March 14, 2009
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China
Dan from Yunnan calling…
We will be meeting a Pu Er expert who also helped set up the tea growing business in Africa for many years. I believe I met him before. FYI, the walk to the King of Old Tea Trees is about 2 hours. It takes about 2 hours coach ride to get there. Bring your camera! When I was there last, I also arranged a reenactment of one of the legends of Shen Nong discovering tea. I wanted to film it for my documentary. The part was played by an 80+ year old tribal woman who looked like she could have known the real Shen Nong. Despite her age, she could climb the hills (and the tea trees) faster than any of us “younger” people. She had tended the now 400 year old tea trees her entire life. She speaks no Mandarin, only a very local dialect. We drank some of the “wild” tea together and she gave me a few handfuls. Attached is a photo of her tea garden. I hope she is still climbing those hills. I promised her that I would return and we would drink more tea together.
We will fly from Kunming to Xiamen, have a brief meeting and then drive to Quanzhou. As you know, it was one of the early sea ports for tea. From Quangzhou we’ll make our way to Dehua – famous for porcelain. On the way I’m hoping for a stop in Anxi to see some oolong tea making and then, time permitting, Panyong to see their black teas. From Dehua we go to Fujian for a day and the next day we go to Fuding for jasmine tea and also white tea and the blooming “performance” teas. From Fuding we will go to Wuyi Shan but on the way we will stop to visit the tea village of Yellow Meadow. There will be a reception for us there. I donate funds to the village for community services and have been going there for some years now. They make very nice organic green tea though they are too poor to afford to go through the=2 0certification process. Also, they sell out all their crop every year so there is no need to get certified. I’ll send you an article I wrote on the village.
http://www.tching.com/index.php/2009/03/13/mt-kanchenjunga/
