Portrait of an LBX

The younger of the Messrs. Huang serves us tea in his father's home in rural Anxi County (安溪县) in Fujian province. We spent most of our time in the family's home with the younger Huang, a soft-spoken man who came off as embarrassed by the family's financial condition. Mr. Huang is using some of the family's roughly 100,000 yuan/year ($14,638) income from the tea farming and production business to build a boxy, cement, steel and brick home next to his father's traditional courtyard home. "The style is popular these days," he told us. Despite the new home's bland outward appearance, the younger Mr. Huang hopes its location directly on the provincial highway will bring in more business, allowing him to provide for a better retirement for his father and mother.

The elder of the two Messrs. Huang pours us tea in the family's country home built into the hillside of a small village in Fujian province's Anxi County (安溪县). Sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution in 1969, Mr. Huang built his own house and decided to remain in the village once the tumultuous period ended, becoming the village's first farmer of tieguanyin (铁观音, Iron Avalokitesvara) tea, the county's specialty. The generous elder Huang invited us into his home for dinner, an overnight stay and breakfast, an offer which we gladly accepted.

A tea farmer in Anxi (安溪) County, China's most famous area for producing tieguanyin (Iron Avalokitesvara, 铁观音) tea, trims tea plants. Tea harvesting and production occurs mainly in May and October, with leaves from the spring harvest generally the most sought-after.