoenix dips its head” you can use “gao chong di zhen” 高冲低斟 where you start pouring from a lower height and then “pull” the water into a longer stream by raising the kettle higher. This will create the same “rolling water” effect as “phoenix dips its head.” Once again, the water speed should not increase or decrease. Pour until the water level is even with the mouth of the teapot.

Now you’ll have water bubbles and twiggy debris floating around the mouth of your teapot. Using the teapot lid, gently brush these unsightly objects off the sides, in a step called “chun feng fu mian” 春风拂面 or the “spring wind lightly brushes”. Then place the lid on top to close the pot.

Now you might think it’s time to let the tea steep and serve it to your guests. But you’d be wrong, it’s time to shower the teapot with boiling water in a step called “lin hu” 淋壶. Apart from creating a beautiful display of wispy steam coming off your yixing pot, this shower helps to maintain the temperature of the pot during steeping and extract more flavor from the leaves.

Serving the tea

Now you’re ready to serve the tea, with the help of two Chinese generals from the Three Kingdoms period – Guan Gong and Han Xin.

The next 2 movements are used for all kinds of tea, whether you're using a teapot or gaiwan.

“Guan gong xun cheng” 关公巡城 - “Guan gong patrols the city”

Guan gong (also known as Guan Yu) is that angry guy with the red face & massive halberd who you see in Chinese restaurants, and he wants you to put all your cups together in formation! Pick a formation based on the number of cups, if 4 cups, make a square, if 3 cups, make a triangle, if 8 cups form lines – it’s up to you, he’s been dead for centuries anyway. Once you’ve got your cups in formation pour the tea in a continuous pour, ensuring every cup gets an equal amount. Imagine Guan gong is the teapot, and the cups are the city. Gong guan ceaselessly does his rounds until all the teapot is empty. You have to time it just right so that the cups are evenly full - try not to run out of tea mid round! If you have 4 cups and want to be extra flashy, you can place your teapot lid in the center of the 4 cups and pour the tea on top of the lid so it cascades down into the cups (just like the champagne towers you see at Chinese weddings).

Han Xin counts his troops - “Han Xin dian bing” 韩信点兵

General Han Xin was a superb strategist who never lost a battle. He doesn’t want any troops to be left behind idling & getting bitter. To make sure every last drop of tea is extracted from the teapot, point the teapot spout straight down and dip it quickly into each cup. The last few drops are extra concentrated so make sure each cup gets a drop.

And that’s pretty much it. Rinse & repeat, until your tea is exhausted, or you are.

In today’s fast paced world, so full of distraction, practicing gongfu cha is an existential act. Focused on nothing but making & sharing the best tea possible, the ritual clears the mind & refreshes the body. Some use digital scales & automatic kettles. Others go out of their way to collect mountain spring water, and bring it to boil in an iron tetsubin over a charcoal flame. Is this obsessive and self-righteous? Or something to be admired? A search for pure form, a desire to experience nature unadulterated by modern convenience, to live fully in the moment, appreciating everything it has to offer.

Happiness is a warm gun... or cha pan

Puer to the People

2011-02-26T00:33:00.000-08:00

The strange & wonderful road to becoming a Puer collector.

1998 CNNP cake made by the Fu Hai factory in Menghai

At home, I drink more Puer than any other kind of tea. Come to think of it, I drink more Puer than any other beverage! It is fair to say I am pretty undiscriminating when it comes to Puer. I love raw & ripe, young & old, wet stored & dry stored, wild arbor & terrace grown, spring & autumn pickings, old clumpy bits of partially composted leaves, mouldy yellow leaves, with hair or without hair.

For the benefit of my friends & family who have no idea what I’m talking about, there are basically 3 major categories of Puer:

Raw puer (young tea that produces an astringent yellow liquor)
Aged puer (raw puer which has oxidized and naturally fermented over the years to produce a dark red liquor that tastes sweet & mellow)
Ripe puer (puer that has been put through an accelerated process of artificial fermentation similar to composting and produces a dark coffee coloured liquor)

What is raw puer?

Raw puer (called "sheng puer" in Chinese 生普洱茶) consists of crude green leaves that have been wok fried to fix the leaf enzymes, rolled into striations and sun-baked to reduce moisture before compressing. Young raw puer produces a light yellow liquor which is highly astringent and tastes of fresh grass, spices, hints of cocoa & camphor. Over time, the leaves will slowly oxidize and microbial fermentation will break down the leaf’s cellular structures. Years later, these same leaves will produce a dark red liquor that is sweet & mellow. In the search for tomorrow’s bing of happiness, I drink a lot of young, raw puer, and have stacked away quite a few tongs now. But until my collection of raw cakes mature into a lovely mellow brew full of musty earth, I’m chipping away at my ripe cakes like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

What is ripe puer?

Because raw puer can take anywhere between 10-30 years to reach full potential, puer producers experimented with using heat & humidity to accelerate the microbial fermentation process and achieve a similar taste to aged cakes in just a few days. Moist leaves were heaped into piles & covered with a blanket to create conditions similar to a compost heap. The humidity & environment is regulated, and the leaf pile turned every 6-7 days to ensure even fermentation. Even so, little dense clumps of semi fermented puer form which are eventually filtered out and sold as “Lao cha tou” (old tea heads 老茶头)

Lao Cha Tou 老茶头

After 40 days, the leaves can be steamed & pressed into cakes. This pile fermentation process is called “wo dui” in Chinese and has been perfected by the industry since 1973. The end result is a much darker and earthier brew than a sheng puer that has been naturally fermented over decades. Hence ripe puer is a category of black tea in it’s own right, whereas raw puer is technically a type of green tea.

In Chinese the character meaning "ripe" 熟 can be pronounced both as "shu" and as "shou" so you will invariably hear ripe puer called both "shu puer" and "shou puer" but the characters are the same: 熟普洱

Ripe puer is also called “artificially fermented” puer and sometimes erroneously labelled “cooked” puer (based on a mistranslation of “Shu” 熟). When you order Puer at a Chinese restaurant, you will most likely be served loose leaf ripe puer.

In winter, the dark soupy liquor of shu puer, its earthy aroma and sweet aftertaste, are a godsend. According to traditional Chinese medicine, shu puer is “warming” (xing ri) and sheng puer is “cooling” (xing han). So in winter time, many Chinese drink shu pu, because it gets the circulation going and warms the extremities. I don’t know if it’s just a psychosomatic reaction, but in the frigid, unheated tea shops of Shanghai, I’ve found this warming effect to be true.

An acquired taste

Since the 1990’s, Hongkong & Taiwanese puer collectors & tea scholars have done a fantastic job of researching, producing & promoting puer to other tea drinkers. More recently, English language blogs & bulletin boards have created new communities around this exotic drink. Yet for the vast majority, Puer is still an acquired taste. Many first time drinkers describe it as “basement bilgewater” … or worse. When I was younger I thought Puer was the “smelly tea”. Like durian, stinky tofu & blue cheese, I could not understand what the fuss was all about.

But now I understand the romance of Puer. Puer is a tea that stands apart, with all the romance & beauty of Yunnan, pressed into unique & heavy cakes that you can collect & age. Puer is a tea that is all about transformation & becoming, offering something new with each year that passes. A tea that can accompany you for decades - wrapped in time, steeped in history, infused with life’s vitality & decay. What a thrill to drink tea from before your time, a tea produced in your childhood, a tea bought & stored to celebrate the birth of your child - ancient tea cakes that need to be reawakened from their slumber before drinking. Puer is truly a tea worthy of treasure hoards & speculative asset bubbles.

The ancient tea horse road

Yunnan was the cradle of ancient Chinese tea cultivation & processing. As early as the Tang dynasty (641 AD), black tea was being steamed & pressed into hardy bricks & transported to Tibet. The ancient tea horse road ran from Xishuangbanna all the way into the highlands of Sichuan & the Tibetan plateau. Back breaking loads of Yunnan tea were carried by porters, mules & yaks 1,400 miles to Lhasa, and traded for Tibetan horses. Because Tibetans do not eat much vegetables or fruit, yak butter tea is an essential part of the diet, and tea bricks became a de facto currency that could be traded for pretty much anything. Another tea caravan route ran south through Burma to India, perhaps explaining how tea trees made their way to Assam.

Modern day Yunnan province, lies along the border with Burma & Thailand, and it is thought the tea tree, camellia sinensis, originated somewhere in this area. Puer is produced from a large leaf variety, which when left unpruned, will grow into trees 20-30m tall. The trees can live for hundreds of years - the oldest currently living is around 800 years old! With dark green, leathery leaves 12-24cm long, the tall trees look entirely different from tea plantation bushes, which are cropped to a convenient height for plucking. When British botanists first came across such trees in Assam, India, they classified thought they had discovered a new species and named it camellia assamica. Only later did the taxonomists realize that all tea is made from the same species, camellia sinsensis (sinensis being the latin name for China), so the large leaf variety was changed to camellia sinsensis var. assamica.

Check out the size of that leaf!

Large leaves of a 2009 Nannuo mountain picked by Hani ethnic minority

Reasons to love Puer

Puer grown from old trees is highly sought after as the large leaves make pretty looking cakes, which are supposedly more natural & tastier than terraced tea bushes. It is believed that tall, ancient tea trees produce more complex flavours than plantation bushes because the biochemistry of the plant is not stressed & stunted by pruning, or the use of chemical fertilizers & pesticides. Certainly it’s what we in marketing call a powerful USP (unique selling proposition … or unbelievably special puer). I’ve seen several vendors emphasizing the spiritual benefits of drinking Puer produced organically from large, wild tea trees, venerated & protected by ethnic tribes high up in the mountains of Yunnan. And for a few highly desirable cakes, this is not stretching the truth too far. But the majority of Puer on the market is made from vast terraced plantations planted in the last 30 years. Sadly, there just aren’t enough ancient trees to produce the amount of “old tree” or “wild arbor” cakes in the marketplace. Many producers only blend in a nominal amount (if any) of these highly valued arbor leaves. Also, the size or age of a tea tree does not automatically mean it will produce superior tea. Many of the ancient tea trees do not actually produce good tasting tea. It is careful genetic selection & cultivation by humans that turned the wild camellia sinensis tree into delicious tea producing varieties.

But there are other reasons to love Puer. It’s relatively cheap by the kilo, when compared to other teas, and it increases in value the longer you store it. A sound investment, you would think. Between 2004 and 2007 Puer prices increased a hundredfold as excessive liquidity and rampant speculation drove prices through the roof. People were not buying Puer to drink, but to hoard away in a warehouse in the hope they could sell it for a profit. Many vendors & investors lost their fortunes when the puer bubble finally collapsed.

But the puer bubble did get the world’s attention, and I have no doubt puer will one day be to China what wine is to France, and whisky is to Scotland. Puer collectors sound a lot like wine connoisseurs, fiercely debating the merits of each year’s vintage, comparing tasting notes & speculating on how flavors will develop with age.

My affection for Puer is much simpler. I love its appearance, its weight, its presence. From the bamboo wrapping of each 7-cake tong, to the hefty weight of each individual cake, down to the densely compressed leaves, which need to be pried apart with a metal pick or knife, Puer is satisfyingly tactile. The tea leaves are usually put in a cotton bag before pressing, and the knot tied in the bag leaves a large dimple on the underside of the cake, like the impact crater of a meteorite. I love how Puer is steamed & pressed into unusual shapes, including discs, bricks, ingots, mushrooms and pumpkins.

A tong of 7 bings

Impact crater on the back of a 2008 Menghai 7552

Buying Puer to age

The magic of Puer is what you don’t see. Like cheese & wine, it is the tiny microbial dance that miraculously transforms sun baked crude into liquid treasure.

Astringent, bitter & grassy when young, microbial action breaks down the leaf tissues over time, catechins become oxidized and turn into thearubigins & theaflavins, resulting in sweeter, more mellow & complex flavors as the years go by. This slow maturation process means optimum drinking time could be anywhere from 10 to 30 years after purchase, depending on raw materials & storage conditions. Buying a cake today, one can only guess how it might taste in the future, but it’s a fun journey to revisit your favourite cakes over the years and see how they’ve developed. Good raw material is essential, and proper storage does the rest. Although I suspect most collectors have a bunch of low quality cakes they stubbornly hang onto in the hope they will get better with time!

One cake of Puer is called a “bing” in Chinese (饼). You will know you’ve been bitten by the puer bug when you start buying tongs of the stuff. A tong （桶） is 7 bings of puer stacked on top of each other, and wrapped in bamboo leaves or paper. Usually weighing in at 357grams up to 500grams per bing, that’s a lot of tea! The Chinese name for these cakes is “Qi zi bing” (七子饼) and literally means “seven sons cake.” Sons of any kind being highly desirable in Chinese culture, giving someone the gift of seven sons is the ultimate good luck present!

Once you start buying puer by the tong, you will very soon find yourself at IKEA shopping for additional bookshelves, and before long, your house looks something like this...

Just kidding! This is not my house... but one can dream...

If you buy Puer by the jian (件 = a box of 6 tongs = 42 bings), and you are not a tea merchant, you are certifiably Puer crazy!

Because it is hard to predict how a Puer vintage might evolve, many sellers advise you to just buy what tastes good now. Puer novices are often advised to start with Ripe Puer, because you can drink it now and it will still improve over the next 5-10 years. When buying raw puer to collect & age, vendors will advise you to choose more aggressive, astringent cakes, because the more personality a cake has now, the more likely it is to mellow into something extraordinary.

Puer fanatics will use words like “cha qi” (茶气) to talk about the mystical life force energy tea drinking confers on the drinker. Certain mountains like Bulang are famous for being “Hen ba qi!” （很霸气） which means you’ll get such a boost of “qi” energy, the hairs on the back of your neck will stand up. This is probably a good sheng to store away.

With a proliferation of mediocre brands, false product claims, and counterfeits, Puer can be scary for beginners. Variations in raw materials, processing and storage methods, make Puer collecting an arcane & nerdy fetish. It requires a lot of research, experimentation & patience. Serious collectors can tell which mountain the raw material came from, just from tasting the tea. Some claim they can even discern which side of the mountain, and in which season it was picked! There is a “26 mountain tasting set” available specifically for puer palate training. As with blended & single malt whisky, huge debates rage over whether puer produced entirely from a single area is more interesting & desirable than a masterly blend of different leaves. Getting familiar with the signature taste of famous mountains will only increase your appreciation of blends. I like Nannuo (南糯山) for it's thick soupy mouthfeel and lack of bitterness, and Lao Ban Zhang 老班章 (despite the price) for its pungent fragrance, sweet tongue numbing mouthfeel and a powerful cha qi that will make your back sweat! Drinking old puer inevitably stirs debate over what degree of wet storage the cake has endured, and whether or not artificially fermented ripe puer was blended in to fake a really old cake.

Storing Puer

Because most of the early puer was stored in humid tropical conditions in Guangdong or Hongkong, it has a distinctive dusty taste associated with wet storage （"shi cang" 湿仓）. The Chinese call it “fa mei wei dao” which literally means mouldy taste (发霉味道). So not only does aged puer look like a dried cowpat dung, it often has a musty or mouldy taste. Puer warehouses in Guangdong deliberately amp up the humidity to 80% so the tea develops faster. Southern Chinese defend the “Wet storage” taste as desirable, whilst people in Shanghai think it is unhealthy and prefer “Dry stored” tea from Kunming. At the end of the day it’s a matter of personal taste. If you like blue cheese, you’ll probably enjoy a wet stored puer as much as I do.

For home storage, Puer is best stored on a wooden shelf, with good ventilation, and away from odors. Because tea absorbs odors easily, don’t store Puer in the kitchen or garage. Some vendors deliberately scent their puer by storing it with camphor wood, or orange skins. Others separate their tea by region & year, so there's no chance of contamination between new & old, raw & ripe. If you own a rare or expensive puer, you might want to isolate it further using a porous clay pot. Personally I like to see my collection arrayed on a matrixed bookshelf, with wooden dividers separating the years, and isolating sheng from shu.

Weather & humidity can also affect the taste of puer from one day to the next. The same cake can taste flat during rain/snow, and brighter once it’s dried out again. Some collectors build a pumidor to create a consistent temperature & humidity, but the oxidation process requires exposure to oxygen, so fresh air is also important. Warehouses have to rotate their stacks regularly so each tong gets even exposure to oxygen & humidity. Sometimes you'll see older cakes that have reached their prime being shrink wrapped in plastic to prevent further oxidation, and also to protect them from dust, as the original paper wrappings disintegrate easily after a few years of handling.

Because the tea sits on the shelf for years, it is advised to revivify & reawaken old puer, by breaking up the tea into small pieces to increase it’s exposure to oxygen, and letting it “breathe” for a few weeks before drinking. Breaking up the cake accelerates oxidation & allows also microbes on the surface of the cake to populate the center, and even out the flavour profile. Put the broken up cake in a porous clay pot with a paper or cloth covering and come back in a few weeks. Paper bags can also work if you dont have a clay pot handy. The same technique will also give young cakes a kick in the pants. I've got a 2009 Menghai 8592 shu that has been broken up for 2 months now, and this has brought it closer to the 2008 release (a personal favourite of mine).

Twice whilst breaking into a cake I have found human hair embedded in the tea. Puer is laid on the ground to wither and there is a lot of human contact during all tea production. Always rinse the leaves twice with boiling water before drinking. This not only kills the germs & washes out the dust, it gives the leaves time to open up, so the full range of flavours can be tasted.

Lovely 30cm long orange-dyed hair with my 2001 CNNP Shu Pu

Puer as medicine

Nearly every Puer cake comes with a piece of paper claiming it lowers cholesterol, and increases metabolism, but I’ve yet to see any credible scientific studies. I can however vouch for shu's effectiveness as a good hangover cure! I've also noticed that when drinking a lot of young sheng, my blood sugar level goes down, my heart rate goes up and I need a chunk of chocolate to right myself. Puer is popular as a diet tea, because the Chinese believe it reduces the body’s absorption of nutrients and disperses fat. My family drinks it after dinner, every night, as a digestive. In Hongkong, puer & chrysanthemum are both popular teas to drink with dimsum, as they reduce the heavy feeling one gets after eating a lot of oily & greasy foods. You can even order a blend of puer & chrysanthemum flowers. The white flowers present a nice counterpoint to the black puer leaves. So if you needed a final reason to drink Puer – it’s a beautiful, tasty detergent!

Hongkong through the eyes of a tea lover

2011-02-03T07:55:00.000-08:00

I have always loved Hongkong, this bustling neon city, epicenter of global trade, gateway between east and west. It is a city of epic architecture and natural beauty. Buildings fight for space, mushroom around the margins of mountainous islands, spill over into the sea. Overpasses and elevated walkways thread their way up steep hills, under a canopy of high rise shopping centers & human filing cabinets. 7million residents are squeezed into this condensed cityscape, intensifying every experience, from walking down the street to fighting for a table. Hongkong thrives on speed, and it is this speed that powers the city, like a giant dynamo. Even the escalators move faster. How could one not feel excited?

The very architecture of Hongkong reminds the visitor that this was an unlikely supercity. It got its start as a colonial outpost, built on the illicit trade of British opium for Chinese tea. In 1781, the only Chinese port open to foreign trade was Canton (modern day Guangzhou), and the Chinese would only trade tea in exchange for silver. Procuring enough silver became a huge problem for European traders (to the extent where Mexican silver dollars became a common currency in Canton!). The British needed an alternative trade good, and they found it in opium. Ironically, whilst tea enhanced the productivity of the British working classes, opium devastated Chinese industry & society. Chinese officials desperately tried to ban the opium trade, confiscating & burning all the British opium in Canton. In retaliation, British forces inflicted defeat after defeat on the ill-equipped Manchu navy & army. The Manchus were forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty, opening more ports to foreign trade and ceding Hongkong to the British. It was the beginning of the end for the Qing dynasty, but Britain’s insatiable thirst for tea had directly led to the birth of modern Hongkong.

I have been privileged to visit Hongkong more than 10 times previously, but always as an ad-man, never as a tea-lover. This trip was different. I had scheduled an entire day to dedicate to teaware appreciation.

First stop was the Teaware museum at Flagstaff House, ex-residence of the head of the British garrison. Situated in Hongkong gardens, it is an oasis amongst the towering skyscrapers of the financial district. The two storey white-washed building now houses teaware, arranged in rooms by chronological period, so you can walk through time, seeing how tea preparation techniques evolved with each Imperial dynasty. Entry is free but the museum is closed on public holidays, so don’t make the mistake of visiting on Boxing Day like I did!

Stunning teapot at the Flagstaff House Museum of Teaware

Qing dynasty gongfu cha equipment

Inside, there was an interesting video demonstrating the southern style of gongfu cha. After warming the teapot with boiling water, I was surprised to see the tea master place the lid of the yixing teapot on top of the teacups, and then empty the teapot on top of the lid, so the hot water cascaded evenly into the teacups. He also had a special container to hold & drain the teapot after serving. This container allows the remaining few drops of water in the teapot to empty out, preventing any bitterness from accumulating in the pot.

Upstairs are works of contemporary Hongkong ceramics artists. The museum has held 8 teaware competitions since being founded in 1986, and the winning entries are housed here. In true asian style, the winners are predominantly cute & whimsical. My favorite piece was this ceramic version of the competition entry form, shaped to form a cup & saucer!

"To Museum of Teaware" by Tsang Cheung Shing

"A Victorian Afternoon Tea" by Annie Chung

Another creative entry shows a couple sitting at a table, enjoying a pot of tea. This convivial scene is actually a teapot in disguise. The table forms the body of the pot and the spout is hidden under the girl’s ponytail. Nearby tables are the cups!

I picked up some English books on Puer at the museum gift shop. The English is obviously translated from Chinese by non native speakers, but with a bit of perseverance, a world of rare & unusual Puer is illuminated for the reader. Did you know there is a parasitical grass called “crab pincers” which grows on the puer tea tree? In Yunnan they pick & dry these “crab pincers” and infuse them in water. The “crab pincer” infused water can then be used to brew puer. Bana Tea Co. has put a nice little video of crab pincers on Youtube. You can also check out Phyll's tea blog for a review of this unusual brew.

After spending the morning admiring teaware, I really wanted to drink some tea! We proceeded to the Lock Cha tea shop, located in the adjacent building, but the building was under renovation and the overpowering smell of paint turned us away. Luckily, Lock Cha has a second tea shop off Queens Road, on the stairway up to the Man Mo temple.

Mr. Ip Wing Chi of Lock Cha 乐茶轩

There I was lucky to meet Lock Cha’s owner Mr. Ip Wing Chi, and his apprentice. Few young people in fast paced, materialistic Hongkong are willing to invest the years required to become a tea master. Mr. Ip said he is ready to pass the baton on to the next generation, but there is a shortage of students!

With his wispy white goatee and traditional Chinese long shirt, Mr. Ip certainly looks the part of a Hongkong tea master. He considers himself lucky to be in the tea business because it threads together all the things he is interested in – scholarship, history, art, philosophy, craftsmanship. Like many other tea store owners, he wistfully told me “It’s hard to make money in tea. You need a lot of passion to follow this path.”

We sampled four of Lock Cha’s best sellers - a fruity lapsang souchong with a hint of longan, a Yunnan white tea with rose aroma, an organic misty cloud green tea, and a Yunnan golden pekoe. Did you know “pekoe” can be used to describe any tea where only the bud/tip is used? Mr. Ip bemoaned the speculative investors that are driving up the price of high quality teas. In 2011, he plans to do a grand tour of China’s tea fields in search of hidden gems, tea that tastes great but is relatively unknown. I look forward to drinking the teas uncovered on this expedition! (There is an excellent account of one of Mr. Ip's previous tea buying expeditions at Saveur.)

Lock Cha's selection of bamboo tea accessories

Yixing teapot for sale at Lock Cha tea shop

A porcelain maker from Jing de zhen turned up with a batch of custom teaware Mr. Ip had commissioned. Stacks of porcelain wrapped in newspaper were spread out across the floor, and samples brought to the table for close inspection with a ruler. My eye was drawn to an yixing teapot on a matching stand, which Mr. Ip designed himself. With only 100 in existence, it would’ve made a perfect souvenir! Another pot on display featured an incredibly lifelike little frog. So very, very tempting. Yet in the end, we chose a simple but elegant gaiwan set decorated with hand painted goldfish. Fresh from the ovens of Jing de zhen!

Bidding adieu to Lock Cha, we proceeded up the hill to the antique shops on Hollywood Road & Upper Lascar Row (aka “Cat Street”). Hunting for antique gaiwans, I found instead a grave robber’s treasure trove of Song dynasty pottery, funereal statues, and mammoth ivory carvings.

Ivory carving made from a 10,000 - 40,000 year old mammoth tusk

Gaiwans for sale on Hollywood Road

As an extra bonus, after dinner at the IFC mall, I came across the Fook Ming Tong tea shop. Unfortunately, it was closed, but I was able to snap a few photos of the exquisite jing de zhen pieces in their window display.

All in all, not a bad catch for my first Hongkong teaware hunt!

Tall tea stories

2011-01-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

Mountain legends & modern myths, enrich the appreciation of humble tea leaves.

After a full day of tea appreciation, I was drunk on tea. We tried to take our leave but Mr. Yu insisted we join him for dinner, where he served a homemade alcohol infused with plums. The dinner party was composed of several members of Mr. Yu’s Buddhist study group, and a charismatic investor from Fuzhou. Several courses of poultry, fish & local vegetables followed. Completely stuffed, we retired to the tea-room for some of the most amazing teas I have ever tasted. That is no exaggeration. He started with the da hong pao which won the gold medal at the Shanghai Expo. It sells for $200 per 50g!

Mr. Yu then served another rare & spectacular tea called mei zhan (梅占). What made it special was the fact that it had been picked & processed in 1996. The overseas owner had stored 18 boxes away in a warehouse where they were forgotten for 15 years. When time came to clear out the warehouse, Mr. Yu’s friend had insisted he come along to inspect these old boxes. With zero expectation, Mr. Yu described how he had been transported away by the sweet heady aroma of the leaves, miraculously enhanced by time. He bought the lot.

I love a good story behind my tea. It just adds another dimension of appreciation to the liquid gold. When we drank the mei zhan we were all lost for words. It was amazing, even perfect, but such crude and common words could not do it justice, so we said nothing.

“A good tea speaks for itself” Mr. Yu said sagely.

Our last tea of the evening was a gold-medal rou gui. Mr. Yu elaborated how the unique terrain of wuyishan shaped this superb tea. The rainwater leaches minerals out of the cliffs, which means the tea bushes growing near the limestone bluffs tastes different from the bushes that grow in the middle of the valley. The blade like cliffs also shield adjacent bushes from wind & sun which affects the chemistry of their leaves. He recounted how during a farm visit, he discovered some rou gui trees growing up against a large rock cliff. The land owner had mistaken them for the more common shui xian, and had neglected to harvest them. Without pruning or plucking, these trees had grown wild & tall. Mr. Yu described how he had excitedly plucked and rushed home to process the leaves. The tea produced from these trees was uniquely complex & fragrant. You could taste the freedom of the tree, rooted in this sheltered spot yet tall enough to reach into the sun & wind.

One of the guests told us about his Chinese culture center in Guangzhou, where he trades aged Puer and collects Chinese art. He boasted that he could taste any puer and tell us which mountain it came from, and even which side of the mountain it grew on! We heard a sad story of an investor who asked him to assess a puer collection which he had bought for RMB 4million. It wasn’t terrible tea, but the flavor & raw materials did not match the age it was claimed to be. He didn’t have the heart to bluntly tell this man he had been conned on such a massive scale, so he merely hinted that more of his losses could be recouped if he waited a few more years.

As the majority of his guests had come to Wuyishan for a Buddhist retreat, conversation invariably turned to religion. The Buddhist students talked excitedly about their life in the monastery on top of the mountain, where they greet the sun each morning, and spend their days studying Buddhist texts and meditating. They are modern day pilgrims, travelling from all over China to seek enlightenment on this mountain peak. I was touched by the sincerity of their world perspective. They reject materialism for a life of simplicity & contemplation. One young girl told me the body is just a temporary shell, a mere vehicle to carry her through this life into the next.


The sheer limestone cliffs of Wuyishan

"Tea should be photographed in the landscape where it was grown" - Mr. Yu

The next day, Mr. Yu took us up the mountain to see the original Da hong pao bushes. As he is a local tea producer, he does not have to pay park entrance fees after 4pm. By the time we reached the bushes it was nightfall, and there were none of the usual tourist hordes that plague mountaintops in China. The 3 mother bushes of Da hong pao grow on a ledge about 6m up the cliff face.

The original "Big Red Robe" mother trees

The 350 year old bushes are not much to look at, they are actually quite small and scraggly, yet these hardy little trees produced China’s most highly priced oolong. All the da hong pao we drink today was grown from cuttings & seeds taken from these bushes. According to online reports, the mother bushes only yield about 100g of tea a year. This is reserved for state gifts, and occasionally auctioned off for ridiculous prices (ie. 20g for $25,000). It is said that when Nixon extended the olive branch of détente to China in 1972, Mao gave him in exchange, 50g of da hong pao picked from the mother bushes. Nixon thought this meager gift to be a bit stingy, until Zhou En Lai explained that Mao had just given him half the nation’s treasure!

As the chill of night fell around us, Mr. Yu bought a bag of steaming eggs, hard boiled in tea. We sat under a straw shack, peeling the boiling hot eggshells and devouring them with our hands like primitive cave dwellers. Surrounded by tea bushes, atop a holy mountain, I had an epiphany. There is something mythic about Wuyishan, its eroded peaks, mute witness to a millennia of nature’s drama. What stands before you is not tea, but the stuff of legends.

We descended back down the stairs to the carpark in pitch darkness.

The stairway to heaven

On my final day in Wuyishan I climbed up to the "heaven travelling peak" (武夷山天游峰), passing through a forest with ruined pagodas, caves & tea plantations tucked inbetween sheer red & grey cliffs. The steep ascent took my breath away, the final leg up the spine of a razor sharp ridge was magnificent. Far below me, tourists puffed out in fluorescent life jackets floated down the river in a column of bamboo rafts.

Hiking through the national park completed my tea pilgrimage. Seeing the bushes of da hong pao, rou gui and shui xian, it was easy to see how a single mountain range can harbor a range of microclimates that encourage adaptation & shape the famous tea varietals of wuyishan. No doubt selective breeding & variations in processing play a big role, but nature did a lot of the hard work upfront.

Nothing beats personally visiting the source of origin and buying tea directly from the producer. Now everytime I drink a roasted oolong, I am transported again to that wondrous place, where tea bushes grow out of sheer cliff faces, and tendrils of mist cling to the mountain top.

Rou Gui bushes growing amidst the mythic landscape of Wuyishan

I brought a suitcase full of samples back to SH for further taste testing. Soon, I will offer Mr. Yu’s teas for overseas sales. In the meantime, I am deeply grateful to Mr. Yu for welcoming me into his circle of friends, and his staff who gave me a crash course in wuyishan yan cha (rock tea). 非常感谢!

Mr. Yu's School of Rock Oolong

2011-01-16T08:33:00.000-08:00

Finding a tea master to teach me all about yancha. Part 2 of my Wuyishan Tea Adventure.

Finding the Wuyishan tea expo magazine was a goldmine. After making a few phone calls I had a list of tea producers and their addresses. We were just about to head out in search of these producers, when the hotel phone rang. “There is a man here looking for you” said the front desk. 10 minutes later I was shaking hands with Mr. Yu for the first time. He had driven over to pick us up from the hotel personally rather than wait for us to visit later that afternoon.

In his late 30’s, humble and softly spoken, at first I mistook Mr. Yu for the company driver, but his Columbia all-weather jacket, and Chinese navy commanders cap suggested otherwise. As we drove over to his showroom, he told us he started out as an organic fertilizer salesman, which is how he got to meet all the region’s farmers, understand the variations in terroir and where to source the best teas. Now he is a vertically integrated producer with his own farm, factory & retail stores. The last few years have been especially good for him. His knack for buying the region’s best tea leaves, and processing them into award winning teas was recognized at the Shanghai Expo where he won the gold medal for his Chuantong Da Hong Pao (传统大红袍 tasting notes available here).

Mr. Yu (on the right) showing off his gold medal trophies

I quickly realized we had stumbled upon a very passionate, modern tea producer. Arriving at his 2 storey tea house, the sweet aroma of roasting tea leaves greeted us at the entrance. Proceeding upstairs we passed through a room full of music stands & gu qin (古琴 a 7 stringed Chinese zither) and another room dedicated to exquisite calligraphy by local & visiting masters. Intricately carved wooden sculptures and a beautiful collection of yixing teapots completed the cultural treasure collection. We spent nearly an hour appreciating his art collection before moving into a tastefully decorated tea room to drink some tea. I was a little bit overwhelmed by the VIP treatment. After all, we had just made a cold call from a print ad!

Guqin music is the perfect accompaniment for a yancha session

Mr. Yu's Chinese calligraphy room

After a few cups of tea to wet the palette, we drove across town to the factory & warehouse, where a several women were separating tea leaves on large bamboo trays and laughing amongst themselves.

Women hand grading tea leaves

Bamboo baskets full of tea about to be roasted over charcoal

The rolling & drying machines were lying idle as it was not picking season but the roasting room was in action, with red hot coals burning silently (and without smoke) under a thick layer of sand coloured ash. Upstairs, we found room after room stacked with boxes of tea. With no computers to manage inventory storage, the names of each tea were scrawled on tiny white labels stuck to each box. Mr. Yu cracked open a few boxes to show us his wares, including a massive disc of pressed black tea. He designed the logo himself, and offered to press a cake with my logo too.

Mr. Yu with a disc of compressed black tea

In the tasting room, his assistant carefully weighed out 5 grams of each tea on an old fashioned scale. 8 gaiwans were pre-heated & used to steep the tea. The tea was then poured out into a bowl so the leaves & liquor could be simultaneously appreciated. We used spoons to scoop tea from the bowl into our tasting cups. Slurping to aerate the tea and open up the flavours, we greedily worked our way through a fragrant (qing xiang清香) and traditional da hong pao (传统大红袍), wild high mountain shui xian (高山野生水仙), an old bush shui xian from wu san di (吴三地老枞水仙), a single bush shui xian (单枞水仙), a light & medium roast rou gui (qing xiang清香 & zhong huo中火肉桂). I was in oolong heaven.

Weighing out 5g of tea for taste testing

Taste testing wuyishan's finest rock oolongs

We then returned to the tea house, where Mr. Yu’s young apprentices taught us the correct way to gracefully serve tea from a gaiwan, without burning or scalding your fingers. It’s all in the angle of the lid, and the quickness of the wrist! An assortment of local guests dropped in - a traditional Chinese doctor, a visiting businessman, and a crackpot historian who joked that he can’t leave China because they might not let him back in. We practiced our gaiwan skills on the guests, with two teenage girls as our instructors. “Don’t tilt your head when you pour!” they barked at me. I used to think the only rule of gaiwan is “don’t burn your fingers!” I quickly discovered the simple act of pouring tea is a highly regulated artform. Serve tea to the eldest first, using two hands to show respect. Pour in a circular fashion, ensuring equal measurements, skipping those who haven’t emptied their cups, and always serve yourself last. Even drinking has its own etiquette. Men should have three fingers on the cup, and ensure the remaining 2 fingers are together. Slowly take 3 sips to empty the cup. You are not allowed to down tea like a tequila shot!

I got to sample more esoterically named teas, such as bai ji guan (white cockscomb 白鸡冠), tie luo han (iron arhat 铁罗汉), a biscuity qi lan (profound orchid 奇兰), fo shou (buddha’s hand 佛手 tasting notes available here), jin que she (gold sparrow’s tongue 金雀舌), and shui jing gui (golden turtle 水金龟)

Continued in Part 3: Tall Tea Stories

Learning the art of serving tea from a gaiwan

Amazing sculpture carved from tree roots