busy busy busy

I hadn't realised it had been so long since I last posted. I hadn't come across anything that I'd wanted to relate to the world & have been generally so busy that I didn't have the inspiration to post.

Hopefully that will change a little soon - I have my bags packed and am heading off to Taiwan for a couple of weeks. This time though it's business related - Kathy & I hope to open a tea house in Cornwall in the next couple of months. We've been on a couple of trips to scout for potential premises, done a lot of work sorting out the financial and other responsibilities & it looks like it's going to happen!





Cornwall is beautiful. For some reason I always had it in my mind that it would be a good place for a teahouse. There are a lot of artists there and open minded folk, there are loads of potters & it's near the sea. When we went there first in July, we both immediately fell in love. The average person in the street seems to have a fairly high level of happiness. The scenery is beautiful & living near the sea is a big bonus. They even grow tea there - http://www.tregothnan.co.uk/ (though I haven't heard great reports about it).

So now I'm off on a buying trip - find some nice oolongs (maybe a little more puerh too), some teaware & 100 other small tea related things that would be useful for a teahouse. I've spent the last few days ringing up tea producers & farmers and trying to arrange meetings/tastings with them. Hopefully I'll meet some interesting folk and have something worthwhile to report back for those who share an interest.

The next few months are likely to be insanely busy, but hopefully it will be worth it & one of our dreams will be realised - our own tea house & a place to settle for a while. All this travelling is tiring!

Nannuo tea picking song

I thought I'd post this - apologies for the poor sound quality and short length, but you get the idea.

A Traditional Ai-Ni (the minority living in Nannuo) tea picking song...

Chen Qi Nan

I thought I'd post some pictures of a visit I had to Chen Qi Nan's studio last week.

This man makes some really beautiful teaware. In past years he was an engineer, then gave it up to devote his time to making pottery and throughout he drank tea and practiced Qi Gong. These different aspects of his life come through perfectly in his work - his pieces have the practical construction of an engineer, the functionality that a tea drinker would wish for and the art and spirit of someone who has a feeling for more subtle things.

Many pieces he makes using pieces of wood he finds in the mountains and clay that he produces from grinding and mixing different stones he finds.

The results are truly amazing pieces of tea art.

you can click on the pictures for a better view...











(more photos on my flickr page - follow the links in the pictures)

Naka

I thought I'd post some photos of some of the trees I made tea from this year.

First up... Naka, a relatively unfamous mountain about 1 hour drive from Menghai, known for its abundance of old trees with characteristically small leaves & home to the La Hu minority. These trees are apparently ~400 years old. Smooth clean taste, with some bite and nice chaqi.

Yiwu

I felt a little disappointed upon leaving Yiwu this year, despite learning a lot. I guess this year, being able to speak the language a bit better and with the novelty of a new place wearing off, I began to see the cracks of commercialism that had gone mostly unnoticed last year. This year I went during the peak of Spring and the town was awash with fancy jeeps as tea producers from all over China, Korea and Taiwan made their yearly trip to collect tea.

The farmers we stayed with were busy pressing cakes and buying maocha from neighbouring villages to fulfil orders from people who didn't have the time or wish to stay around and oversee their production. The tea was good but not great and, having agreed to press some bings for a London tea shop, I didn't feel comfortable buying this tea to ship half way across the world.

Since the farmers we were staying with were busy we decided to strike out alone and head for Mahei village, about 15km from Yiwu town. Since there was fairly regular traffic of tea producers and locals on this road I felt comfortable walking to the road and sticking out my thumb. Sure enough, within 10 minutes there was a tractor with a couple of locals passing. He slowed long enough to allow us to jump on and our slow and bumpy journey to Mahei began.




I learnt some interesting things - in Mahei, they have many old trees, but most have been cropped to make the tea easier to pick. I was told an interesting story, it may be true or not, but apparently a government representative's family member was climbing the old trees to pick tea and fell, breaking her back. An order went out for all farmers to crop their trees. Most families complied, but a few were lazy and now have the remaining large trees in Mahei.



Mahei tea is interesting. despite being close to Yiwu town, the tea displays different characteristics. The leaves, when dried, turn a very dark colour, almost black, and the leaves are amongst the healthiest I've seen with complex sub-veins branching though the leaf.





I wandered through the village stopping at various houses to try the tea. With the dryness of the weather this spring, the leaves have little moisture in them, making it all too easy for farmers to over fry the leaves in the shaqing stage and leaving a burnt taste to the maocha. Also with less quantity of fresh leaves on the trees and farmers having to walk further and longer to pick a full basket it meant that more of the leaves at the bottom of their baskets were getting bruised and oxidised.



These drawbacks aside, I eventually found a family with great tea who seemed honest and open. We had lunch and then discussed purchasing some of their tea. Actually it was all of the tea they had, yesterday's pickings - apparently there's no trouble selling their tea with the daily jeeps of tea producers visiting.



A piece of advice I'd gleaned from the farmer I was staying with was to compare the tea they were selling to the tea that they had drying outside, since that was certainly processed by them and not many people bring bags of fresh leaves from other places. It all looked good, but more importantly, it tasted good. And so I began the journey home with a large bag of tea, hoping for one of those jeeps to be making a journey back.

Luckily after not too far, two motorbikes stopped and offered us a lift. My friend got on one with the tea strapped behind and I got on the other and they quickly ferried us back to Yiwu town. We had an interesting chat with the guys driving the bikes - they were from Gua Feng Zai - a village close to the Laos border. Apparently they live quite quietly keeping a lot of their old customs, occasionally venturing across the border into Laos and even marrying Laos natives. They extended an invitation, which we quickly agreed to, for us to come and stay with them for a while next year. They have some great tea there!



Getting the tea back home, we retasted the tea and were very happy with the tea, making a mental note the next day as we picked out the yellow leaves that we also need to be more careful about checking the quantity of yellow leaves in the maocha before purchasing. The maocha was about 5-10% yellow leaves. At least we now have a couple of great quality yellow leaf cakes to drink alongside our pure bings.

The village of dogs

One of the first facts I was told upon arriving at Lao Banzhang yesterday was that there are around 500 people in Lao Banzhang and over 1000 dogs! They're everywhere. Apparently people don't take care of a lot of them, they just scavenge and somehow survive off meagre scraps.






Having arrived in comfort this time - being invited and driven there by one of the managers of Chen Shen tea company, I proceeded to inquire after a few more facts... "Is it true you bought the rights to Lao Banzhang tea and that all the farmers have to sell they tea through you?"... " (paraphrased)... well it was last year, but then we figured that even with our security around the village, the villagers were still sneaking tea in and trying to sell it to us. We had some difficult situations, since we'd agreed to buy their Lao Banzhang tea. So this year we decided to change things a bit. The farmers can bring their tea to us to buy, then if we don't like it or don't want it, they can sell it privately elsewhere."

Renting the mountain for 30 years sounded like a strange thing when I first heard of it, and it seemed even stranger when I went to Lao Banzhang last year and saw the security checkpoints as you entered and left the village, and the one place you could buy tea - only straight from the company. I found out a bit more about the pricing this time - the factory bought it from the farmers for 400RMB/kg and sold it for 600RMB/kg. So everyone made quite a bit of money - the farmers and the factory. And everyone became richer and richer, the farmers and the factory. The wealth here is obvious compared to other villages I've been to. Many houses have new roofs, expensive 4x4 jeeps sit in front of many, and walking into the village leader's huge house it was obvious that some extensive renovations and decorations had taken place in the last couple of years.



As we entered, we were greeted by a group of people inside - some from Chen Shen, one guy who worked for CNNP, the leader of the village and some others. They were in the process of brewing up tea from various little bags of maocha on the table. There was to be a tea competition in Nannuo in a few weeks, and they were trying to select the best Banzhang tea to enter in the competition. I sat down and tasted. All were amazing, some more than others, but all very good. Strong, with a bitterness that quickly turned to sweetness in the mouth - it's easy to see why Banzhang grew to have the reputation it has.



Some more tea drinking, some lunch (managing to escape the ubiquitous drinking of Bai Jiu (a strong rice/corn alcohol) that seems to accompany many meals in villages), and then on to see some of the old trees that surround Lao Banzhang village. These were huge, bigger than many I'd seen in other places. Bigger than most I'd seen in Nannuo. I'd not had a chance to see these trees last time I'd visited and was glad to be able to see some of these trees for myself.






Then it was on to some farmer's houses to taste some tea. The factory hadn't started selling tea yet this year, so any purchases had to be directly from the farmers. This was the point, as seems common when cash starts to get involved, when things became a little messy. With buying from the factory, there is some guarantee, but when buying directly from the farmers there is no guarantee. There's no reputation to uphold and no reason not to switch their expensive Lao Banzhang maocha from lesser quality maocha from other places. And so it turned out to be as we tasted maocha after maocha in different houses. The tea was good, even old growth tea, but the banzhang flavour was muted as if a little banzhang had been mixed with tea from other places.



I hadn't planned to buy much for myself, maybe a kilogram or two, but a friend had asked me to make 3 tongs of Lao Banzhang for him. Something didn't feel right, so I walked away with only a small handful of the competition maocha that I'd been given. A little disappointed, but feeling that there's tea in less famous mountains that is as good as Banzhang tea, but without the same price tag and without the same incentive for dishonesty. With the factory setting the price high for their tea, and with farmers now selling privately too, I think Banzhang tea is destined to become messier and messier.

A very interesting day. Mulling it over in my mind on the bus ride back to Jinghong from Menghai, I was glad I'd gone - a little disappointed in the approach they had, but very interesting. Actually one of the nicest parts of the day was sharing the journey with two unexpected companions - an editor from Wushing who was going there to interview one of the factory managers and a celadon potter from Taipei who was along for the ride.

Some more photos from Nannuo

Finally back to somewhere with a good internet connection I thought I'd upload some photos from my time in Nannuo.


It's been a great week staying in Nannuoshan. Spending time living with the family was amazing and very touching. Also having time to go tea picking most days and try some different options with the processing was a very educational process.














I'd underestimated the skill involved in the shaqing process before - there are so many variables to take into account... the strength and thickness of the leaves, the amount of moisture in them, the heat of the fire, the amount of leaves in the wok and the length of time to perfrom the sha qing process for. Also the tightness of the rolling of the leaves and the length of time to sun dry them for - all of these things have a big effect on the final tea.



It was nice to be there to be able to taste teas from different days and discuss with the farmer his thoughts on different processing methods.

Now, it's back to Jinghong for a couple of days rest, before heading on to Yiwu. It's nice to be back in a bed again, somewhere where there aren't insects biting me all day, but my body feels healthy - good hard work in the tea mountains, nourished by so so many wild vegetables and simple, healthy, tasty cooking has left me feeling good.