Tea Destinations: Wuyi Mountain 武夷山

Recently, I took a trip toWuyiMountain; not to view scenery, but to experience Wuyi oolong tea picking and processing methods.

Picking Zheng Yan Rou Gui Tea採正岩肉桂茶

To pick tea, one needs to actually get to the location of the tea bushes first. In some places, where there are roads, it’s a simple, convenient task. But to pick Zhengyan tea, I had to be led in through Wuyi mountains by my friend Wang Yu Long and two of the master tea pickers and porters. We started out at the base in the Wuyi Scenic Area, although not on a path that tourists normally take, walking along narrow, sometimes treacherous mountain paths, slick with rain from the night before. I carried a camera, and nothing else; needless to say, I was totally unprepared for the experience. A porter was carrying large plastic sacs and bamboo carrying rods; another carried the tea picking machine, which was readied at the base. Wang Yu Long carried nothing, except a straw sun hat.

 Ok, I knew it would be a long walk into where we were going. I was told the night before that it was a nearly two-hour walk. But what no one told me was how steep and difficult to cross those narrow paths could be. I thought Wang Yu Long was joking when he said we had to “jump” across a river; I later realized it was no joke. (In Canada, I lived in the mountains of Northern Ontario during my childhood – often wandering around “discovering” what I could regardless of whether there was any path or not. The experience was familiar, yet I admit it, I was out of shape!)

 Breathless, as I staggered to the untouched tea garden on the mountain top, the tea masters soberly stated they make the same trip every day, at least once a day (I later witnessed them make the same trip up 3 times that same day.)

 As you might gather, picking tea is a laborious process – and the conditions must be exactly right. During my visit to Wuyi, it rained, almost every day. We were lucky because the sun was shining that day, so the tea leaves would be dry when picked. Picking tea when there is still dew on the leaves is not ideal; picking tea when the leaves are wet with rain is also imperfect. (I was told, many tea factories are unwilling to buy rain soaked tea leaves, even at a low price, because the final quality of the processed tea leaf suffers).

 With sun beating down, the men set about attaching the long nylon sac to the tea picking machine, which would neatly contain the picked tea. In the distance, I could see a group of 5 women, hand-picking tea from the same field. They were not, however, the beautiful young maidens romanticized in Chinese tea picking songs, they were old-looking women, well experienced tea pickers, whose hands were worn from picking tea nearly every day during tea picking season. Their index and pinky fingers were taped to protect from cuts one could endure from repetitively plucking tea stems.

 You might think that hand-picked tea, a somewhat quixotic notion, is superior to machine-picked, but in reality, both obtain the same objective – to remove green leaf and green stems from the tea bushes. The picking machine, requiring 3 people to handle it, does a much quicker job, requiring less manpower than a large group of tea pickers that would be otherwise necessary to do the same job. When you have a few thousand pounds of raw green leaf to be picked from the tea bushes (which must all be processed the same day) – you need an efficient solution like a tea harvesting machine.

 After closer inspection of the tea pickers, I noticed they weren’t daintily picking the tea with their fingertips, slicing leaves off with sharp fingernails, as sometimes described (which might be so for green tea), instead, they were grasping bunches of leaves from the bushes, pulling them with long green stems intact, then placing into bamboo baskets.

 By this time, the tea picking machine was working, harvesting a whole row of tea in just seconds, making two passes of the same row so both left and right sides were picked. By the time several rows of green leaves were bagged, weighed, and bundled for the ascent down the mountain, we all sat down for a break, thirsty from physical labor. I followed Wang Yu Long down a mountain path, to fetch mountain spring water, which we collected into “previously enjoyed” plastic water bottles used by the tea pickers in our company. It then dawned on me that everything these tea pickers needed for the day had to be hand-carried in – including their lunch.

 After we all had a drink of water, fed from water cascading off a rock cliff high above some tea bushes, the porters hefted their bundles of tea onto their shoulders, leaving a small group of us behind to continue tea picking. For some reason, we were short of laborers that day; the supervisor was frantically working her cell phone, trying to round up more laborers to carry loads of tea down the mountain. I could hear her repeatedly saying “you’re totally mental” in the Wuyi Minbei dialect, a sign of her desperateness.

 I left the hand-picking to the experts, since I didn’t bring any tape for my fingers anyway. Wang Yu Long 王裕龍 however, volunteered me into action with the tea picking machine, collecting the harvested tea into the large plastic sacs, which when full, are quite heavy. As I watched the harvest, I noticed the curved blade of the tea picking machine only harvesting from the tops of the tea bushes. The sides and ends were left untouched; I then realized this is where the tea pickers were harvesting tea from. So tea harvesting seems to require a complement of both hand and machine harvesting to fully get the job done. Both hand-picked and machine harvested tea piles were mixed together in the tea sacs; they weren’t differentiated or treated separately – except on the factory floor, they would be separated as they all came from one specific location – Ma Tou Yan馬頭岩. Ma Tou Yan’s Rou Gui tea肉桂茶produces the most superb rou gui tea; although, rou gui tea as a varietal tea bush is now grown throughout the Wuyi area. But the very best Cliff Proper Rou Gui (Zheng Yan Rou Gui)正岩肉桂, which we happened to be picking, comes from the precise area we were harvesting from, Horse Head Cliff (Ma Tou Yan).

 After one pass over a row of tea bushes, a sac of freshly plucked tea leaves had to be filled, hefted back to our collecting station by me as I ran through rows of tea to be ready for the second pass of the tea cutting crew. Bundles and bundles of tea piled up at the collection station, yet there were still no porters to carry the now wilting leaves down to the factory. Finally, the porters arrived with take-out boxes of spicy meat, vegetables and rice; typical Wuyi fast food. As we sat down on the bare ground to rest and eat our lunch, the porters hefted the remaining sacs of tea away. Then it was time to complete the process of tea picking and gathering into sacs until that particular mountain field was completely harvested, a task fully taking the whole day to complete.

 After our supervisor was satisfied the field was fully harvested, she allowed us to leave. I followed Wang Yu Long down the mountain, each carrying a manageable size sac of tea, since we had no bamboo carrying poles. As we walked along, I shuddered at the thought of having to “jump” across a river with a sac of tea on my shoulders. I wondered how the porters managed to handle two sacs of tea, 100 pounds in total. Did they fly across the river? Later, I cruelly realized, there was an alternate gentler, wider path, we took down the mountain, across field after field of Zheng Yan tea bushes, through sculptured, scenic mountain cliffs and gorges. We passed numerous crews of tea harvesters. They looked at me, a foreigner, darkened, sunburned, dirty, somewhat mockingly asking “Is Wuyi Mountain fun?” To which I somberly replied, “Tea picking is weary.”

 After a week of reflection, I came back fully appreciative of the laborious, physically demanding task of tea picking on distant Wuyi mountain summits.Now, I have a totally new perspective when I sit down to drink Zhengyan Yancha 正岩茶, or Cliff Proper Rock Tea. I also have a much deeper respect for what Heaven, Earth and Man has coaxed into each single leaf. Tea production, even with machinery is still a very labor intensive task. The spectacular sweet nectar coaxed drip by drip from a fist-sized zisha teapot into our delicate porcelain cups is not just a product of nature but an expression of love and dedication of those in the Tea World.