Portrait of an LBX

Two years ago when I visited Anxi (安溪縣) with my mother as a day trip from nearby Xiamen, I was impressed by its giant “City of Tea (茶都),” which I remembered afterward as resembling a hastily assembled Vatican with the merchandising of tea as its religion. Afterward through the years that I spent in Beijing and Shanghai, whenever I went to a tea market — which I often did — it was usually exclusively in search of the type of tea that I had discovered on my first trip to Anxi, tieguanyin (鐵觀音, Iron Avalokitesvara, or Iron Goddess of Mercy, a type of oolong tea produced in Anxi, article 1 & article 2). Not only was the tieguanyin I kept at all times in my freezer always produced in Anxi, but every one of the hundreds of merchants selling it for between 100 and 1000+ yuan ($15 – $150) per half kilo (I usually bought in the 200 yuan range) was a native of said mountainous county in Southern Fujian. A year or so ago Andy also began his appreciation for the hot, green beverage, and so when plotting our route, it was only natural to plot a course through one of chief production centers of one of China’s greatest gifts to the world. By way of a metaphor, Anxi is more or less to the world of Chinese teas what Napa Valley is to US wine production. Yes, it’s kind of a big deal. 

An Anxi woman crops her tea trees with extended shears. Photo by Andy

As we neared Anxi in neighboring Datian County (大田縣), signs for tea workshops (茶廠) began to appear regularly on the sides of the road, although most producers with whom we stopped to speak told us they had tea only immediately after production and had long ago sold the entire batch. One old man informed me that due to the profitability of tieguanyin production, its cultivation had spread to Anxi’s neighboring provinces of Datian, Yongchun (永春縣), and Dehua (德化縣), and further that Datian’s tea was superior to Anxi’s since “our tea industry has only recently been developed, and their trees are old (我們的茶業最近幾年才開發起來的，而安溪那邊的茶樹都老了).” Not only that, but some producers from Anxi even travel to Datian to buy tea and then sell it with an Anxi label slapped on the packaging, he told me. The veracity of his claim is of course up in the air, but from the long row of tea producers all lined up in a row with giant mechanical tea cookers out front and the brand new “International Tea Trade Center” across the street, it was clear the industry was growing. 

Women of one Huang family sit in front of the family storefront picking stems from a batch of tieguanyin. Photo by Andy

Without having to ask or see a sign, I knew immediately when we had crossed from Yongchun into Anxi, as the villagescape changed noticeably. Whereas for days, all the villages (村子) we had passed were rugged, simple, and sparse, the first of Anxi, a place called Xianrong (仙榮村), was full of multi-story, redbrick structures, densely packed and clearly recently built. We later found out that just about all these buildings were built on “tea money.” On the first floor of many of the buildings — especially those marked with Anxi’s single most commonly occuring character: cha (茶, tea) — were what I call “tasting desks (品嘗桌).” These desks are all fitted with a tea tray and built-in plastic drainage tube to a bucket, and on them sit large, plastic bottles of spring water and little metal pots on electric stove plates. In front of one such room we saw a group of three women and a man sitting around a shallow circular bamboo basket full of green tea leaves, picking out and discarding the stems. We approached, and immediately the man, Mr. Huang, thin, in his twenties, and with densely knotted hair, invited us to sit in front of his desk for tea. Though he was very skittish, and his Mandarin was nearly unintelligible, we were able to gather from the group of his male friends who arrived presently that his family has been in the tea business for years, just like all the other families, and that they bring in 200,000 yuan (~$30,000) a year on the trade. All the men in the room (the women stayed in the background) had very yellow or brown teeth, probably explained by their common habit of slurp-aerating every sip of tea over their front teeth, a somewhat disgusting practice that Andy explained is common among wine connoisseurs. 

Hillsides full of tea trees like this are everywhere in Anxi. Photo by Andy

Over nearly a hundred little cups of gongfucha (功夫茶, quickly steeped, strong tea), the men explained the cyclic nature of the business. Spring tea (春茶), the more delicate tasting and thus more sought after, is harvested and processed over a 30-day period starting from around May 1. Fall tea (秋茶), with a stronger but less nuanced flavor (比春茶的味道濃可是沒有春茶的味道微妙), which we were drinking, is also processed over a 30-day period, starting around October 1. Whereas back in the day tea masters had to pay close attention to the ambient temperature when fermenting (發酵) their tea, nowadays most producers use air conditioned rooms (空調房) to keep the tea at an even 17 degrees Celsius, assuring uniformity. Afterward the tea is fired in a machine that looks a lot like a drying machine for a few minutes at 2-300 degrees Celsius before being dried and packaged. All the while that we sat inside drinking tea and shooting the breeze with the men, two young women and one middle aged woman sat outside around the basket of tea picking out the stems. After a good long time with Mr. Huang and his pals, we said adieu and headed down the road, hoping to find another tea growing family who would be willing to take us in for the night, which we figured more likely to happen if a family invited us in on their own initiative. 

Five minutes later on the edge of Xianrong, we passed a striking old courtyard house with a very ornate roof, especially as contrasted to the monotonous, redbrick boxes back in the village, and stopped for a moment to admire it. Seconds later a young man in a white t-shirt standing in the doorway hollered at us just the invitation we were hoping for: “Come in for tea! (進來喝茶吧!)” Within five minutes we had stashed our bikes in the concrete frame house under construction next door and were sitting under a 20-foot-tall recession in the courtyard in front of a deep freeze and the family’s ancestral shrine, complete with a sketch of the recently deceased grandpa. Our host, the very skinny and cheerful Huang Peibin (黃培斌), fetched a small pack of his family tea from the freezer, sat across from us, and began pouring us small cups of gongfucha. The rest of our time with the Huang family will be detailed in the next post, which ought to be coming out tomorrow. Goodnight until then, Happy New Year in advance, and GO SAINTS (if miracles can happen in South Louisiana, who knows what’s possible in this crazy country)!