Dragon Well Tea

Tea Bushes

There's an old idiom about "all the tea in China".  I'd always heard it, but never understood until coming here.  All the tea in China would be a LOT of tea.  This is a country of 1.3 billion people and virtually all of them drink tea all day long.  Every bus driver and taxi driver will have a thermos of tea wedged under the seat.  Migrant workers go to work carrying their tool kits in one hand and their tea containers in the other.   The demand for tea is huge. 

One of the most famous, if not the most famous, teas in China comes Hangzhou.....from the hills surrounding the West Lake.  LongJingCha, it is called. It is a green tea.  Translated, it is known as Dragon Well tea to English speakers.  In the old days, the best of this tea was reserved for the emperors.  Today, much of the high quality stuff is still reserved for government use.  Good quality LongJing tea can be expensive. The highest quality can be obscenely expensive.  For that reason, Dragon Well Tea is also one of the most counterfeited items in the country.

Gathering Tea Leaves

Our EAS tour group made a stop at one of Hangzhou's tea plantations.  It seemed a bit of a tourist trap.  At the foot of the hills there was space for bus parking.  Our tour group trekked to  the top of the hill, where there was a cluster of buildings.  There we were given some baskets and assigned a guide to take us out into the bushes to pick tea. 

More gathering of tea leaves

Now, a tea bush may have a lot of leaves on it, but very few of them are suitable for picking.  Only the smallest, newest leaves emerging from the tip of branch are suitable.  Our guide taught us how to recognize these. We were then challenged to pick enough tea to cover the bottom of a basket.  Not to fill the basket... just to cover the bottom. It took our group about a half hour of cooperative picking to accomplish.  I think we could have picked all day and not filled a basket.
The secret of good green tea, we learned, is in the roasting of the leaves.   The roasting of the leaves assures quick drying, but more importantly it denatures the natural enzymes in the leaves.  If you just pick the leaves and allow them to dry in the air, then the colors will darken and the flavor will become less flowery and more earthy.  This is how the dark teas (like the stuff in the tea bag) are made.  If you roast the fresh picked leaves quickly and carefully, then it stops the oxidation processes dead in their tracks.  The leaves dry, but they retain their green color and their herb-like scents.

Pan roasting the leaves - the essential step

They call it pan roasting, but it more like a saute.  First a large steel pan is oiled and then heated over an open flame.  Once the temperature is just right, then the tea leaves are added.  They must be kept moving, constantly, so as not to burn them.  In the old days, it was all done by hand.  These days, there is more automation and mass production creeping into the process.  But the good teas are still hand roasted in a process controlled feel and smell.  It takes a skilled worker to bring out the highest quality product.  The photo above shows our guide in the process or roasting the leaves which we picked.

So, at first this whole tea plantation thing seemed a bit touristy and hokey.  In time, though, it was explained that this really WAS a working tea plantation, and not some Disneyland stagecraft.  The guides and the pan roasters really WERE tea growers and not people play acting the role.  The land, like all the land in China, is owned by the government.  The government grants the use of the land to the farmer.  It's like sharecropping.  Sharecropping has never been a particularly lucrative occupation.  

This particular farm family makes most of their income by producing tea.  The whole tourist thing is just a way to bring in a little cash on the side.  It also gives them a chance to sell their product directly to the consumer.  What farmer wouldn't want to cut out the middlemen?  And what Chinese consumer wouldn't want to avoid counterfeiters by buying direct from the farm?  They sold three grades of tea.  The best grade went for about $50 per 100 grams, if I remember correctly.  By that math, the ten pound sack pictured below is worth a fair bit of money.

Finished product.

Since Suzhou and Hangzhou are rivals in most everything, it's appropriate that Suzhou also has a famous green tea that rivals the Dragon Well Tea of Hangzhou.  Suzhou's tea is called BiLuoChunCha.  In English, it is known as Green Snail Spring Tea.  BiLuoChun is grown in the hills of DongShan, on the eastern shores of Lake Tai.  The "snail" in the name is because the tea leaves become corkscrew shaped as they dry...like shell of a snail or a nautilus.  (Dragon Well tea leaves remain flat.) 

The local people are passionate about their tea.  As passionate as the French are about their wines.  Some of my colleagues swear that Hangzhou's LongJing tea is the best.  Others swear by Suzhou's BiLuoChun.  It's like Bordeaux or Burgundy.  Democrat or Republican.  White Sox or Cubs.  You develop an allegiance for one or the other and that allegiance lasts for your entire life.