a Felicific life

Moving

2011-06-01T10:15:00.004+01:00

For a while I've been split about wanting to post about the places I've been and people I've met, but not wanting this blog to become too linked with commercial subjects. These days, the people I meet and places I go tend to be more and more connected with sourcing teas and teaware for The Essence of Tea. There's still, I feel, an interesting story and I hope it might be educational and useful to those who choose to read it. To make this all more transparent, I've decided to begin posting on The Essence of Tea website. Our blog will be at http://www.essenceoftea.co.uk/blog, with an RSS feed at http://www.essenceoftea.co.uk/blog/feed.

I'm not sure what it means for this blog. I'll still leave it online and will still post from time to time, but there'll be more and more articles appearing on The Essence of Tea website blog.

See you over there,
David (nada)

Travels in Yunnan

2011-04-26T06:38:00.003+01:00

This year has been interesting. We've spent the past month travelling around Xishuangbanna. We managed to rent/borrow a 4x4 for most of our time here & could travel a bit further afield and visit more remote places.

Driving in China is really a test of nerves. Despite having a comprehensive system of road traffic regulations, it basically comes down to a few simple points.

1. The bigger vehicle has right of way. Lorrys->Buses->Jeeps->Cars->Motorbikes->Electric Scooters->Bicycles->pedestrians

2. If you encounter a smaller vehicle, use the horn excessively and continue to drive in any direction you wish

3. Use the horn and flash the lights some more while watching out for drunken kamakaze motorbike riders swerving across the road with 1-4 men, women and children clinging onboard

Despite this test of nerves and inevitable hair loss, being able to drive opened up a new level of freedom and control in making our puerh this year. For some of the mountains this year, we worked with a friend living in Xishuangbanna who has facilities for processing the fresh leaves and we hired a couple of people to help us with the shaqing (kill green) and rounian (rolling) of the leaves. This enabled us to buy fresh leaves from the mountains and drive them back to process them ourselves completely by hand, ensuring greater consistency of the processing and more confidence in the source of the leaves. We also made a small test production, working with a farmer in Yiwu to collect fresh leaves from Guafengzhai and process them by hand back at his studio in Yiwu.

Unless staying with the farmer, having built up some relationship and overseeing the whole process, when buying dried maocha from the mountain, the only control one can have is to buy or leave the finished tea. The leaves have already been picked and processed with whatever skill (or lack of skill) the farmer happens to have. It is difficult to verify exactly where the leaves have come from and often farmers are less than wholly receptive to requests for hygiene, for complete hand processing and for extra care to be take with the leaves. Some farmers like to process the leaves completely, earning a higher profit in the end, but others are content to pick the leaves and sell the fresh leaves at the end of the day or, better yet, allow you and some hired tea pickers to pick their trees and pay them by weight for the fresh leaves.

As in previous years, working on our own, I could see that instead of helping the situation in Yunnan, we were contributing to what I saw as many of the problems Yunnan was facing. Turning up at a farmers house for a few days, staying with them and buying their leaves wasn't helping to influence the farmers to care of the trees or the environment in any meaningful way. Once I was gone, life would return to normal and the only thing remembered would be the wad of cash in their hands. This approach has concerned me for some time. It's so prevalent in the mountains, with expensive 4x4's full of Guangzhou businessmen turning up with no concern for the effect their cash is having on the minority people and the remote environments. This is one of the main reasons we teamed up with our local friend for some of our teas. He lives there all year round, travels regularly to the mountains and builds up long term relationships with farmers in a way that would be impossible for us on our own. He is also one of the few people I've come across in Xishuangbanna, actively trying to educate local minorities to care for the environment, to handprocess their leaves and to protect the ancient trees. I hope in future years we can work with him more and more.

Sha Qing at Lao Banzhang

2011-04-11T03:16:00.002+01:00

I thought I'd share this short video of the Sha Qing (Kill Green) process at a farmer's house in Lao Banzhang. Note the angled pan, making the leaves naturally slide towards the bottom, where they're flipped back to the top ensuring even rotation of the leaves and making sure none of them stay in contact with the heat for too long. Occasionally the leaves should be shaken out to ensure they're not sticking together.

This process requires a lot of skill to produce leaves that have been heated enough to stop the oxidisation in the thick stems, but not so much that the thin edges of the leaves are burnt.

Last year with the drought in Yunnan the leaves had very little moisture content, making the process all the much harder. It was very easy to burn the leaves by accident. This year there has been a bit more rain and the quality of the processing is generally better.

The work to manually process leaves in this manner is no small task. Processing around 20kg of fresh leaves can take a few hours. They must be done in small batches so as to ensure even heating. The constant heat from the wok is sweltering and the leaves must be constantly turned. This 20kg of leaves translates to around 5kg of maocha after sundrying.

Mr. Gao's Shengtai Tea

2011-04-03T04:00:00.009+01:00

Our time in Taiwan was a little limited on this trip. We had so much to do and so many people we wanted to visit, but with the wish to make it to Yunnan for the puerh tea harvest pressing in our minds, we tried to keep our time there to a minimum.

We did however carve out a few days to visit some farmers and get into the mountains, making a nice change from the bustle of the cities.

As I've been continuing my journey with tea, I'm coming to appreciate more and more the damage that chemicals do, both to the environment, the farmers and the drinkers of the finished tea. I had the opportunity this time to visit one of Taiwan's most vocal advocates of organic tea - Gao Ding Shi. Mr. Gao goes a step further than organic with his Shengtai (natural farming) methods, not only growing his tea without chemicals, but also without organic fertilisers or pesticides. He manually weeds his tea gardens and has small gardens interspersed with other trees and plants.

It was interesting to talk with him - he turned to Shengtai farming around 18 years ago following the premature death of his father (which he attributes to his father both spraying pesticides and drinking tea with traces of pesticides still on the leaves). In the ensuing years he has watched as the insects returned to his tea gardens and the soil quality steadily improved.

This method of farming requires much more work for less yield than relying on chemicals. Many of neighbours look down on him, saying he is foolish to be working so hard for such a small return and such 'ugly' tea that is often bitten by insects. We walked past one of their houses where a group of farmers were sitting playing cards & drinking in the middle of the day with their loud Chinese pop music blasting over the valley. As we reached his house, lit the charcoal and quietly sat and tasted some of his exquisite tea, I felt glad that there were still some people who were willing to put in the extra effort and produce something so special and pure.

As we left, I bought a little of his tea to drink. His teas are produced in too small quantities (and sell at too high a price) for us to bring back to sell, but if anyone would like to taste some and can visit us in Cornwall, I'll be happy to brew up some of his tea to share.

The importance of teachers

2011-03-25T15:48:00.005Z

It feels good to be travelling again. I've spent the past couple of weeks visiting Malaysia and Taiwan, both searching for tea and visiting various people I've come to regard as teachers. It's interesting to look at the past couple of weeks and see how much I've learnt in such a short period of time. It feels the same each time I come to Asia - it's like each time I take a big step internally in my relationship with tea... perhaps I appreciate a new aspect of tea or relate to it on a deeper level, re-examine my brewing or the effect my teaware is having.

My meditation teacher used to explain a lot about the importance of having a guide for meditation and spiritual practice, often making the comparison of a mathematics teacher in a school. With a teacher, addition, multiplication, even complex algebra can be learnt in a relatively short period of time. This knowledge would take so many lifetimes to acquire on one's own. It's the same with tea. When I'm on my own, I do make some progress - slowly though. With a teacher on hand, I feel like I take giant strides.

It's difficult for us in the West I think. Many of us don't live near or have contact with other tea lovers. I think to develop the wish is a good starting point. From there we make a small effort and gradually come into contact with more and more tea people. The internet, with it's various blogs and forums, is in general good but there really is no substitute for drinking tea with people face to face and sharing our knowledge and appreciation of different aspects of the tea we're drinking.

Experiments with roasting

2010-10-06T11:15:00.007+01:00

I have a predilection for roasted oolongs. As the colder weather is creeping in again, I've begun to crave them more and more these days. Over the last few years I've experimented a bit with various methods of roasting to create that toasty caramel sweet flavour I love. I started with some experiments using a saucepan, then a rice cooker and hand roaster/refreshener.

A year or so ago I decided to try to do things a bit more properly & picked up a commercial roaster during a trip to Taiwan. I did a couple of test roastings soon after I got home with unsatisfactory results. It seemed the temperature wouldn't go high enough to create the strong roast that I desired. With other commitments taking up my time, the roaster got forgotten about and left largely unused.

Recently I fished it out from beneath the stairs and decided to allocate a jin (600g) of a decent quality Li Shan oolong to some experiments with roasting.

This time, it worked. The dial on the roaster seems to function largely as a guide, not reflecting at all the correct temperature inside the basket, but with the aid of a probe thermometer I was able to fairly accurately regulate the temperature.

It seems the crucial difference this time was the quantity of tea used. This time the 600g of oolong was enough to cover the mesh inside and insulate the heated portion of the basket.

The first roast (80oC 1hr, 120oC 4hrs, 80oC 1hr) produced a nice medium roasted taste and aroma, while the second roast (after waiting a few days for the leaves to rest) produced a more roasted taste, but lacked the strength of aroma. I'm not sure of the reason, but one factor might be that the leaves were still hot when I transferred them to a purion teajar after roasting. The second time I left the leaves to cool in the roaster first before transferring them.

So... here's the results after 2 roasts. I think I'll continue roasting several more times, saving a few grams of leaves at each stage to see how far I can go with this tea.

A teahouse is born

2010-05-29T19:12:00.005+01:00

Finally, after 5 long hard weeks of manual labour, we opened our teahouse. We had a great day - a little quiet in the morning, but the afternoon was a hive of activity. It seems this small town on the tip of England has a lot of knowledgeable tea folk already - we didn't even have any requests for Earl Grey or English Breakfast! Instead quite a few people seemed well acquainted with oolongs and a few even with puerh.

Wuyi

2010-05-03T12:06:00.003+01:00

Earlier in the year Kathy (my wife) & I had planned to go to Wuyi together after our trip to Yunnan. Then the lease for our teahouse began to move forward and I volunteered to come back to get the teahouse ready. Kathy went on to Wuyi alone to meet up with a Malaysian teamaster and a few other tea friends who visit Wuyi each year.

Below are some of the pictures of her trip that she just sent me. I'm pretty jealous! No matter - there's always next year.

Mengsong

2010-04-27T07:50:00.002+01:00

As promised, some more photos from our time in Yunnan this year. This time the photos are from a small village in Mengsong area. A friend from Menghai took us on a trip to these mountains to see some of the biggest trees he knew of in the area. As we walked up the hill and I asked if I could take some photos he said sure, but please don't tell people exactly where they are - it would be a shame if too many people came here and spoiled the environment or the local people.

Sure enough, as we climbed the hill, we were greeted by bigger and bigger trees.

Until we arrived at the biggest tree I've seen - bigger than the 'King of trees' at Lao Banzhang, bigger than the 'King of trees' in Nannuo, this tree had no such lofty title to attract tourists, instead just being another tree on the mountain, unknown except to a few.

You can see from the leaf edges that the drought was affecting even this huge tree with such a deep root system. It's not wonder that the smaller tree below which seemed like it had had a hard time in previous years was close to death this year.

I was encouraged to see evidence of the natural clearing methods in use by the locals. These grasses had been felled by hand and left to fertilise the trees surrounding them.

I think this area showed a perfect balance of having a wide range of plants growing amongst the tea trees. All too often the locals cut down other trees believing this will provide the tea trees with more nutrients to draw from. I think the opposite is true with nature providing the balance that these old teas trees need to flourish.

Tea House in progress

2010-04-18T16:25:00.001+01:00

I arrived back from China last Wednesday to receive a call from my Solicitor informing me that the deal had gone through that day for the lease for our Tea House. I've spent the last few days in demolition mode, tearing down the horrible plasterboard walls and exposing the beautiful natural stone beneath. It's tough work, but I think it'll be much nicer than I could have dreamed of previously. There's even a couple of lovely fireplaces which had been bricked up. Perfect for a charcoal brazier and a woodburning stove for the winter time.

More photos from the tea mountains to follow soon...

Lao Banzhang - A village in decline

2010-04-10T03:28:00.005+01:00

Lao Banzhang is a strange place. I don't really enjoy going there so much - there's an air of greed and duplicity about the village. For some reason though, I ended up going there 3 times this year. I didn't plan it, it just worked out that way. I just happened to be around people who were going there and, having no real reason to decline their offers to tag along, I went.

Last year Chen Shen tea factory was building their new factory in the village. This year it's finished, shiny and new. Given that the village is surrounded by old tea trees, and that there's not much available space to build a factory, they cut down a lot of old tea trees to build their new premises. I find this type of thing so sad. Trees that have been growing for hundreds of years being cut down for profit.

They are processing maocha on a larger scale, buying fresh leaves from the villagers and processing it themselves. This, in itself, isn't a bad thing - it's the only way to get the consistency in processing that they need, but they've done away with the hand processing and installed one big machines. Out with the old, in with the new. No more hand based kill-green, no more hand rolling.

Equally as disturbing, if not perhaps more so, was the view across the village that greeted us as we entered Lao Banzhang. Another area, also previously filled with ancient trees, had been bulldozed and flattened to make way for new homes to be built for newly rich villagers. The greed of a big factory, and lack of immediate concern for the old tea trees in just one of it's locations I can kind of understand in a despairing way, but this really shocked me - villagers bulldozing the very trees that brought them this newfound wealth. I really can't comprehend it.

I don't have much hope left for Lao Banzhang. Unless something drastic happens to cut the greed of the farmers, the factories, the producers, vendors and consumers, I fear that this area and people in it are well on the way to self-destruction.

Banpen

2010-04-02T15:14:00.003+01:00

This morning we returned from a trip, staying for a few days in the mountains, in Banpen village (~4km from Lao Banzhang). This village is home to the LaHu minority - a minority which has been traditionally looked down on by surrounding minorities as being backward & lazy. As a result, these people have become distinctly insular, shunning too much contact with the outside world and with outsiders. I knew this before I arrived, and even though I'm well used to the stares I get as a westerner in the mountains, this village caught me a little off guard. Usually I manage to coax a smile out of at least the children, but this time it was just timid, blank stares. Luckily some kind farmers agreed to let us stay & as time wore on they began to open up a little more.

Although, like the nearby Lao Banzhang, this village has a lot of dogs, this minority don't eat them but worship them, believing that their people were born from flowers and then suckled on the milk from dogs to allow them to grow. The LaHu people have 3 festivals each year to worship dogs and even feed the dogs before they themselves sit down for their meals, rather than throwing them a few scraps at the end.

This minority has been cultivating tea for hundreds of years and as a result, their villages are surrounded by many many ancient trees...

Picked leaves - Wei Diao (resting the leaves - let the leaves wither slightly) ...

Sha qing (kill green)...

Rou Nian (rolling the leaves)...

Shai Qing (I didn't get a photo of them outside, but the leaves are left on these bamboo mats to sun dry outside. They are moved inside when it looks like rain is coming or to rest them overnight)

The surrounding environment is very pure, with ancient forests surrounding the trees. Many parasitic plants such as orchids are a common sight on the old tea trees.

Handmade paper tea wrappers

2010-03-29T14:33:00.003+01:00

Today we took a trip to a local Dai minority village to pick up some handmade paper for wrapping our tea. Being pretty far out of the way, we took a combination of taxi, local bus, and motorbike to arrive at the little village at the base of the Bulang mountain range, not far from Banzhang. This village is famous for their handmade paper with around half the households in the village engaged in this lovely craft. Unfortunately for us, today no-one was making paper - most people were out in the fields planting rice seedlings, but a friend made a call and a lovely Dai lady appeared to show us around.

They make the paper from the bark of the Paper Mulberry tree, producing different tones and textures of paper from different ages of tree - the bark of the young trees make a more fine, uniform paper, while the older trees make a courser, darker paper which in a way is more visually interesting.

The bark is stripped from the trees and left to dry.

These pieces are then boiled for around 12 hours, alternately layered with wood ash.

The wood ash allows the bark to separate into small fibres. These are threshed to properly separate the fibres. A few families use a machine such as the one below, however most still use the traditional hand methods to separate the fibres.

The threshed fibres are then washed thoroughly in 2 separate basins to remove the wood ash and any foreign particles and the fibres in the second basin are sieved onto trays, which are then placed in the sun to dry. (there's no fibres in this photo - she was just demonstrating)

And the result...

Rain at last!

2010-03-28T13:54:00.002+01:00

Finally, after months of dry weather, it has begun to rain in Xishuangbanna. Last night we woke up to the sound of a thunderstorm and rain, and again tonight there's thunder, lightning and heavy rain. This is good news for tea farmers - the buds will fatten up and the harvests will grow. Hopefully there's not too much rain though - too much will dilute the flavour of the tea leaves.

It's too late for these plantation trees though - they're already dead & the farmers have begun to dig them up to make way for new seedlings.

It seems the fertilizer hadn't done much to harden these trees up (and the farmers had been even too lazy to pick up the empty packet dumped on the ground)

dry

2010-03-26T13:22:00.003Z

It's dry here, really dry. We first enountered it upon arriving in Kunming - the streets were more dusty than normal, our noses filled with black dusty dirt & our skin constantly felt dry. Yunnan is experiencing the worst drought they've had in the last 50/100 years (depending upon which news sources you listen to). The result of this has been villages without water to drink, power outages (~70% of the electricity in Yunnan apparently comes from Hydro-electric sources), a shortage and subsequent rise in the prices of vegetables in the markets & a unfortunately a similar consequence for tea.

Xishuangbanna is also dry, but arriving here was a relief from the streets of Kunming. We could blow the dirt from our noses and it felt as though our skin was soaking up the humidity in the air, rehydrating from our couple of days in Kunming. We spent a few days in Nannuo visiting and staying with the farmer and his family who have been very kind to us in previous years. Their feeling is that it has been very strange for them weather wise - they picked their old trees for the first time in February - the first time they could remember the harvest beginning that early. Since then the buds have grown slowly, with a big decrease in quantity. Their plantation teas usually have 200kg at this time of year, but now just ~50kg, while his old growth trees produced around half their normal production.

The situation in Nannuo hadn't prepared me for the sights we saw driving on the track down from Lao Banzhang - the plantations in Menghun had huge patches of brown. The plantation trees, with their shorter roots, weren't getting very much moisture at all and whole areas were dying off. Apparently there was no chance for these trees to recover. This was reconfirmed for me today - we visited the Tea Research Station in Menghai. They have huge areas of plantation trees, each area divided according to the varietal of trees. Some varietals seemed to be coping with the weather and still producing good buds, some sections with newer varietals or hybrids had big areas where they'd dug up the trees that had died from the shortage of water.

Fortunately (at least for the moment), there still is tea around & the quality can be good. The prices are higher - Lao Banzhang has gone crazy again with prices of >1000RMB/kg being quoted (more than double the price from last year), but we're off to the mountains again tomorrow to try to seek out some less famous places and to see what we can find.

Back in Taiwan

2010-03-13T05:40:00.005Z

After spending the last couple of months engaged in negotiations for our Tea House it feels like we've finally made some progress. The lease is signed and waiting with our solicitor for the landlady to do some work and repair a storm drain which can leak from time to time in the basement during heavy rain.

Having got this far, and having pushed my trip to Asia back as long as I could, it was a relief to finally get to Taiwan. I love it here. I love the people, the culture, the food and of course I love the tea.

The downside of all this time spent in the negotiation of the lease is that I've had to cut my trip to Taiwan down to a week and have had to really prioritise my time here. It hasn't been hectic, but my days have been filled. It's only now that the weekend has arrived and businesses are shut that I really have some time to spend the day relaxing and doing nothing in particular.

Looking back on it though, I've had some beautiful days. On Thursday after a brief morning of busyness, I had a very relaxed lunch with my friend Jered in Wisteria, then without having to leave the building, had a lovely tea session with WuDe (Aaron), Master Tsai and then Zhou Yu.

I've long admired Zhou Yu. His humility, integrity and ability to maintain a beautiful but relatively busy tea house while being unswayed by monetary gains and keeping his personal internal path in sight are qualities that I very much admire. He had just returned from giving a talk about tea culture in Auroville (a place both I and WuDe had visited many years before), and had time to sit and chat about it for the time it took to slowly drink a couple great old teas.

He gave me some excellent advice for my tea house too & if we can create something with even a fraction of the qualities present in Wisteria, I will be very happy indeed.

Up in the air

2010-01-19T22:09:00.006Z

I've been engaged in legal negotiations for the last month or so. I'm trying to take on a lease for a property which I hope could become a tea house. It has been quite good practice for me to have gone through this, I've been able to see my mind has reacted towards obstacles thrown in the way and have had to practice a fair share of patience with the 80+ year old landlady who can conveniently forget agreeing to some points, while rigidly sticking the enforcement of others.

And so we're kind of in stalemate at the moment while she makes up her mind on a couple of pretty important points.

It kind of struck me that this is a good place to be. I've been able to relinquish my attachment to opening a teahouse and step back a little. So I'm left with 2 likely scenarios - either I get the lease and have to rush back from Yunnan in late March to open up for the Easter rush of tourists to the tip of Britain, or I can take my time in Yunnan and can take an extra month or two to spend some time in Chaozhou and Wuyi to try to find some nice tea.

Either way I have confidence that we'll open a tea house sometime. Either way will be good. A nice place to be. Let's see what happens!

busy busy busy

2009-10-24T15:48:00.001+01:00

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

2009-07-06T21:11:00.001+01:00

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

2009-05-27T12:31:00.001+01:00

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

2009-05-02T13:11:00.006+01:00

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

2009-04-23T07:04:00.006+01:00

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. Kathy 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

2009-03-27T00:36:00.007Z

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

2009-03-24T06:50:00.002Z

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.

Nannuoshan (1)

2009-03-18T11:17:00.000Z

After a long wait for the tea season to begin, on Sunday I made my way south with a friend from Kunming to begin a month in the mountains, staying with tea farmers in Xishuangbanna.

The farmers we'd met last year had turned out to be really nice, honest and down to earth people, and we'd kept in touch with them from time to time during the year since. And so, on Thursday we received a phone call from the farmer in Nannuoshan telling us that on Monday there was a festival to mark the beginning of the tea picking tea season.

A couple of rushed days to pack up our belongings and hand over the flat in kunming back to the landlord, a 11 hour bus journey on Sunday and on Monday we found ourselves picked up on the main road by our friendly farmer Erduo to be whisked up the mountain to be greeted by seemingly endless meals and traditional songs in various people's houses in the village.

Once again, I was really touched by the openness and hospitality of these village people. We had a long chat with the leader of the village about their wishes for their tea. They realise that they've got some great tea here and want to promote the true unblended taste of their mountain (even of subregions within the mountain). I got some feeling for their gratitude for their ancestors and the old trees they'd planted and their realisation that they need to protect and culture these precious trees to hand over to their children.

In the evening, we retired back to Erduo's house for another meal and as we finished a car pulled up with a group of tea producers from Guangzhou who were also spending some time searching for good tea. Among them were two people we'd met earlier in the year at a tea expo there. We were very happy to meet them again, we'd spent quite a bit of time at their stall drinking tea with them. In fact, theirs was the only great tea we'd drunk there, a haven amidst a sea of mediocrity. They were just calling in for a few hours before continuing their journey. They planned to travel to Lincang and visit a few small villages which, despite being relatively unknown, had some old tea trees and some great tea. They ate dinner and we spent a couple more hours chatting about tea, tea producing and their venture and of course drinking tea, some from Nannuoshan and some Yancha I'd brought along for a bit of variety.

The next morning, after relatively sleepless night of dogs barking until 4am and roosters crowing from 5, we rose early to begin our tea picking. Since Erduo knew we were coming he'd held off on picking his old trees, so when we climbed up the mountain, his trees were ripe with buds and fat leaves. It was nice to see his trees, we'd previously seen many of his plantations, but never actually seen his old trees. His family have been farming tea in Nannuoshan for six generations, and when he was younger and many of his neighbours were cutting their old trees to make plantations he admits that he was too lazy to do much work. Luckily his laziness has paid off, and he still has about 300 old trees, ranging from 3-800 years old.

And so the tea picking begins....

Sealing oolong

2009-02-01T09:51:00.005Z

I've been experimenting a bit recently with a few attempts at DIY oolong roasting (more on this later).

One consequence of this is that I had some oolong which needed bagged up and sealed.

Having looked around at bag sealers of different degrees of professionalism and noting the general high price, I decided another approach was necessary.

Half an hour of google searches later, I came across a post in a coffee forum from someone who had been using hair crimpers to seal his coffee bags. The price difference is staggering - over £100 for a professional heat sealer vs. £10 for a pair of cheap hair crimpers. So long as it worked, there was no contest really. I decided it was worth a shot and, with Walmart just around the corner, I was soon in the possession of a fine set of Vidal Sassoon hair crimpers - they were even on sale!

They even came with a set of 4 styles of crimp plates that I can use - just in case I feel the need for a wavy seal on my oolong bags.

Despite reading the blog post, I wasn't quite sure whether they would work, but once plugged in for a few minutes the plates had heated up nicely, and after holding the bag in for about 30 seconds, found they'd made a nice seal.

One drawback is that the seal is quite wide, but I guess this doesn't matter - once sealed, the top part of the bag is rendered useless anyway & a wide seal can only be better for forming a barrier to air anyway.

All in all, a successful venture and I'm now happily sealing my old open bags of oolong.

Drinking poo

2008-12-30T08:05:00.007Z

I thought I'd make a short post on a tea I'd read about, but never had the chance to sample before... well, I say 'tea' but its days of being tea are long over - it was once tea - aged puerh to be precise, about 20 years ago, before some little insects munched down on it and left their pellet like excrement behind to be gathered and stored.

A friend gave me a sample of this a while back and it lay forgotten in a small bag amongst my belongings until yesterday when I remembered that I had it and rummaged to find it.

He had said it was about enough for 2 sessions and, having no idea of the potency of bug shit, I divided the contents of the bag in two and into a tea strainer. It looked uninteresting, didn't smell of anything, but as I poured boiling water over it it yielded a thick black liquid.

I examined it carefully for a few moments before taking my first sip... Hmnn, strange - definitely not like tea, but not bad. A very medicinal taste, some qi, mellowing with a few more infusions, before I started to feel a little queasy. I'm not sure if this was entirely the effect of the tea or the fact that some of the black pellets had started to turn more brown - more like the colour of regular shit. Anyway I drank a little more before deciding to abandon ship, take a rest and brew up some regular puerh.

In all, an interesting experience. I wouldn't seek out more of this tea, but at least now I know.

Yi Tiao Long

2008-12-12T03:09:00.003Z

At some point during my recent trip to Taiwan my tea karma seemed to take a big leap forward.

I think it was at the point where I was offered the chance to buy a few grams of 1920's Song Pin at a price that was so low that it was pretty much a gift in disguise.

I thought about it for a while (since it was still relatively a fair amount of money) and decided it would be a nice gift to drink with my host who had been very generous to me.

And so I made the purchase - 8g of Song Pin Blue Label. Now the question was just how to drink it. Should we blow the whole lot in one session, or have 2 or 3 sessions in smaller pots? Once again, the middle way seemed the way to go and we opted for 2 sessions in a small qing pot.

Wanting to get the best from our session we decided to make the trip up a mountain to get some of the best water available in Taiwan.

There's a temple devoted to a goddess who lives deep within a mountain and blesses the water which emerges from a spring about 2000 steps up the mountain. Locals bring their sick relatives to climb the mountain, make offerings to the goddess and drink the water which is reputed to cure many ills.

For us, we brought 2 water containers - a plastic jerry can (for ease) and a heavy glazed clay pot (for quality - this is the water we'd use for the Song Pin). The trek up was fairly quick and felt like good exercise, and upon arriving at the top, the water was some of the best that I've tasted. Cool, smooth, clean and nourishing to the body.

We filled the containers, taped on the lids and began the tough part - carrying these heavy containers down the mountain, much to the amusement of the locals - these two foreigners struggling to carry heavy water containers down the mountain, pausing every 20-30 steps of so to rest.

I have no pictures of the tea session, since I have no wish to intrude on such a special occasion with a camera, but all I can say is that is was amazing. The taste was clean and smooth and more importantly the qi was strong and refined... this is the reason I love to drink old tea.

Since then, it seems my tea karma has opened up and I've met people who had a lot of antique teas and who have been happy to drink them relatively freely. In the past 2 weeks I've drunk around 12-14 pre-1950's teas. It's true what they say that some of the best teas in the world can not be bought for any price, but can be drunk for free.

Another person I met in Taipei treated me to a day drinking old tea in an apartment he keeps for entertaining guests. In a room at the back he showed me his collection of 'YiTiaoLong' (The Spine of the Dragon) - these are all the major teas of the Masterpeice & Chi Tse eras. A few pieces were missing from his collection, but most were there, and many of these teas he has tongs of safely in storage.

Below are some pictures of sections of this collection - you can click on them to view higher resolution pictures

Staying in HK

2008-12-10T15:22:00.002Z

Well, having been in Asia for at least a month now, I have to be the first to admit that I've been a bit slack on the blog front. Most of this was due to a quite high concentration of buying teas & teaware for the online shop & I didn't want this blog to just turn into an advertisement for things I've shipped back to sell.

All this aside, I do have a few things I'd like to share over the space of a few posts...

1) Hong Kong - I'd stayed in the city here 3-4 times before & always disliked spending much time here. The air is horrible, the hotel rooms are either super expensive and (I imagine) quite nice or slightly expensive and grotty. The streets are crowded and the atmosphere is busy.

This time I decided to try a different tack. Once a friend who is from HK told me about Lamma Island where she was staying with her parents. She had nice things to say about it, so I did some research and booked a room in a hotel on the island.

The price is cheaper than most (except the grottiest) hotels in the city and a nice room comes in at about 280HKD.

Taking the 30 minute ferry ride from the city proved to be a delight and unpon arriving at the island it seemed as though I'd entered a different world - the streets were small (too small for cars) the sea front was littered with small restaurants and the pace was super slow. I spent a day exploring the island and found beautiful nature, beaches for swimming and nice cafes & small shops selling tasty tasty food.

It's really a pleasure to stay here & for other travellers travelling to/through HK I can't recommend this place enough.

teacraft

2008-10-26T01:20:00.001Z

As I start to prepare for my next trip to the east, I thought I'd post some pictures of some handicraft I've been making while staying at my parents' house in N.Ireland. I quite enjoy making things with my hands, and having my tools around me gave me some impetus to make some tea things.

Unfortunately I've given the few I made to tea friends without taking any pictures, but do have one left that I thought I'd share.

Despite being a vegetarian and having no wish for any animal to be killed, I do believe that having been killed for another purpose, their remaining parts should be used effectively and not wasted. In nearby Scotland there are many highland cows slaughtered for the meat industry. Their horns though are so beautiful, long and elegantly curved.

When I encountered these horns, they were pretty horrible, covered in hair and smelling of cow, but given some time and attention, they can be carved, polished and turned into things of beauty.

Below are some pictures of a cha he I made, perfectly sized for funnelling leaves into the small entrance of a teapot.

Tea for sale

2008-08-12T11:22:00.001+01:00

Although I may be away from time to time in the future, at the moment I have some tea & teaware for sale.

I pondered for some time how best to display these products for sale, and since I wanted to hone some web design skills anyway, I decided to make a site.

For those who wish - you can have a browse at www.nadacha.co.uk

Leaving Taiwan & Wisteria

2008-07-16T10:02:00.001+01:00

I've spent the last week or so in Taipei, staying with some friends in the city.

On the whole, I've enjoyed it here although the city doesn't really compare my the time spent staying in MiaoLi (an hour's drive to the south). MiaoLi was surrounded by mountains and felt much closer to nature, but Taipei has proved enjoyable in a different way.

I've spent some time taking in the usual cultural museums and sights, but also made plenty of time for tea, cleaning out most of my remaining funds with the plethora of old puerh and beautiful old teapots and teaware that's on offer for quite reasonable prices.

It seems, if the money is available, most vintages of puerh are available if one finds the right people. They often won't be displayed to the public, but if you get chatting with the owner of some teahouses/tea shops, they'll often have a stash of really good stuff in a room in the back.

I've seen many silver kettles, tetsubins, antique pots, a variety of Hong Yin's (50's Red Mark), some antique (1900's-40's) puerhs and many 60's, 70's & 80's bings.

Beside the commercial aspects, many of these tea shop owners are happy to meet a westerner who appreciates puerh and often are willing to brew up some of these old cakes for us to drink together.

One place of note for me has been Wisteria Tea House. This recently reopened following a year of refurbishment, and is a beautiful oasis to wile away a few hours from the hubbub of the streets.

On the menu are several vintage puerhs, a few young ones and many new and old oolongs of different varieties.

The surroundings are elegant, with a tatami room being my place of choice. Low tables, good teaware & water collected from a mountain stream all add to the tea experience. We drank several old teas we'd brought ourselves including some '58/60 (depending on who you ask) GuanYun Gong and a couple of 80's tuocha. With a reasonable charge for water, you're left to drink tea as you please with no feeling of being rushed at all, even for a few hours.

I can highly recommend a visit to this place to fellow tea travellers coming through Taipei.

Some thoughts on approaches to tea

2008-06-27T16:27:00.001+01:00

I haven't posted in a while, mainly because I wanted to wait, observe and digest the change and evolution of my relationship with tea.

I originally came to appreciate tea whilst living in a hut in a forest in Scotland. At that time I had a few fairly standard Kunming tea market bings, some reasonable oolongs and a few small bags containing bits and pieces of older puerh.

As most of my day was spent in meditation, my daily tea sessions during the breaks became a very important part of my day. Mostly teaching myself and learning by intuition, many of my practices would be deemed technically 'wrong' by most learned tea folk, but I appreciated the tea and came to value the bits and pieces I had and my time spent with them.

Since finishing my meditation retreat and coming on a journey to some of the places of tea, I've met many people with many opinions and different approaches to tea. Until recently I've been kind of disappointed - it all felt so commercial. First in Hong Kong, and then so much more so in Kunming. Kunming tea market is stocked full of such mediocre tea and teaware that it is a rare thing to come across anything very much of note.

With a few exceptions the quality of the wares on offer is matched by the feeling of the shops there. It is cheap, a commodity, to be bought and sold on after a few years, months or even days, hoping to make a small profit on a large amount of cheap, market standard new tea. It was all about quantity and profit, with not so much quality or love for the tea itself.

There was none of the spiritual feeling I'd previously felt during my tea sessions whilst in the forest in Scotland. It felt 'dead', lacking any kind of positive energy. I guess it's created by the same kinds of minds that can bulldoze a hillside of hundred year old tea trees to make room for their new, efficient, fertilizer fuelled plantations.

And so I left, without realizing consciously how disappointed I felt with my experience of tea there. I did drink some nice tea and met some really nice people, but it was only once I left that I realized that it wasn't what I was looking for from my tea life.

With visa extensions in China being almost impossible during their Olympically crazed paranoia, I had to leave the country. Very fortunately for me I received an email, inviting me to come and stay in Taiwan. I'd previously considered coming to visit Taiwan but had kind of brushed over it, figuring it was going to be too expensive, too hot etc. etc. etc. But here was an invitation, and it fitted the time I had to spend somewhere before my flight back to the UK in July.

My host here has an approach to tea which much more fits my disposition. We've been drinking old teas, drinking in silence appreciating the energies each tea had to offer, drinking in mountains collecting water from mountain streams, we tried silver kettles, tetsubins, new cups, antique cups and so many other variables, all of which had a much more profound effect on the tea drinking experience than I had given credit for previously.

I'm reminded again and again of a trick I used to play on my younger brother when we were young children, swapping him 3 'moneys' for 1 'money'. He gladly accepted, not realizing that his 1 money was worth 5 of mine. In the same way one can buy a whole case of poor tea for the price of a single bing, but for me the satisfaction of a pot of good tea greatly outweighs any gallons of poor tea I could have bought previously.

I guess here I've found the beauty in tea which had been missing for me. If I had to give a recommendation to fellow travellers wanting to experience tea culture I'd say 'by all means go to China, experience what there is there and appreciate it for what it is, but make a stop in Taiwan too, appreciate the tea culture and see what beauty there can be in tea too.'

Transit

2008-06-16T07:22:00.001+01:00

As I stopped off in Hong Kong enroute to Taiwan, I called by my friend's house to take some things from the bags I'd left there on my way to Kunming and leave some things I don't require for my next few weeks in Taiwan.

My friends weren't answering their phone, so I called around anyway. After about half an hour of knocking periodically at the door, thinking that they were still asleep, my knocks grew louder. With one particularly heavy knock the door swung open - it hadn't been locked.

I entered to find the place in a mess - the plaster was falling from the ceiling, water was dripping everywhere, their stuff was mostly packed up, moved out or inside plastic bags. Judging from the mouldy smell the place had been like that for a couple of weeks.

I quickly located my stuff, still dry in a cupboard, but the 2 small bings now have a strange smell. My '58 Guanyungong bing is still sealed in it's box and plastic, but I'm afraid to unwrap it.

I quickly stowed it in my bag and got it out of there as soon as possible. Now it's coming to Taiwan with me where I'll have a chance to check it for sure. I'm hoping it's OK. I have the fear that this is a bit more than 'Traditional Hong-Kong wet storage'.

Some further detective work has revealed my friends are in Australia on a trip, apologising that their flat had been 'attacked by water' just before they left.

I'm sure there's a lesson here somewhere, but I'm still trying to figure it out. Maybe it's 'Don't trust anyone with your Guanyungong'. From now on, it comes everywhere with me!

More tea adventures to follow from Taiwan for the next few weeks... stay tuned

Dali

2008-06-05T06:52:00.001+01:00

A few photos from a non-tea-related weekend trip to the mountains a few hours away from Kunming.

Banzhang

2008-06-03T06:26:00.001+01:00

It is commonly remarked that Yiwu is like the queen of puerh tea, while Banzhang is the king. The soft rounded character of Yiwu is contrasted by the intensely strong, bitter flavour and powerful chaqi of Banzhang. Due to the high demand and subsequent sky high prices (up to 1800RMB/US$260 per kg) of Banzhang tea in recent years, it's unlikely that the vast majority of Banzhang tea on the market is actually pure.

With the myth surrounding Banzhang, this was the place I was most excited to be able to go to on this trip and it was as we were driving for 2 hours up possibly the worst track I've ever driven on that I had time to contemplate the different terrains and contrasting flavours of each area. Just like the teas, compared with the smooth bus ride right into Yiwu village, there's nothing smooth about Banzhang - it's rugged and hard, not for the casual sightseer. You really have got to want to go to this place.

Time and time again we winced and felt bad for our kind driver as he scraped the bottom of his van across another rock or ridge, realising why he'd said that it was pretty much impossible to get to Lao Banzhang without a 4x4.

Suddenly the road forked, we stopped for a brief rest from the boneshaking track and viewed the scenery. We were greeted by a sign informing us of our choice... left road Lao (Old) Banzhang and to the right Xin (New) Banzhang.

It seems that up until around 1940 these villagers lived as one community and split up to farm an adjacent mountain, creating a new village and transplanting some tea trees from the old village.

Since we were to call in on one of Erduo's friends later for lunch in Xin Banzhang, we took the left track and continued our negotiation of the hazardous track to Lao Banzhang.

Upon arriving at the town I was surprised to find a barrier in the way with some men sitting in a hut. As we pulled up they got up and peered through the windows, checking the floor of the car where we were sitting and peering into the back. Due to the crazy heights that the price for Banzhang tea has reached in recent years and the lucrative potential for selling tea from other places as 'Banzhang', the villagers have placed a ban on bringing other tea into the village. This goes some way towards ensuring that the tea within Lao Banzhang village is actually from Lao Banzhang, although I'm sure there's bound to be other ways for someone with a strong wish to smuggle tea into the village.

We pulled up into the centre of the village and took a walk around. It seems that a Hong Kong company had bought all the maocha from the second spring picking, and every farmer collectively had agreed to sell only to them. If we wanted to buy any maocha we had to do it at the one official tea trading post in the town, and could only buy a few kilograms if we wanted any at all. This was fine by me, even at the current price which is 1/2 - 1/3 of last years price, this is still expensive tea at US$90 per kg.

We sat and tasted, wishing as we encountered the bitter Banzhang tea that we'd eaten something before.

This tea was bitter, too bitter even for Banzhang. Upon inquiring, we were told that because of the exceptionally heavy rain this Spring, the second picking all possessed this harsh flavour. Luckily there were a few kilos of the first Spring picking available for us to taste. This was much better. Still possessing the strong Banzhang ku [bitterness], this was much less harsh and more aromatic, with a lasting huigan [pleasant aftertaste]. "We'll take some of this, but just a kilo each".

Our tea was weighed out and we left, with a couple of shopping bags filled with maocha. We had a brief look around the village, before hurredly getting back in the car, on our way towards lunch to fill our aching stomachs.

Our venue for lunch was at Erduo's friend's house in Xin [New] Banzhang. Back onto the track!

Luckily when we reached the junction to Xin Banzhang the road became (comparitively) more smooth, and the few remaining miles to Xin Banzhang were much more comfortable. Before ariving at the village, as with Lao Banzhang, there was the standard barrier and scrutiny of the contents of our car to prevent tea smuggling. Luckily they seemed uninterested with the few kilograms of maocha we'd picked up in Lao Banzhang - presumably they're really only interested in someone bringing sackfulls of tea into the village

First before lunch, we had some more tea. Luckily the Xin Banzhang tea was much less bitter and more easy for our aching stomachs.

Lunch was a pleasure, a feast of tasty dishes, followed by yet more tea. Having already spend more than we could afford on Lao Banzhang maocha, we declined the offer to be able to purchase some Xin Banzhang maocha, but upon our leaving, we were each presented with a plastic bag stuffed full of maocha anyway. Such kindness.

And so, after a brief look around the village, back into the van to begin our journey back home. Pretty much the end of our tea trip and a pleasant end to a very special week.

Nannuoshan (2)

2008-05-25T07:37:00.001+01:00

It's with a feeling of relief that I write this post. I'd been holding off on this, while I waited for our tea from Nannuoshan to arrive in Kunming. With usual haphazard inefficiency somehow our package of tea took 1 week to make the 10 hour journey from Menghai to Kunming.

Following MarshalN's warnings about unscrupulous tea farmers and the very late arrival of our tea I began to question my instincts at trusting our farmer friend in Nannuoshan. I'm happy to say that once again our instincts proved correct and our bings arrived safe and intact, tasting as good, if not better than I remembered the maocha tasting. Next time though I've made a mental note to take a sample of maocha away with me to be able to compare to the freshly pressed bings - I realised that if our tea had been switched there would have been no way to prove it. But thankfully all is well, so on with the story...

Following lunch we set about tasting some of the farmer's 2008 Da Shu Cha maocha. First off was the 1st Spring picking. The first picking of Spring is traditionally the most sought after, being more aromatic than it's subsequent siblings and this one didn't disappoint. Throughout the infucions, it smelt and tasted great, however in the first couple of infusions there was a slightly burnt taste and hint of a burnt smell which worried me slightly. Having memories of drinking another tea which exhibited this characteristic in a much more pronounced manner I enquired as to the sha qing of this tea. Erduo (the farmer) confessed that yes, he'd messed up the sha qing for this batch of tea, leaving it a little too long in contact with the heat and scorching it slightly. What a pity.

Next up was the second Spring picking. This had less smell in the cup, but had a thick soup and a nice lingering hui gan. A nice tea to drink.

I thought about pressing a few bings of each one, and then the idea hit me - what about blending the two maochas to get the best qualities of each and even out any shortcomings either may possess. We went back to the sacks and grabbed a handful of each tea, mixed it up as best as possible and refilled the gaiwan.

The flavour was good, the smell was good, but there was still that hint of too much sha qing that worried me. I decided to play it safe and decided just to buy some of the second Spring picking maocha.

While discussing the pressing of the bings, Erduo volunteered a friend's factory in Menghai. He trusted their attention to detail and they'd be happy to press the (relatively) small quantity of bings that we wanted. He volunteered to bring us there that afternoon before dropping us home.

Once again our luck exceeded any of our expectations. While chatting about our plans for the rest of our tea trip, and hearing that we hoped to go to Lao Banzhang the following day, Erduo expressed some reservations. Lao Banzhang is a couple of hours drive up a dirt track from the main road and is accessible only by 4x4, motorbike or truck. He doubted that we'd be able to get there very easily and, after some thought, volunteered that he'd drive us there the next day. He'd drive us back to Menghai that afternoon, bring us to press some bings in the tea factory and stay with us in Menghai, ready to make an early start the next day. Perfect.

Since we had a bit of time to before we needed to go back to town, we looked around his tea processing setup. For Da Shu Cha and smaller quantities of tea, he used the same wok setup for his shaqing, but when processing larger amounts of taidicha he had a machine for this purpose. Basically a revolving drum mounted over a fire, the drum had spiraling fins inside to keep the tea moving around and working it's way through the machine

Also in his mechanized setup was a rou nian [rolling] machine, taking the manual work out of another stage of the processing.

Then it was into the van, to take a drive through his tea plantations before heading back down the mountain, towards Menghai.

We stopped briefly at the factory, drank yet more tea & chatted with the friendly owner, discussing our bing pressing requirements. With a little coersion from Erduo, he finally agreed to let us in to have a look around the factory - apparently (and it's not the first time I'd heard of this) the government has a ban on foreigners going into tea factories - perhaps they're worried that the unhygenic conditions in many of the factories might reach international attention. Luckily there was nothing to worry about here. We donned our white coats, hats and plastic shoe covers and wandered around freely.

Much of what we say here was very similar to the other factory I posted about a few weeks ago so I won't go into any detail. The one major difference here was that they package their tongs in the traditional manner, bound in bamboo husks. This process was intriguing to watch, with the worker stripping, cutting and binding with speed and ease.

Then off for some food & some sleep before our early departure in the morning.

Nannuoshan

2008-05-22T07:11:00.001+01:00

We spent a fairly uneventful day making the journey from Yiwu to Menghai and settling into our basic accommodation which we hoped to be able to use as a base for the next few days while we explored surrounding tea mountains. Next morning, we arose early and boarded a bus headed back towards Jinghong, backtracking a little, hoping to jump off half an hour down the road and hitch a lift up the track to Nannuoshan.

As it turned out, once again we had a little more good fortune on our side than we'd even dreamed of hoping for.

As the bus drew out of the station in Menghai, Kathy decided to phone one of the numbers we'd been given by some friends in Kunming of a farmer from Nannuoshan.

It turned out that the farmer, whose name was Erduo, was in Menghai, just a couple of minutes from the bus station. We rushed off the bus to the bemusement of driver and fellow passengers and within 10 minutes we were back on the road to Nannuoshan, this time in a comfy van instead of a crowded bus.

As we drove high into the mountains along a dirt track, I felt very glad to have this friendly guide. Who knows what experiences an alternative scenario would have yielded for us, but having some local knowledge on hand was once again proving invaluable.

We drove past the entrance to his village and up higher into the mountain in search of Nannuoshan's 1000 year old tea tree. At some point we couldn't go further, from here we would continue on foot. As we continued along the track gradually the usual forest vegetation beside the path began to change. First some small tea trees, then bigger ones, then some really huge ones. These were much much bigger trees than those we'd come across in Yiwu, and more similar to those I'd encountered in photograph form usually accompanied by someone standing proudly in front.

We took our obligatory tea-tourist photos standing in front of a few big trees, and continued on to find the one true "millenial old tea tree" that Nannuoshan could lay claim to. Unfortunately, for the makers of those bings which make claims of containing leaves from trees of this age, this tree isn't picked. Being recognised as something of a local heritage piece, this tree has been surrounded by a barbed wire fence and is left to grow according to it's natural cycle, without being of robbed of it's leaves a few times a year.

Having seen this local treasure, we headed back to the van to return to Erduo's house, where his wife and their mothers had produced a beautiful meal for us. Once again we feasted and relaxed in the friendly, open & genuine atmosphere of another tea farmer's house.

Yiwu (3)

2008-05-19T15:45:00.001+01:00

Day 3 - Yiwu

Following a leisurely lunch, we set about preparing for the afternoon's activities. Our hosts had an order for 84 taidicha bings which they were due to press. To this we added our request for a few bings of their Dha Shu Cha [big tree tea] and Yesheng Chiao Mu [Wild Arbour] maocha.

Despite their basic living conditions, I was impressed with the cleanliness they practised towards their tea processing activities (although who knows how much our presence affected the proceedings - my guess is that it wasn't a lot)

We went to the roof and gathered up the maocha that had been wilting in the sun.

The room was swept, the sha qing wok scrubbed and a fire lit. The sha qing wok was interesting for me, basically a huge oversized wok, mounted over a sealed fire. The edges were sealed and the smoke vented out a chimney in the rear to prevent the tea picking up any smell from the wood fire beneath.

Besides being used for sha qing, this also provided the means for producing steam to soften the maocha during the pressing process.

Water was poured into the large wok, then a smaller wok with a hole in the bottom placed upside down over the water and wet rags arranged around the edges to seal the water beneath. As the water boiled, steam was vented up through the hole in the small wok into the waiting tube of maocha.

The bing pressing process was a 3 person operation. One to weigh the maocha into the metal tubes, one to steam the maocha and make sure it is evenly distributed in a the cloth bag, and one to compress the bing by standing on the stone moulds.

The bings (still inside their cloth bags) placed on a rack to cool, before unwrapping several hours later and drying for a few days.

With their order of bings already pressed, I took the opportunity to stamp some neifei for our bings

WIth the pressing of our order of bings complete, we moved on to processing the tea leaves we'd picked in the morning. As the wok was already heated, we just needed to remove the remaining water, scrub it down, and begin the sha qing [lit. kill green] process. This process stops the oxidation of the fresh leaf, and prevents it from turning into a red tea.

The trick, it seems, is to keep the leaves moving constantly, so no leaves ever come in contact with the heat for so long that they get burnt, but still allow enough heat to properly stop the oxidation process. The smell of these crackling fresh leaves cooking was sweet and almost overpowering.

With the sha qing complete, it was time to begin the rou nian [rolling] process. This, if done correctly, breaks the cells within the leaf, releasing oils and giving shape to the dried leaf.

The remaining steps before this tea could be pressed into bings were shai qing - withering in the sun, and picking out the huang pian [yellowed leaves]. Since we planned to leave the next day, they offered to carry out the shai qing themselves over the next day or two and send us the dried leaves for us to pick out the huang pian and press the bings ourselves back in Kunming. Perfect.

With some time left before dinner, I took the opportunity to have a wander around the village and came across this guy sitting in his yard making stone moulds. I was impressed by his speed and skill, able to carve these blocks of stone with an appearance of ease. I subsequently learnt of farmers driving for 5 or more hours to buy these stone presses from Yiwu.

Then, back for dinner. I was disappointed, but touched, to learn that they'd killed one of their chickens for us. They'd prepared a feast. Some in-laws came around for dinner and we ate and chatted until late in the night.

Tomorrow we would leave this peaceful village on our journey to Menghai.

Yiwu (2)

2008-05-17T06:22:00.001+01:00

Day 3 - Yiwu (2)

Rising early, as may be expected in village life, we took cold showers in the shed at the bottom of the garden and climbed up the Old Tea Horse Road to fill up on a breakfast of spicy rice noodles.

The village seems enmeshed in history and I had to remind myself from time to time that I was really in this famous place of which I had previously read so much.

After breakfast, it was back to the house to grab a bamboo basket, some locally made cloth bags to collect tea in and a few fresh cucumbers from the garden and some fruit to snack on in the mountains. Then we set off for the half-hour trek to reach their tea plantation. Rows of neatly pruned taidicha filled the small hillside that belonged to this family, interspersed with darting tea chickens almost self-sufficient save for a few handfuls of corn thrown for them each day.

Unconcerned with picking the taidicha, we paused here briefly only to take in the scenery before beginning our ascent into the forest in search of some wild tea trees. Those that we found were very different from the images of Wild Arbour trees that I'd previously encountered. Fighting for light amongst much taller trees, it seems these tea trees needed to adopt a much taller, wiry approach to their growth pattern. Luckily, for eager tea gatherers such as us, this thinness also meant that, although too thin to lean a ladder against, it was possible to stand further up the steep hill and bend the tree towards us, bringing the fresh shoots within our grasp.

Continuing further on into the forest we arrived at the family's Da Shu (Big tree) garden. These trees were planted by the Great Great Grandfather of our kind hostess, and had been continually tended by the family throughout the years. Unfortunately they'd also been pruned for many of these years, so hadn't been allowed to grow to their full size, though this fact also made it easier for us novice tea pickers, needing sometimes only to climb a log resting upon a fork in the trunk to reach the fresh leaves.

The strategy when picking was to leave at least one fresh leaf on each shoot. This provided the conditions for another shoot to sprout from the base of this leaf, encouraging the growth of the tea plant.

I was impressed with the lightning quick speed with which these farmers could gather leaves. By the time I'd picked a few shoots, they already had a handful of leaves.

On the edges of the garden, where there were less overhead trees shading the tea, I noticed the plants growing purple leaves. I'd previously read of tea plants doing this at high altitudes to reflect more of the lower wavelengths of the light spectrum and protect their tender shoots from the harsh ultra-violet rays, and have also drunk some tea composed entirely of these purple leaves, but had never seen this process in action before.

We stayed and picked for another hour or so and descended down towards our awaiting lunch.

At one point on the track, our friendly host said something and darted into the bushes only to return moments later with a stick surrounded by fresh honeycomb, dripping with the sweetest, most delicious honey I've ever tasted. He carved off slices with his knife and we stood and feasted on this sticky treat.

Yiwu

2008-05-16T09:14:00.001+01:00

Day 2 - Yiwu

Happy to be beginning our actual tea journey, we boarded the crowded midday bus to Yiwu village.

It seems there are two buses that make the roundtrip from Yiwu to Jinghong and back each day. Run by friendly Yiwu locals, the conductor would receive a call on her mobile phone and 10 or 20 minutes later the bus would stop to pick up stacks of printed puerh wrappers, bags of pineapples from roadside sellers or tea farmers returning from the many plantations that adorned the hills to each side of the road.

Seeing the sheer scale of the tea plantations along the way, I feel less and less surprised by the amount of puerh that is passed off as being from Yiwu. These were places whose name meant nothing to me, having never come across tea labelled as being from there, and I guess puerh is usually sold as being from somewhere. If the farmers are from Yiwu, why not bring it the 30-50 miles back and sell it as being local. Indeed one of the Yiwu farmers subsequently told me that if a tea is produced by a large factory, it's pretty much guaranteed not to be actually grown in Yiwu!

As the bus pulled up in Yiwu, the friendly conductor enquired as to why we were here and wondered if we needed to be dropped off at the hotel. Overhearing Kathy, my travelling tea friend and Mandarin tutor, replying that we were looking for some tea farmers, a youngish couple shyly introduced themselves, said they were tea farmers and invited both of us to come and stay at their house. With a healthy wariness, we discussed this offer briefly, but sometimes it's possible to tell straight away that someone is really a good person, and from these people it was obvious. From their faces we could see they were honest and genuinely wanted to help us.

Fortunately our instincts proved correct. They made a phone call and a friend of theirs arrived in a van to drive us the short distance to their house on the edge of the village.

Their house was a simple affair, a courtyard filled with bamboo baskets of leaves withering in the sun, a large sitting room with TV, tea table and a few seats, 4 bedrooms, kitchen and a tea processing & pressing room.
It was interesting to note that they also had a dry storage room for their maocha. They kept this room heated and dry to prevent their maocha from gaining any humid flavour from the mountain air. This apparently is quite rare for farmers in Yiwu and, as I came to appreciate later, was just another of many indications of their attention to detail and wish to produce tea that was of a high standard.

The husband of the couple was originally from Puerh town and, having met his wife, moved to Yiwu to live with her parents and farm the land & tea plants that had been in her family for over 5 generations. As we sat and drank maocha with the husband, his wife and her mother prepared a feast in the kitchen which I observed with a tinge of guilt and a feeling that this was obviously much more extravagant than usual for the family. Nonetheless, as I relaxed and understood their wish to treat us well as guests, I accepted and ate gratefully before retiring to bed.

Tomorrow, we would head for the mountains to pick some tea.

Jinghong

2008-05-16T07:32:00.001+01:00

As I return from a tea filled week, a bit exhausted and overwhelmed, it's kind of nice to be back in Kunming again. During the past week I've experienced so much and met so many open, generous and genuine people. Again and again I thought the trip couldn't get any better, only to meet someone new and be really touched by their kindness towards a couple of complete strangers arriving at their home.

There's been far too much in the past week to be able to recount in a single post, but over the next few days I'll attempt to compile my thoughts and convey these experiences as best I can.

Day 1 - Jinghong

Jinghong, being the largest of Xishuangbanna's cities and the destination of our 10 hour overnight sleeper bus from Kunming, was our first stop on this trip, allowing us some time to relax and break our journey.

We arrived at dawn and checked into a friendly Korean guesthouse, waking the staff from their early morning slumber, showered, changed and emerged feeling slightly less exhausted. In the courtyard were several bamboo huts, one of which complete with full gongfu setup. It turns out the owner of the guesthouse buys and exports puerh to Korea. He invited us to join him, and a tasty tea session soon had us revived from our travels and prepared for the day ahead.

Since our bus to Yiwu didn't leave until the following morning, we took the opportunity to rent a couple of bicycles and explore the surrounding countryside.

Compared to Kunming, Jinghong is a beautifully slow city. We checked out some Thai Buddhist temples and cycled to some outlying areas. The weather here was a big change from the cool Kunming climate and, as the midday heat increased, we took refuge in the shaded courtyard of a Dai restaurant, thirsty for some iced water. As we sat in the cool shade uneager to brave the sun again, quickly we decided to stay for some lunch. Despite the fact that we were their only customers, they happily fired up their barbeque and cooked some delicious vegetables and fish. We ate our fill and, as we arranged the chairs to enable us to lie in a more horizontal position, they noted our weariness and invited us inside to their sleeping mats and invited us to sleep for a midday siesta - perfect!

The remainder of the day, we spent exploring a little more of the town, drinking fruit juice in western style cafes and casually checking out some of the local tea shops with no intention of buying anything so early in our trip.

'Banna bound

2008-05-08T08:35:00.001+01:00

Armed with newly purchased camera, my Mandarin tutor (who I've managed to get hooked on pu), some mosquito spray, sunscreen and some cash, I'm off to Xishuangbanna for a week or so.

Amongst destinations on our itinerary are Banzhang, YouLe, YiWu and most probably some unplanned tea adventures.

Expect some reportage upon our return

12 Gentlemen & 100 Year old pu

2008-04-30T06:03:00.001+01:00

I've been spending a lot of time recently hanging out at the tea shop owned by the 12 Gentlemen, a group of puerh aficionados here in Kunming. The name itself is a reference to the 12 accoutrements deemed necessary for preparing tea in the Song dynasty. Of all the producers I've come across, these guys seem to be the most interesting. As true puer geeks, they source leaves directly from the mountains, overseeing every stage of the production, tweaking variables on a small scale to fine tune their productions.

I've learnt a lot in this place. Despite my limited Chinese, and their limited English, somehow we've always either had someone handy to translate, or patiently muddled through with the help of dictionaries, charades, nods and smiles.

One of the managers, who seems to be in the shop most days, has been teaching me bits and pieces about the grading and selection of leaves, methods of tasting, testing and assessing a tea. Each time I go, he brews a new tea for me to try. Without telling me anything of the history or quality of the tea, he'll brew it and ask my opinions. Sometimes I chance upon an answer which is close to the mark, sometimes I'm way off, but it's fun to play and, when a tea is bad, it's usually pretty obvious. The game gets harder when he brews teas that have been artificially doctored by some unknown process to make them seem more aged. Sometimes this has been done so well that it's really very hard to tell - sometimes it's just a slightly burnt smell from the dry leaves, an unusually red liquor, a strange taste or feeling at the back of the throat that give it away. It's useful practice for identifying the fake teas that are on the market.

Hidden upstairs from their shop is the most extensive puerh library I've come across. The amalgamation of several large individual collections, the aim here is to catalogue puerh from subsequent years, from many areas, from a variety of producers. That way, they have a reliable reference for how a good tea from any particular mountain from any particular year should taste. Several times I've wandered into their shop at the end of an afternoon wandering the tea market and produced a bing I've just bought. After a cursory examination, they've produced a bing from the same year and same area to brew side-by-side. Sometimes the tastes are very similar, sometimes remarkably different. Sometimes my newly-purchased bing compares favourably to their collection item, sometimes poorly, but it's always interesting to be able to compare personally and get an unbiased opinion from someone with much much more experience than I.

I apologise for the lack of photos of this event, my camera just got stolen, but wandering randomly into the tea shop a couple of days ago I encountered one of the Gentlemen I hadn't come across before. He owns the majority of the puerh library, and this day had come to the shop with a baggie filled with 100 year old pu. I'd arrived quite late in the brewing and the atmosphere was very relaxed, when tasting my first cup I understood why - the qi of this tea was very powerful. Immediately my whole body relaxed and all was well. My only previous experience with a chaqi of this strength was whilst drinking 1958 GuanYunGong with Hobbes & Lei, and since drinking so much young tea recently I'd forgotten how good an old tea can really be.

I make a mental note that I really should to try to drink old pu slightly more often.

Visit to a tea factory

2008-04-25T10:57:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting a tea factory. A friend was pressing a few bings of taidicha (plantation tea). Content to wait for a week or two until some quality 2008 Spring Gu Shu Maocha arrives, I accompanied her just for fun.

The owner's wife, being an ex-teacher, spoke great English and was happy to show me around the factory and explain the process of pressing a bingcha.

For those of you on slow connections, I apologise for the photo-rich post. As usual, for those of you who wish, you can click on the photos for larger versions.

The leaves, after the relevant processing (Sha Qing, withering and rolling) arrive at the factory in large bags

From where they are graded (for Shu Cha) according to their size

And sorted

to remove any yellowed leaves or other rubbish.

They are sprayed with water to prevent excessive breakage during handling and pushed down tubes into the pressing room.

The Maocha is given one last inspection by a quality control supervisor

and weighed individually for each bing.

The correct weight of maocha is inserted into a metal tube and placed over a jet of steam.

This greatly softens the maocha and prepares it to be placed into a cloth bag.
The bag is compressed by hand, and twisted in the centre. This twisted excess bag is the cause of the dome in the centre of the back of most bingcha's.

The bag is then placed under a stone press, which is gently rocked in a circular fashion.

And then placed on a rack to dry slightly.

Each bing is then removed from it's bag and placed in a heated room to remove the remaining moisture from the bing and prevent moulding. The heated pipes on the floor keep this room around 45ºC, with a sauna-like quality to the air. The smell in here was delicious.

When sufficiently dried, each bing is then individually wrapped and parcelled into a tong (made of thick paper in this case).

The factory also had a selection of Da Shu (Big tree) Maocha's available to purchase & were happy to brew a selection for us to try. Their standard brewing method was to infuse 5g for 5mins to bring out any negative aspects that each tea could exhibit. None seemed exceptionally special to my tastes though, so I declined the polite offer to be able to purchase any, although they promised to make me a bing of my favourite and send it back with my friend's newly pressed bings.

In all, a great day out. Interesting, educational, and we got to drink tea!

Kunming 3rd International Puerh expo

2008-04-21T04:59:00.001+01:00

Despite high hopes for this event, I have to say I was a little disappointed my day out at the tea expo. Filled with people, all handing out their business card, sussing out how how many cases you might like to buy from their factory whilst brewing their low quality teas that they brought for the general public to try, this place left me yearning for the quiet streets of the tea market.

I'm afraid I don't have much commentary on this event, the atmosphere of commercialism wasn't really my thing. I'm told though that this year's expo was approximately 1/2 - 2/3rds the size of last year's, another indication of the slump in the puerh craze of late.

Scott did manage to find some good young teas to buy in quantity and some apparently great 2008 Jingmai Gu Shu Cha, which I haven't had the opportunity to taste as of yet, but hope to soon.

Some pu from a Taiwanese company, specialising in mixing their pu with various kinds of lotus blossoms. A pretty bing, but too floral for my taste.

Kunming

2008-04-12T02:15:00.011+01:00

Despite my best laid plans to stay in Kunming for just a couple of weeks, I got here and quickly decided that a couple of months would be more productive. With much help from Scott (from Yunnan Sourcing) I was soon equipped with a bike for getting around and a room in a flat with a very pleasant American friend of his. I found myself a Mandarin tutor and quickly settled down into a comfortable daily routine - some meditation and Mandarin study in the morning, then onto the bike and head to the tea market for an afternoon of trawling the shops, drinking myriad different puerhs, pausing briefly only to eat something light now and again to maintain some kind of friendship with my internal organs.

And so it goes day by day... with literally hundreds of tea shops to choose from there always seems to be some new discovery tucked around a corner or up some stairs.

Kunming tea market is something of an amazement for me. Hundreds upon hundreds of tea shops packed into a small area, with development going on to create room for another hundred or so. The place is quiet, a change from the rest of the city. Most of the shops spend the day devoid of customers, with the owners sitting drinking some tea with their family and friends or chatting with other shop owners. I can't help wondering how these shops can survive. I have a feeling that the development going on was planned and initiated at the height of the puerh boom last year and that the many cases of puerh that fill the shops were bought near the height of the frenzy, now sitting unwanted, with the owners hanging on, trying not to make too much of a loss on their sale.

The vast majority of the puerh available is low end stuff, packaged in all kinds of wrappers touting their 'Da Shu' (big tree) or 'Ye Sheng' (wild) credentials. If you believe that you'll believe most things. Sit down and have a taste and generally you're greeted with some unpleasantness or just a bland brew, nothing to excite one's tastebuds here - the actual plantation tea contained within these cakes leaves much to be desired.

As I spend more time there and meet some more people I'm gradually coming into contact with a few people who seem to be into puerh for the love of the tea. These are the people who seem to take some care when separating the leaves, take some care when brewing & tasting the tea, generally are doing their own small productions of puerh, sourcing the leaves and experimenting with different production methods to learn first hand how these variables effect the flavours, both in the newly pressed bings and as they evolve over time. Of note so far for me, has been Hai Lang Hao and a group of puerh aficionados called The 12 Gentlemen (a reference to the 12 accessories deemed necessary for making tea in the Song Dynasty). I guess each of these merits a post of their own, so more to come on them later.

Yummm... some of Hai Lang Hao's 2005 Jin Gu Yan Ta wild tea.

More to follow from the 3rd International Yunnan Puerh Expo which takes place for the next 3 days.

A beautiful tea day

2008-03-21T17:49:00.001Z

Today provided another confirmation to me of the wonderful way that tea can bring people together and create the opening for an instant friendship to arise. This is something I've experienced often with Dharma friends & as I begin to meet some online tea friends in the outside world sometimes something special can ensue.

A few weeks ago, while planning my trip to Hong Kong, I emailed Cloud (a well known puer lover amongst the tea community and author of "First step to Chinese Puerh Tea") to see if he would like to meet for some tea while I was in Hong Kong. He very quickly agreed and very kindly offered to bring some of his collection of vintage puers to the table to provide the very necessary sensory experience to relate to several of his articles he's written on his site and posted on internet forums.

Today was the day we would meet. I spent the morning beforehand browsing tea shops & trying (mostly failing) not to drink too many samples as I knew some serious gongfu action was to follow. As we met in a subway station there was an instant easyness and lightness in our conversation and I felt happy that today would be a fun day.

Having failed to be able book a table at Best Tea House (they were holding a function), Cloud and his girlfirend Cedric lead me round a few corners and up a tiny stairwell in a random street. The venue was to be "Green & Tea House", a small tea house run by our very kind and gracious hosts for the afternoon Charles and his wife (who's name escapes me... my poor memory again!).

This venue was beautiful. The colours were muted browns, beautiful woods and inscriptions painted by Charles and his wife on the walls. The walls were minimally adorned with framed, aged bings and the large balcony bordered by bamboo plants. The whole place imbued our gathering with feeling of relaxation - if perhaps I knew something of Feng Shui I could say that this place had it good, but I'm content to say that it was the most comfortable tea establishment I've had the pleasure to come across yet.

As we sat & prepared, each of us produced our guns, Cloud his 1992 Menghai, a wet stored 80's 8582 for comparison purposes, his 1980's Zhongcha brand Traditional Characters and 1970's ZhongCha Brand Simplified Characters. I, with much much less tea than this long time collector, brought a recently restocked sample of the '58 GYG that I drank not so long ago with Hobbes & Lei at another tea meeting with this feeling of specialness to it.

Hmnn... looks like we're in for a heavy one. First off was the youngest, the 1992 Menghai, starting to show some nice signs of ageing, a reddish brown soup, a smooth taste and lack of astringency. This is a tea that Cloud has had for over 7 years and has been observing the changes in this tea as it matures. The infusions lasted well into the teens and, after an hour or so, aware that we had others to try, we moved on to the 1970's ZhongCha brand Simplified Characters.

This is a tea I'd been wanting to taste for a while. I'd read Cloud's articles of praise for this tea and having previously once only tasted a wettish stored example of this tea, I was eager to taste a bing from someone who had the opportunity to pick and chose his beengs several years ago before the prices rose to their outrageous (US$1500-2000) current position.

For me the Chaqi is the highlight of aged puerh and this tea came up trumps. Nicely blissful with a thick soup and beautiful aftertaste to match, this tea was a pleasure to drink. Time passed quickly as Cloud brewed infusion after infusion, flitting between cups with his antique yixing and soon (many infusions later) the liquid was getting weaker though still very pleasant.

Aware that our capacity to drink much more tea was going to wane sometime, we moved on to the early 60's GYG. This was a tea I'd ordered a few grams of from the internet, and as we brewed it to my surprise Cloud and Cedric praised it - they had 2 bings of the same vintage, but not with such good storage. As before for me this tea sent wave after wave of blissful feeling through my body as the powerful chaqi took hold even from the first inhalation of the scent. The already pleasant atmosphere grew very special and peaceful. On this, my second encounter with brewing this tea I can confirm that this is like no other tea I've come across and produces an effect that verges somewhere between narcotic and spiritual.

As the four of us (Charles the proprietor had joined our session) approached the exhaustion of our infusions of this tea, Charles magically produced 2 bings of this same tea for our comparison. I was wary of the much inferior late 60's GYG I'd previously tried, but these did seem to have the same composition... lots of stems, compared to the more bud laden 60's version. Cloud & Cedric confirmed and Charles very kindly chipped off a healthy Gaiwan full for us to sample. Phew... qi overload, more bliss. Slightly rounder in taste, this bing had a hint of some humid storage to it, but nowhere near enough to make it taste bad. I could see that indeed the sample I'd managed to come across previously had enjoyed a more blessed life free from moisture, but this came close. Please stop now... I don't think I can face any more qi!

And so we rested for a while... Cedric disappeared out for a few minutes and returned from the street laden with fresh waffle snacks, I walked on the balcony delighting in the surroundings... and Charles produced another old tea!

This was a 1950's tea that came from a "1000 Tael Tea" - a huge log of tea that is tightly compressed. While, I think, not puerh proper, this tea is compressed in the same way and improves with age in the same way.
The taste was interesting, pleasant but obviously different to the old pu's I've tried. Not so much qi, but quite honestly I was in no fit state to be able to tell at that stage of the game.

That was it, game over. The four of us adjourned to a Vegetarian Restaurant to eat fake sea animal parts (fake crab claws, fake sea cucumber, fake squid tentacles, fake abalone and fake shark fin soup), all sculpted, seasoned and textured to be strikingly similar to the real thing. Accompanying this feast Cloud asked the waitress to replace the standard restaurant tea they were about to offer us with a chunk of 80's Traditional Characters... nice.

It was during this feast that I learned that Charles was going to be in YiWu next month to source some wild maocha. Cedric dropped the hint and he agreed to show me around. Great! The tea gods seem to be doing their thing. I'd hoped to press a few bings while there, but had a few reservations about my non-mandarin speaking/obvious westernerness/fresh maocha virginity credentials for getting blatantly ripped off even if I managed to make it as far as the mountains! Things are looking good.

So that was it. We parted with warm smiles, a day well done.... and tomorrow? Yep you guessed it... more tea!

Touch down

2008-03-19T16:00:00.003Z

Well, I'm here. After a month or so of preparation I've finally arrived in Hong Kong, and all's gone smoothly.

Checked into the hostel and was informed that I could only stay for 2 nights - fully booked, no matter, let's see what happens. It seems like there are signs for hostels on every street anyway.

Had a wander around to get a feel for the area, and... wait a minute, what's this? Gaiwans in the window?

Yes, it's The Best Tea House, one of my places I'd hoped to search for. I walked in, sat down and was served with a selection of their teas to try. I'd seen their range of loose leaf pu's on their website and often wondered about them. Miscellaneously packaged, giving scant clues as to their history, I could but pick an age - 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, 30 years.

I opted for their 20 years. To wet? Lets try the 25 years - this one's drier stored. Too wet again? Don't worry this 30 year old one is even drier stored. Too wet! I walked away content that I would never need to wonder about their range of loose puer again.

I did have a pleasant conversation with the lady who worked there and had a browse of their bings. Amongst a wall of wrappers that meant nothing to me, I spotted a bing of the Zhong Cha Brand Traditional Characters tea much written about by Cloud. I'd often wondered about the price of these, now I knew - HK$9000 (£600). Out of my price range I'm afraid.

Next morning, I rose early and dropped off my passport for a Chinese Visa with a smile at the 250% extra I pay for being British. Oh well, I did have some consolation in that I'm not American... they pay much more.

What now? More tea. I track down the illustrious Sunsing. A haven from the busy streets at the 34th Floor of a tower in what looks to be an upmarket area of town. I browse their pu. Some young ones, some older ones, some older still, some 50's Red Mark, some wrapperless 1920's bings, some 1900's bings. They stopped displaying their prices (in English at least) well before I reached the Red Mark so I can only guess what crazy prices a bing of 1900's pu goes for.

I spotted a bing of Zhongcha Brand Simplified Characters - HK$15000... dream on!

They do have a nice selection of yixing pots at apparently reasonable prices (to someone who's previously only bought pots via the internet or in the West) but since I hope to return to HK after my adventures in Yunnan I hold off on any purchases this early in my journey.

Finishing my day with a meditation at the Vajradhara Buddhist Centre, I'm offered a place to stay while I'm in hong kong. Nice. The Buddhist connections came through. This is one of the fringe benefits of being Buddhist. In almost all countries I hope to visit there is a Dharma centre, with people who are kind, trustworthy and happy to help. This really does make a big difference when travelling.