I sit with a thimble-sized Yixing clay teacup in hand, looking into the second steeping of my Laoshan green tea, transported away by the smell of wet earth and soy beans swirling up in water-bead vapor trails towards the ceiling light. The glass pitcher used to steep the tea rests on my desk, with bright green leaves covering the bottom. The small leaves were moments ago dry and twisted to the thinness of yarn; now open as if they still lived to absorb the muted sunlight of Laoshan.
They remind me of a friend's hand, calloused from picking tea leaves each day. We walked his tea farm, the northernmost crop of tea in all of China. He gestured to the rocky peak of Laoshan. “The rain that falls here is filtered by those rocks. It runs down the mountain peak and collects here.” In front of us was a crystal-clear pool of Laoshan water with circular rocks at the bottom. “It is the clean water and the unique mineral content that give my tea its earthy and pure flavor.” He bent over and picked three perfect buds, each with a just-unfolded leaf still attached. “Drinking tea affirms our bond with nature. We must keep the countryside clean and unpolluted for good rain and fog to nourish and protect the leaves. When you drink my green tea, I hope that its flavor will remind you of Laoshan, and make you thankful for nature and for the hard labor that the farmers carry out to pick each leaf.”
We walked back towards the buildings at the center of his farm and I saw peasants spreading leaves out on bamboo mats to wilt, sending the leaves through an air dryer, twisting them into a unique spiraled shape and drying them again. A worker asked me in heavily accented Mandarin to film her so that Americans could see the work that went into tea. “Everything I do simply keeps the natural flavor of tea sealed in those dried strands so that weeks or months later, the leaves can be woken again by water.”
As I sip the tea, I remember those words and admire her skill, thinking how far from Laoshan those leaves have now traveled on their way back to America. Of the many people in the tea industry that I befriended over two months, the farmers left the deepest impression. Conveniently, to discuss the farmers is to discuss the origin of tea, the starting point, the bulwark of tea culture.
One weekend I took a pilgrimage from the tea's final frontier in Qingdao to the very heart of green tea culture, Hangzhou. On my taxi ride from the airport to the hostel I was lodging at, the driver asked me why I came to Hangzhou. I explained to him my goal of understanding tea culture in its most traditional context. His reply; “You came all the way here from Qingdao for that? I will help you out, alright? This is tea culture.” He took his thermos from under his seat and set it in front of me. “First I boil water, then I add leaves. Did you get that? There is nothing else.” I did not know how to respond, so I bought time with a question,
“What kind of tea are you drinking?” He opened the thermos and let me look at the mess of broken leaves and swirling sediment.
“It isn't much. Not the kind of tea you probably like, but it works. Just green tea.” I decided that asking what region his green tea was from was not the best idea. We sat in silence for the rest of the trip. When I arrived at my room I was reminded of the tea master Sen Rikyu and his instructions on successful tea ceremony: “Make a satisfying bowl of tea, lay the charcoal so that the water boils efficiently, provide a sense of warmth in the winter and coolness in the summer, arrange flowers as though they were in the field...act with utmost consideration towards your guests.” His disciple was indignant at the seeming simplicity.
The master responded, “Observe all my rules without fail and I will become your disciple.” The enormous depth of the ceremony for Sen Rikyu lies in its simplicity.
Was this taxi driver a modern tea sage, or simply someone having a little fun at my expense? Whatever the answer, his words reverberate even today whenever I talk to a classmate about tea.
[To Be Continued: Tune in tomorrow for the Li family of Longjing village]
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