Portrait of an LBX

A snoozy street in the Fengqing old town, by Andy

By Andy

2010/05/29 – 78 km

We start the morning with a search through town for the post office so we can send the tea we bought the previous day to a friend in Shanghai. During our search, we find that Fengqing actually has an old section of town. By old, I mean it looks Communist-era, with most things appearing to be built in the 1950s when the real Communists were around. With the exception of a few white tile buildings (why they built everything to look like a bathroom in the ‘90s is beyond me), everything is built in blocky, imposing, Soviet style).

What’s striking though is how alive the area seems compared to the new section of town where we stayed the night before. The streets are narrow, a single lane in each direction, and everyone is out and about. Street vendors peddle snacks, goldfish, bamboo brooms and anything else someone might be interested in purchasing on the cheap.

There’s even a big mosque, at which we take a quick peak on our way back to the main road. It is one of the unfortunate, white-tile monstrosities of the 90s, complete with cheap, blue, reflective glass windows. Unfortunately, there’s no one around from whom to learn any of the history, so we head back out to the main road and begin climbing.

The road, paved and in good condition once we get out of town, takes us straight up the mountain to the northwest. Below and to our right is the still under-construction highway that will soon make our road obsolete. On it, the occasional car or motorbike climbs over the piles of dirt that have been set up to keep vehicles off, a fairly ubiquitous but ineffective way of closing off roads in this country. Above, our road’s numerous switchbacks snake up the mountain, and the bridges and overpasses for the new highway, held up by tall, concrete columns, cling to the mountain face.

It’s nearly noon by the time we’re crawling up those switchbacks, and just as I’m considering a break to munch on some trail mix, we spot a small tea factory and stop to have a look. (more…)

By Andy

2010/05/28 — 35km

After a rushed breakfast of baozi (not noodles, finally!), I walk Devi to the bus station to see her off to Dali, where she’ll spend the night before flying to Kunming and then Shanghai for her summer internship at the consulate. It’s sad to see her go, but I’m sure glad she extended her ride with us for as long as she could! If my finances look okay, maybe I’ll even get to fly to Shanghai for a weekend at some point during the summer to see her. If not, she’ll hopefully meet up with us, along with some other friends (everyone’s invited) when we get to Chengdu in mid-July.

After her bus departs, Evan and I hit the road again. It’s not long before we’re following another river the wrong way — up into the mountains.

Today’s ride is short though. We had modified our original route to Baoshan through the mountains of western Yunnan on back-mountain roads in order to get Devi to Yunxian where she could catch an easy bus to Dali. Our new route to Baoshan is on provincial and national roads, and there are two county seats on the route. Since we didn’t have Internet in Yunxian, and we didn’t get enough rest due to birthday shenanigans, we decide to hit both of the county seats and get a hotel with Internet in each.

In no time, we’re pulling into Fengqing, the hallowed home of some of Yunnan’s best black tea, Dianhong (滇红茶). With the early arrival, we plan to do an afternoon of tasting and then ship some back to Shanghai. (more…)

By Evan

*For less verbiage and more color, see all our pics and videos from Hainan so far here

Picking up from the last post, we ended up spending two days in Haikou for post-train R&R and a little exploration, even though it turned out to be yet another unwalkable, giant, concrete crapper overlooking the murky strait that divides it from the mainland, with a few sprinklings of palm trees here and there. After this long and so many places traveled, the ghastly state of the place is not at all a surprise, but my heart pains to think that they build the capital of their island paradise to look exactly the same as their monuments to megalomania in the Gobi Desert! After our nice dinner with some long-time residents from back stateside who follow this silly blog (thanks to Nicki, Erik, and Marian for a nice time and good advice), it was with tremendous relief that we made our exit to the southeast, even though it meant beating tropical sun and a dead-on headwind for 105 km. Incidentally, it’s redeeming to finally be in weather where I feel natural while the two northern nancy boys hyperventilate.

Speaking of northern nancy boys and this tropical island, thankfully the locals have derived a cultural phenomenonof which I never thought the Chinese capable: drinking cold tea (any self-respecting Chinese can reel off a list of dangers to health posed by cold beverage consumption, which was told to them by their grandmother) to beat the heat. After passing innumerable little tea houses on the way down, we flopped off the hot highway around the apex of the heat and into some plastic lawnchairs for tall glasses of bottomless iced red tea (turns out they use Lipton, which I still think is crazy, but it’s the ice that counts here).

Tilapia farmers of Wenchang, by Andy

As always, we were hounded immediately by the group of men sitting around their table playing cards with the same lines as always: “Where are you from? (是哪裡人!) You speak Chinese! (你會說中國話!),” etc. etc. ad nauseum. I responded with my usual puerile joke that always gets an LBX laugh or two: “Yes, we speak Mandarin, but we haven’t quite mastered your [fill in local area] language (普通話沒問題，只是還不會你們某地方話)” (more…)

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…)

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…)