Author Archives: Puerist

Nan Nuo Shan Cha Chang (a sequel of sorts)

I just realised these last few days that it was ten years ago that I made a couple of posts about the old Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory in Shi Tou Zhai.

(see this post for a brief history of the factory and the man behind it Bai Meng Yu).

That was in 2011-2012. I was unable to discover much more new information about the history of the factory locally, but I did talk to the people who live in Shi Tou Zhai and had relatives who had worked in the factory. They shared a book they had with me, 普洱茶记/Notes on Puer Cha, and from which I copied a number of pages. I am waiting to confirm who the author was but I believe it to be 雷平阳/Lei Ping Yang. The section of the book on the tea Factory is mostly about the factory from the 1950s onwards. There are a few photos that were interesting but likely from the same era and may not be the actual tea factory.

Menghai Tea Factory receiving fresh leaves from ‘Puer Cha Ji’/普洱茶记

Within the next couple of years I went a few times to Northern Thailand and, mindful that Bai Liang Cheng (Bai Meng Yu) had gone there after his stay in Myanmar, made a few inquiries to see if any more was known about him there.

Chiang Mai has an interesting, mixed Chinese population who have been there a long time. There are Chao Zhou people who are mostly near the river, centered around Warorot Market, where there’s a small 华人街/hua ren jie/China Town.

Another distinct group of Chinese are the Hui people – Muslims from Yunnan Province – who have been there at least since the late 19th Century. Yunnanese mulateers, who were predominantly Muslim and formed a core element on the trade routes collectively known as ‘茶吗古道‘/ch ma gu dao – Ancient Tea Horse Road in English – made regular dry season trips from Xishuangbanna via Da Luo, Kyaing Tung (Keng Tung) in Myanmar, Chiang Saen on the west bank of the Mekong, Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, and then on from there on to Burma via Mae Sariang, finally arriving at Moulmein, an important port on the Andaman Sea. (Another possible route headed south from Jinghong to Muang Sing in northern Laos, and from there, after crossing the Mekong somewhere near Chiang Saen, joined the first route to continue to Chiang Rai).

Initially, the traders on the ‘Cha Ma Gu Dao’ were not permitted to cross the Ping River and enter the city proper, so they settled on the east side of the river, in the area that is now known as Wat Ket. Some people have said that this is where the earliest Chiang Mai mosque was established, but that is contradicted by other recorded accounts that place it in the Ban Haw area, south of Wararot Market on the west bank of the river. Ban in Thai means village or home and Haw (sometimes Ho) is a term, with slight derogatory connotations, used in northern Thai for Muslims from Yunnan, that has subsequently come to denote all Yunnanese Chinese irrespective of their religion. The Yunnanese themselves do not use the term.

Key commodities on these long distance trade routes were cotton, tea and opium – an image which has served to haunt them until recent times. But these early settlers had become well integrated into Chiang Mai society by the time the next wave, including KMT fighters, arrived via Burma in the 1950s. They were seen by many, both in Burma and Thailand, as being somewhat wild and lawless.

This latter group had no official documents (and even until quite recently many only had a form of ‘refugee card’ which severely restricted their movements) and their situation in Thailand was precarious. One elderly Hui Man in Chiang Mai described to me once how, at that time, if you were out, walking down the road say, and you saw another person you recognised as being a fellow counryman, you wouldn’t speak or acknowledge them for fear of exposing yourself and being subject to the consequences.

It was into this situation that Bai Meng Yu must have arrived after leaving Nan Nuo Shan in the late 1940s, via a soujourn in Yangon (Rangoon). Knowing that he was Hui meant that the mosque in Chiang Mai was a reasonable place for me to start making some inquiries. One could sense the initial distrust, engendered in part by the history mentioned above, but of course also because of having a strange foreigner coming and asking questions. Being able to speak some ‘Yunnan hua‘ possibly went some way to overcoming that hurdle and, having convinced them I wasn’t a spy or a government agent, I was warmly welcomed.

After a couple of visits I was fortunate enough to meet an uncle of Bai Meng Yu’s granddaughter, who was extremely helpful and friendly. He told me that she had, somewhere in her possession, a number of photographs of the original Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory. He had a photocopy of a written account that family members had made at the time of Bai Meng Yu’s death, recounting their knowledge of his life and including one photograph of the tea factory in which one could just make out some people, maybe in work clothing, standing in a wooded area, possibly clearing ground or constructing something, but 80’s photocopying in Chiang Mai was surely not what it is today and the photograph was not of much use other than to confirm its existence. His niece (Bai Meng Yu’s granddaughter) was friendly but not that helpful for her own reasons – she was busy with work, had just moved house, didn’t know where everything was, and really? Is anybody interested in that?, etc. etc.

So hopefully, somewhere in Chiang Mai, there are still a set of photos of the old original tea factory waiting to be re-discovered.

The rebuilt old school in Sha Dian, Hong He Zhou

On another trip I went to Sha Dian, a now prosperous town in Hong He Prefecture where Bai Meng Yu originally came from and picked up a copy of a publication put out by the local government in 2012 which has a fairly detailed account of the life of Bai Meng Yu, written in 1987. It doesn’t offer much new detail about the tea factory other than to say that he visited India on a trip to purchase equipment for the factory which was subsequently shipped to Burma and from there hauled overland by cart, and then carried by people back to Menghai. It sounds like a slightly more likely scenario than the one of the rolling machine being shipped direct from England since India already had a heavy machinery industry by the end of the 19th Century and a Scot, William Jackson who had gone out to India to work alongside his brother, the then manager of Scottish Assam Tea Co. and had invented a rolling machine some time in the 1870s.*+

On a subsequent visit to Thailand I also made a trip up to Mae Sai, north of Chiang Rai on the Myanmar border where Bai Meng Yu’s sister lived, and where he spent the rest of his life. His gravestone is in a small Muslim section of a cemetery on the south edge of the town

* The earliest tea rolling machines still in use in Darjeeling were manufactured around the 1850s so those, it seems, were shipped from the UK.

+ In a newer edition of Puer Cha Ji by Lei Ping Yang, it states that the machinery, or at least, the rolling machine was shipped from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Yangon (Rangoon), and from there via Kyaing Tung to Da Luo and then Nan Nuo Shan

Previous posts on Bai Meng Yu and Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory:

Yunnan 'Dian Hong' (Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory)

Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory Revisited

Tea House Talk: ‘Gu Fa’

I was riding through a village when I realised I was almost out of petrol. I stopped and went into a house to ask where in the village I could buy some. (There’s pretty much always someone in a village who will sell you a bottle of petrol. Usually 1.5 liter old mineral water bottles). They were in the back drinking tea and also had some fresh leaves wilting on a bo ji nearby. The tea they gave me reminded me a little of a Darjeeling type tea. ‘hong cha‘ I commented. ‘No’ they said, ‘这是古法！’ This is Gu Fa!

What the heck is ‘Gu Fa’? I wondered. They explained the process to me: fresh leaves are wilted (for maybe 12-13 hours) then the tea is lightly rolled after which it’s put out to dry in the sun. No sha qing.

The proposition is that in ‘ancient times’, whenever they were, lao bai xing may well not have had access to a wok to fire tea in and would have found some other way to process tea to their liking.

A year or two before that I had been introduced to some tea folks in Menghai. The lao ban described a similar process to me. He too maintained that this would have been how local tea was made in the past. He reckoned he had several tons of it stashed away waiting for the day when it was aged enough to pull it out and sell.

Quite some time later while having a discussion with a friend about it, he told me he’d read something online on the same topic in which it was proposed that the term ‘sheng cha/raw tea’ was originally used for a tea that was made more or less in the same manor as the contemporary ‘gu fa’, i.e. not fired/’cooked’, and that ‘shu cha/cooked tea’ was used to refer to tea that was pan fired, somehow in the same way that sheng cha is now made.

Gu Fa sounds like a marketing gimmick, but the idea is not that outlandish, and the tea is actually pretty nice. It’s not Puer, and it’s not really bai cha. It’s something else. With some qualities similar to a lightly fermented black tea.

‘Wu Long’ Puer. Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

A while back I saw the term ‘Wu Long’ Puer recently re-appeared on the English language internet, so I thought it worth revisiting this old topic as it comes up from time to time. I’m not sure when was the first time it was raised on the internet but I remember seeing something from maybe 2005 or 06. It seemed like it could be an appropriate coda to my previous post about processing tea and the implications for ageing.

To be clear, this is an English language term with, as far as I know, no Chinese equivalent. So it’s describing something which is described in a different way in Chinese. The idea seemed to be formulated from the perception that there was a new style of Puer tea that had been oxidised in a way that a ‘traditional’ Sheng Puer wasn’t.

The suggestion was that the tea had been rolled more (more heavily/longer?) with the effect that the tea flavour steeped out much more quickly and the tea had qualities which were reminiscent of Wulong tea.

My guess at this point is that that’s a misunderstanding. I think it’s not likely to have the effect that some folks have suggested. Rolling more heavily, rolling twice, etc. are not new, and whilst, of course, bruising the leaves more is going to break down more of the cell walls and may well result in more oxidation, I somehow doubt it would produce the effect talked about.

If anything, over the last ten years or so, there has been a trend toward lighter rolling, 抛跳/pao tiao, rather than tighter, originally driven, it seems, by Taiwanese demand. People coming to Yunnan and demanding tea that was rolled in a way that they thought looked better. Some tea farmers have told me that Taiwanese customers wanted them to roll straight – backwards and forwards – as opposed to a circular motion to create rolled leaves that were more needle shaped. Less twisted. This is not standard Puer fare. Traditionally, if anything, people rolled tea more tightly pre 2000s, so this doesn’t easily fit with the proposition that post 2000s Puer was rolled more, creating an ‘Wu Long’ type flavour/aroma.

At least, if additional or heavier rolling is a factor, it’s more likely that any extra rolling in tandem with other factors produced the result talked about. Sure, it’s difficult, I haven’t drunk the tea that someone else drank that made them think it had been ‘wulonged’, but the variables in tea making are not infinite.

Another factor with heavier rolling is that the flavours will be steeped out more quickly, so the tea will be less ‘nai pao’ / 耐泡 and the flavour in the early steeps more intense. This is also another reason why there has been a trend to lighter rolling: to make early steeps less intense and to have the tea steep more slowly.

Of course, if other things are done in the processing of Puer, to reduce bitterness and astringency for example, then heavier rolling is not going to produce such a marked effect, and the tea will generally have poorer structure, and steepability.

The only time I have heard a term in Chinese which I would say is referring to the same thing was many years ago when someone referred to a raw Puer as ‘fa jiao cha’/发酵茶/fermented tea. As now, the understanding was that it was tea that had been processed in such a way as to cause it to ferment in a way similar to other types of fermented tea: Wu Long, black tea, etc. and not proper Puer processing.

But even fairly excessive wilting – with autumn tea this is not that uncommon, where the tea is picked in the afternoon and then left overnight to be fired early the next morning – if the tea leaves are piled at a correct depth, it will not on its own produce an ‘Wu Long’ kind of fermentation. So it seems that it’s more likely a combination of factors of which excessive wilting may be a part.

One thing that can cause a light ‘fermented’ aroma is if the sha qing is not done well, or a combination of tan qing and sha qing are not managed properly, which can result in the stems of the tea leaves, which typically have more moisture in them, not being ‘fired’ properly, and enzyme activity not being arrested sufficiently. The result being that once the tea comes out of the pan it continues to ferment, producing an aroma in the dry tea that is reminiscent of a fermented tea -‘hong shu wei/红薯味/sweet potato taste, as some people call it. Personally, I wouldn’t think it was similar to Wulong, but who knows.

Pressing Matters

In the world of Puer tea, opinions are not in short supply. How you get your cakes pressed is a case in point. There’s some logic behind the arguments, but it’s also about trends. Like how tight you wear your jeans, if you’ll excuse the analogy. One year loose fit is in vogue, the next straight, the next tight. It comes and goes.

Before we even get that far, how long one waits before pressing tea is another contentious issue. Generally speaking, the rule of thumb is to wait a month or so before pressing mao cha. The tea has just been made and dried in the sun and is going through a period of significant change and, the argument goes, is best left some time to stabilise. Plenty of folks wait longer. Some at least a year. But if you’re not living locally and need to get back home with tea in hand, or you need to get your product on the shelves, waiting longer may be a luxury you can’t afford.

Many local folks will wait at least till Autumn. This has the added benefit of avoiding the rush that occurs at this time of year, when many pressing outfits have waiting lists of at least a couple of weeks. In recent years, the wait time has perhaps been exacerbated by more people pressing smaller quantities of tea, and pressing smaller cakes, like 200 or 250 grams, which slows the process down.

Tea pressing factories prefer 357 g cakes as the other, smaller pressing options are more fiddly and slow (and the costs go up accordingly). But people who’ve got lesser quantities of tea are more likely to choose these options irrespective of costs. Of course, the much bigger tea companies are likely pressing their own tea anyway. Some people stick to 357 cakes because ‘that’s the tradition’ though the history of that is debatable. Some people go for 400g cakes or another variation, but still using the 357 bags, because they say it looks more ‘ba qi’ than 357. It’s true, kind of. The extra fifty odd grams definitely makes the cake look more plump.

The earlier idea – that bricks were made from junky tea – has been turned on it’s head in recent years with many people pressing 250, 500, or even 1kg bricks but using exactly the same material as cakes.

The process of pressing tea is essentially this:

The loose tea is weighed out (sometimes adding a few grams more to account for loss of weight through drying in the future), put it into the cylindrical container that will be put over the steamer, the ‘nei fei’ if there is one, is put under a few of the leaves on top (it will end up in the bottom of the bag once the tea is turned out of the container), and it’s steamed.

Nobody much talks about the water used, though it maybe has some small but discernable impact on the tea. Whatever the water, we’re only interested in the vapour in any case, so unless there are contaminants in the water that will vapourise, there should be no need to worry.

Steaming is generally for 20-30 seconds. If tea is steamed for too long – it happens occasionally if someone gets distracted, or there is a problem in the production process – it can subsequently have a rather dull appearance.

The pressure of the steam is important because one wants the steam to penetrate the leaves entirely and uniformly and also fairly quickly. Sometimes tea is steamed a second time if, in forming the shape, it has already cooled down too much to be workable, so it is steamed briefly again whilst still in the bag.

Some people like to use a hand operated or hydraulic press to lightly press the tea before putting it under a stone. This can help give the cake a more regular appearance and maybe saves having to stand on the stone, for added compression otherwise, significant amounts of tea are stone pressed. A team of 3 people can press oabout 300 kilos of 357 cakes in a day but around half of that for 200g cakes.

Stones vary in size, but generally are about 20cm tall and 30+ in diameter. The person doing the pressing stage of the work will generally stand on the stone and do ‘the hoola hoop’ 3 or 4 times. What one wants is a fairly uniform compression with the outside edge tight enough that the cakes is not going to fall apart at the edges.

There’s been something of a trend in the last couple of years amongst some folks who have been going for a tighter pressing. The logic is that the tea ages more slowly and therefor keeps its fragrance better than in a looser cake which tends to lose more of the aromatic properties more quickly.

Stone for pressing 3kg cakes

Another reason that is typically sighted for tighter pressings is when the tea is not intended for consumption when young and is to be kept several years for ageing. With that is the added factor of the nature of the planned storage: More humid storage could well use tighter pressings than dryer because the tea will age and loosen up more quickly.

A third idea is that blended cakes work better with a tighter pressing because the oils, etc. from the leaves are going to blend together more as they’re squeezed out giving a smoother drinking experience.

None of that is particularly contentious. The big area of discussion, and disagreement, is on drying. Here, opinions can get pretty polarised. There are broadly three schools of thought. The advocates of each say something along the lines of the following:

1. Tea must be dried in a drying room. The temperature is controlled, and is in the low to mid 40’s ). The temperature can be controlled so that it is lower than that of cakes drying in the sun. Air drying tea runs the risk of the tea going mouldy inside if not properly dry. Sun dried tea runs the risk of producing a sour flavour and the ultra-violet light can have a detrimental effect on the enzymes which are needed for the tea to age well.

2. Tea must be air dried. Historically, tea was not dried in a drying room dried. If the temperature is too high in a drying room it is detrimental to the tea. Room dried tea is initially quite fragrant, but for longer term storage air dried is better. If it is dried properly it will not run the risk of going mouldy.

3. Tea must be dried in the sun. Traditionally, pressed Puer tea was sun dried. Waiting till the winter when the sun is not so fierce is better. Tea needs to be air dried for a couple of days before being put in the sun to avoid it becoming misshapen, but it should be dried in the sun at a high enough temperature and for long enough for much of the moisture inside the cake to evaporate – that could be half an hour, or a couple of hours. Too long and the tea risks being damaged. Tea can also be dried in a ‘da peng‘, a perspex roofed drying platform such as is sometimes used for drying mao cha, but many people would not see that as an ideal option.

And then there are the ‘it depends’ folks:

It depends where and when the tea is being pressed: a little sun in the early morning may be OK. If the weather is inclement you may have no choice but to room dry.

People pressing in Jinghong will often favour room dried tea, because it’s also related to time and place. Jinghong is lower altitude (600m) and more humid than Yiwu or Menghai, for example. They also maybe don’t have a great deal of space to dry any other way. (tea that’s put outside to sun dry would take up a fraction of the space when stacked in a drying room.

People in Yiwu and Xiangming seem to favour sun-drying whilst Menghai folks tend to favour room-drying. This is maybe also to do with the different sizes of the pressing factories. Menghai probably has more large scale pressing operations.

It depends on the season: Air drying is possible into May, but later on, there is no choice but to room dry because of rainy season humidity. The risk of mould developing in tea that has not been properly dried is too great.

It also depends where the tea is being sent: if the tea is air dried and sent somewhere dry, it may be OK, but if sent somewhere more humid, it may be a problem.

It depends if you’ve got time. Room drying takes a couple of days. Natural drying can take several days, so if you’re in a rush to get your tea dried so you can ship it to wherever, natural drying may not be an option. Also larger scale outfits are probably less inclined to air dry because of time constraints.

I’m pretty much in the ‘it depends’ camp. My preference is for air-dried cakes. I have sometimes put air-dried tea outside in early morning/dappled sun for a few hours. If one is not in a hurry, that seems like the best option to me. I have never tried full-on sun drying and don’t feel tempted to try , though I know people who do. If it’s done judiciously it may well be OK, and may even be beneficial, but I doubt anything over an hour or two is good if the sun is hot. Given that ultra violet light clearly has sterilizing properties, and it seems quite probable that it would affect, if not damage the enzymes in Puer. Using a drying room, if done judiciously, is probably OK too.

Most pressing places are small factory type set-ups with sheet steel roofing. They get pretty hot inside. Because steam is being used, they also get pretty humid. Drying room temperature is important, but certainly controllable. I am more concerned with what sort of exhaust system a drying room has: having 40+ degrees of heat is certainly not a problem (if you put cakes outside with an air temperature of upper 30s, they will surely get that hot. If you put them in the sun, even hotter), but making sure that moisture is extracted efficiently is important. So choosing the right place at the right time of year is important: At this time of year with waiting times of two weeks or so, if they are not reliable, it may be tempting for a pressing outfit to push their temperatures up a little in order to speed up the process. That would not be desirable.

These days, a typical practice for deciding when pressed cakes are dry is to weigh them, or rather weigh two or three from a batch. The weight can be compared with the weight of the mao cha weighed out for steaming.

‘King of Tea Trees’ A Sequel

I don’t recall, a decade or so ago anyone much thought of picking tea from single trees. ‘单株/dan zhu’. It’s a thing that started in the last few years. Perhaps as Puer tea has become more expensive and as tea drinkers have been exploring the world of Puer more deeply. I guess it’s also a marketing thing: selling exclusivity. But since every ancient tea tree is unique, there is some logic to it also: even trees in the same tea garden can be quite different. Sometimes there can be a number of sub-varieties or forms of sinensis assamica growing next to each other: one more bitter, another sweeter. It’s done with larger, older trees where a single tree might only flush once a year in Spring, and may typically yield say five to ten kilos of fresh tea, which might produce a couple of kilos at most of maocha.

Xishuangbanna, Menghai Ancient tea tree No 46.

A few weeks back a tea farmer friend took me to see a tea tree which is clearly quite old: the girth at the base is probably getting on for 100cm and the trees branches cover an area of at least 10㎡, helped by the fact that it must have been polarded a long time ago. Let’s say it’s six to eight hundred years old, judging by other trees in the vicinity that are of known age.

‘Have you drunk tea from this tree?’ I asked. He hadn’t, but a few days later he called me up. ‘I’ve got some.’ he said. ‘Some what?’ I asked. ‘Some tea from that tree.’

I was busy and It was nearly a month before I managed to get round to visiting him. When I did I was expecting the tea to be long gone, but he’d kept it.

The fragrance is excellent, with floral qualities and a hint of something I can’t put my finger on – vaguely citrus. The broth is rather fine, certainly compared to ‘da zhong huo‘ from the area. It has a very slight bitterness and good ‘hou yun’. The broth is clear and a little viscous. Apart from a very slight feeling on the tip of the tongue, which is frankly not enough to detract from its attributes, its really a very nice tea. I brought a handfull back to drink with some friends who at first thought it was a Xiang Ming xiao ye zhong tea. Not at all like the Menghai tea that it is.

The processing looks like it was pretty good. Very even and no red stems.

It’s Good For You

In the Yorkshire Dales where I grew up, the village school had no kitchen and school ‘dinners’ as we called them we ferried in from the town about seven miles away. I remember them arriving mid-morning in big alloy warming containers. The food wasn’t good and I had a particular dislike of the carrots which were badly overcooked. I unfortunately took the dislike home with me, where carrots on my plate were an unwelcome sight. ‘They’re good for you.’ my mother would say, which my eldest sister, being the enforcer, would reiterate. It took me till adulthood to re-calibrate my perception of cooked carrots. It maybe also left me with a residual disregard for doing something ‘because it was good for me’.

I can’t imagine many people drink wine or whiskey, or coffee, because they think ‘it’s good for them’. We drink those things because we enjoy them, savour the taste, the aromas, the sensations they produce in us. Unfortunately tea seems to have got boxed into the ‘drink it ’cause it’s good for you’ corner. My first reaction to hearing somebody championing the ‘drink it ’cause it’s good for you’ point of view is that whatever it is they’re drinking probably doesn’t taste good if that’s the main justification for drinking it. Why else would you use that as a selling point?

Puer, particularly raw Puer from old or ancient tea trees has got more than its fair share of stuff that’s good for you in it. Many years ago it was ‘ripe’ Puer that got the attention: the ‘weightloss tea’. The tea that some footballer’s wife drank to help keep in trim. Much early research also seemed to focus on pile fermented Puer because, I imagine, to a chemist the process of pile fermenting is somehow a more interesting topic for research. ( I certainly have a dog in the race and might as well at this point stick my neck out and say that I think ‘cooked’ Puer shouldn’t even be called Puer, having no historical basis, and bearing little resemblance to real Puer. Like coffee and instant coffee, they share a passing resemblance but can hardly be confounded). Anyway, it was a few years before there seemed to be much research around on younger and naturally aged Puer tea. What came to light was that pile fermented Puer had greatly reduced amounts of substances such as catechins, gallo-catechins and what have you because in the fermenting process much of the naturally occurring constituents got converted to gallic acid and thearubigins (the stuff that makes it look red), etc, and conversely there was actually more caffeine in the ‘pile fermented tea than in the ‘raw’. Conversely, it appears, that naturally aged raw Puer tea has a balance of whatever it had in it originally, but over time the less stable compounds: gallocatechins, epigallocatechins, being the first to get reduced to other things: equally good for you.

If you think something is good for you, it probably is, even if for others it may not be so. Surely the most injurious thing is to persist in something which you believe to be bad for you. So drink tea you enjoy. And if you think it’s good for you, it probably will be.Tea Health

Autumn

It was nearly the end of October and it had been raining pretty much solidly for three days.

Ten day forecast for Jinghong

And the same for Menghai.

I had thought it might ease up and was contemplating starting to look for some Autumn tea, which can sometimes be quite good, but the rainy season effectively didn’t stop. I called a couple of tea farmers in the Yiwu area who said there was little to no tea. Even if daytime temperatures are fairly high, overnight temperatures can drop considerably.

Early November and more rain on the way.

Once that happens, old tea trees stop flushing. So that was the end of that. It’s been the wettest Autumn since I’ve been in Xishuangbanna, which is nine years.

It’s bad news for tea farmers because, whilst Autumn tea doesn’t fetch Spring tea prices, and the volume is somewhat less, it means a portion of their annual income has just disappeared.

Some Old Tea Tree Gardens (and some lessons on transliteration)

Last week, I had a few days’ trip in the SFTM area. The weather was good – dry, warm in the day, cool at night – and I got to re-visit some places and also go to a couple of new places.

I’ve been trying to get to Ma Pia (吗叭/ma ba in Chinese) for a couple of years. I think it was the autumn before last, I was with some friends in Ding Jia Zhai who had just come back from Ma Pia with some tea. One of them had a couple of pictures on his mobile phone. The tea wasn’t up to much – there were some problems with processing – but the trees looked interesting.

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New Home

So here is HM in a new home. It’s been a while. I just realised, when moving things around, how long the hiatus has been. I’ve been busy with other things, but I’m hoping to still find time to keep this more contemporary.

Spring is still a little while away, but Spring Festival is round the corner – The Year of the Goat. A wooden goat at that. I just got back from a month or so of travelling to rain and some fairly cold weather. Already, I heard a couple of folks wondering about how so much rain early in the new year might affect tea, but it’s early yet. No point in worrying about what hasn’t happened.

In my explorations of the last year I’ve happened on a couple of interesting tea gardens, not well known – one pretty much unknown – from which I’m planning to source tea this Spring.

I’m getting ready to go and check out the tea gardens again and will post a couple of photos when I get back.

Spring Tea

Another really dry spring, though it looks like it’s going to rain this weekend. Tea prices have gone up anything from 25 to 50%. Earlier in the spring, people were saying that Dayi and Cheng Shen Hao were going round pre-ordering tea which ratcheted up the price, but then, as some others commented, they’re not necessarily willing to pay top whack, and there are plenty of tea farmers who have solid customers who they don’t want to blow off anyway.

One tea farmer was telling me yesterday that, in their village at least, it was an increase in folks from Guangdong that was pushing up prices. That may be maligning Guangdongers, there’s always been plenty of Guangdong people coming buying tea. In any case, the village has seen a fifty percent increase on the price of fresh leaves since last year, and over the last three days, it’s gone up 10 yuan a day. The weather, as always is also a factor: very dry, not so much tea. After it rains, there will be lots more, but then there’s at least a few days after the rain where it won’t be worth having if anyone picks it.

HM came back from Ge Lang He saying Pasha was full of folks from Ban Zhang buying tea – draw your own conclusions. BHT fresh leaves are around 750-800 yuan a kilo, which means prices around 3000 a kilo and the rest of Wan Gong not much less. Walong is still about half that. So here are a couple of pictures to be going on with:

Wa Long is a little like Man Lin or somewhere like that where, at slightly lower elevations, it’s surrounded by rubber, but right round the village, and the tea gardens, the environment is surprisingly intact.

Here are a couple of trees right near the village, but most old trees are in the forest above the village.

Coming up from the Xiang Ming road, one first gets to Wa Long Lao Jia, and from there you run along the mountain ridge to Walong. From the road between the two villages one can see Gedeng.

Horse's Mouth

Tea Tales from the South