Portrait of an LBX

Picking up from the last post, we had just been bidden to enter his an Anxi family’s home to drink tea. The tea tasted damn good to us (even though we’re still not quite connoisseurs), which we told our host, but of course, he let us know in the Chinese tradition of self-deprecation, “No, it’s bad, it’s bad (不好喝，不好喝!).” All the while we sat talking, a dog,  several chickens, three young children, his mother and father, and two young women were walking all over the courtyard, which was messy with tools, stacks of baskets, and lots of machines for processing tea. It was a mess, but it was the kind of lived-in mess that gave warmth to the place.

Huang Peibin chats with us over gongfucha in his family's courtyard home. Photo by Andy

After not very long, young 30 year-old Peibin began explaining the recent history of his family. His father had been born in Xiamen (廈門), but in 1969 at the age of 19 was forced to relocate to the countryside (下鄉) during one of Mao’s great movements (大運動). He had grown mostly rice and other vegetables in Xianrong, where he had married and had children, until about 20 years prior, when he became the first person in the village to convert his hillside paddies into terraces with tea trees. Peibin, the third of three children, had grown up his whole life with tea. The family, he explained, spends six months of the year actively cultivating, harvesting, processing, or selling their tea, divided over two seasons. (more…)

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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. (more…)

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