Alas

End of trip, a mere couple of weeks for the winter harvest. The report in general is that everyone had difficult weather, and the yield is low, and fuel and labor and everything else has gone up in price. The economy is slow in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but judging from the hustle and bustle there is no want of activity. The U.S. dollar is weak and we lose to currency exchange weekly. Moreover, marketing is everything in the West, it's hard to tell the story about these handcrafted teas, the farms, the farmers, and the long history of an excellent tradition. I hope I have done an adequate job reporting a glimpse, and hope that everyone is inspired to experience this rich culture for themselves.

But if not, then more tea for me!

The Many Tea Cultures

The Hakka people have lived in Taiwan for many hundreds of years, and their way of life permeates the island. For example, they brought the tradition of Lei Cha, a kind of tea beverage mixed with seseame and ground peanuts and other goods, almost like a chai. They also have a tradition of preserving oolongs in various citrus fruits from Pommelos to kumquats to tangerines. In the Hakka museum, they have old Pommelo oolongs from 1940s. I did manage to get one from the 1980s for experience. There are so many facets to tea and so many cultures, I hope to be able to cover more indigenous cultures and esoteric tea customs in the future!

Speedy Tea Pickers

That would not be me. My theory is that I pick tea slowly because I don't understand a word of Minnan Hua, the local Taiwanese dialect. The harvesters yell and laugh and chat with one another and their fingers fly.

It was a relatively cool morning today, the tea pickers have been out since 7am, and they can harvest about 30-40 jin (about 20kgs) per morning before lunch. Consider it's about 10,000 leaves per jin or more, that is still, only about 2-3 baskets full. It takes awhile to be fast; the average age of these harvesters are about 60 years old. Mrs Su was a relatively young 45 year old; but unlike the other harvesters, she also produces the tea and finishes the roasting, a job usually reserved for the men. Along the way, she grows vegetables (she wanted some heirloom tomato seeds from me next year), raises 3 boys, organizes other farmers with the farm cooperative union, and takes care of the orphans in the village. Sometimes, a poor farmer would fall off a hillside or die from the last earthquake or typhoon and there would be new orphans for her to take care of.

I just had to fill her plate abit more, she's not busy enough. I told her the customers at Teance misses her tea roasted melon seeds and demands that she makes some for us soon!

But seriously, the life of a tea farmer is hard work, and without an entire village to support each other, and extended family of wonderful people like Mrs. Su, it's hard to fathom how we would ever have hand made teas anymore.

A Night at the Police Station

Mr friend Mrs. Su had the rare luxury of having the night off from roasting tea, so I went with her to hang out with her friends. Where but at the local police station, with the one and only police captain and a few other friends who casually strolled in. We chatted, poured tea, and the police captain served some guava. Are there crimes in this village, I asked? He said no, sometimes there are domestic disputes, but no criminal bothers to come here, and everyone knows everyone else, and really, there is nothing to steal except tea anyway.
The big catch of the week was an elderly farmer who had a crop on her motorcycle and she ran a red light. The police captain had no choice but to give her a ticket, though she didn’t quite understand the concept of these lights. Where were you heading to, asked the police captain. To sell my vegetables, she said. How much? He asked her. 500NT, she replied, which was about $17. Her ticket being at 200NT, he offered to buy her vegetables out of pocket for 700NT so she could pay her ticket. Well, it’s not exactly extortion now is it?

The People Behind the Tea

Meet Mrs. Su the elder, who has been harvesting tea for about 52 years, and still going strong. Her hearing and eyesight are excellent, for she needs to be able to scan a field of millions of leaves to scour for the perfect ones to pick. Folks, your Tung Ting series of teas have been harvested by her all these years.
Her son, Mr. Su, was one of the nine first place winners in the previous Tung Ting Competition. That meant that he was allowed to sell about 20 lbs of the award winner for roughly 21,000NT, or about $700 p/lb. Not bad, a good sum for a farmer. They depend on the income from their two harvest seasons each year to make enough to last through the entire year. Why didn’t you tell me you won the competition, I asked? He said well, I forgot, I usually win something.
Mrs. Su, his wife and my friend, was free tonight when I arrived at her farm house on top of the mountain. The three boys are doing homework and she had just finished harvesting and not yet ready to make her batch of winter Tung Ting yet. However, she did give up her last 15 lbs. of Royal Courtesan she kept for herself, as I explained to her my situation with the customer demands. Royal Courtesan is similar to Taiwan Beauty in that they are both summer crops that the leaf hoppers have come to chew on, but the leaves are Tung Ting varietal and larger, and made charcoal fire style and roasted. She named it Royal Courtesan because it’s like a more mature version of a Taiwan Beauty, with an even more intense perfume and profound finish. Who knows, it’s like a beauty contest, it’s all a matter of preference…….

Te

Pao Te, said one of the roasters as he handed us a hand full of mao cha, primary finished oolong tea. 'Pao' meant to steep, 'te' meant tea. Pretty much all the tea people spoke Minnan Hua, the Fujian dialect from where tea originally was introduced to Taiwan. It was like a capsule of history. That's where the word 'tea' came from when it arrived into the West in the 1600s; the Dutch said it was 'te' that they brought over..... My cousin misheard and thought he said 'Pao Nu', which meant, in Mandarin, go find a girl. Everyone laughed and that was their entertainment for the day! But it's difficult. There are 9-13 indigenous tribes in Taiwan, not to mention the Hakka tribe and the subsequent Fujian tribes that arrived, then it was occupied by the Dutch, then it was the Japanese, and then the Kuo Min Tang took over in 1949.

At 1700 meters in a cold intensely foggy day, the freshly harvested leaves were wilted in a semi-outdoor rooftop at San Lin She . Even if there is no sun and the conditions were not right, still, one has to adapt. The tea processors do not sleep for days on end, and sometimes for a month. Each day, they process the leaves that come in from the harvesters until 4am, catch a nap, and start again at 7am or so and non-stop until the next day.

Drinking the High Mountain tea at the High Mountain with the mountain water, the fog, the chill, and the friendly tea people makes one pretty high. That's how you end up hearing go steep some tea to go find a girl!