Travelogue

| Gateway to the Silk Road | Guizhou Landscape |
| Dream away in Yangshuo | Where memories linger |
| Grand Canal at Hangzhou Ending | Curing Cuisines | Tea Tour |
| A Challenging Trip | Expedition to fairyland |
| Snacks at Kunming | Lijiang Impression |
| A Quiet Village Tour | Splash off Your Bad Luck |
| Summer Escape to a Holy Island | Suzhou’s History |
| In the Heart of a Miao Village | No-frills cruise along the Yangtze |

A Half-Day Tour at Dragon Well Tea Farming Base

Xie Fang
A spring tour of West Lake Dragon Well Tea farming base proves to be refreshing and inspiring
We may not make the best wine in the world, but we can produce the best green tea -- Dragon Well Tea, for instance.
Harvest time has arrived and you can sample the crop in various tea houses right now. But why not go one better and visit the villages and mountains where the green treasure is grown?
Plucking tea
Tea has long been grown in the mountains around West Lake in Hangzhou. The history of its production can be traced back 1,200 years. Wengjiashan, one of the main Dragon Well Tea areas in Hangzhou, is no longer a place to escape the crowds, but it retains much of its natural charm if you walk into the tea fields rather than get lost in the street where tea houses offer Dragon Well Tea.
My guide, Wang Huanmei, is a villager of Wengjiashan. When I asked if I could pick the tea with her, the 57-year-old tea grower was more than happy to give me a bamboo basket to tie around my waist and a bamboo hat to keep the sun off my head.
I liked the way she said "hello" to everyone we met on the way to her tea field.
"The population of Wengjiashan is about 200, therefore people know each other quite well. It doesn't matter if you don't know my address, just say my name to any villager then they will help you find me," she said. According to Wang, a lot of Jiangxi labourers come to the village every March to find temporary jobs and they have different responsibilities based on their gender: women go out to harvest the tea while men stay at home to process it.
Wang has recruited 10 Jiangxi natives this year. "We are always looking for young girls to pick tea because they are dexterous and work neatly."
The hills are terraced with tea bushes, as if circled by stacked green rings from the bottom to the top. I could truly smell the newness of the plants and the noise of civilization melted away. Only bees, birds and tea growers disturbed the air. It is a free exchange with nature without concern about how much work I have left in the office.
Wengjiashan has 43 hectares of Dragon Well Tea. Wang owns a half-hectare of it.
She gave me a tour of her own tea fields and taught me how to harvest the tea in the traditional way, using the left hand to push away branches to reveal the new tea leaves, then pluck them with the right hand from top to sides or from outside to inside.
"Don't pick every leaf. What you need to pick are the new leaves along with two other leaves," said Wang. "The sprout should be a bit longer than the leaves so that it looks like a sparrow's tongue. Having a distinctive shape is one of Dragon Well Tea's characteristics."
My excitement rose as I picked but I was frustrated when I realized how few leaves I had harvested after an hour of work- not enough to even cover my hand.
Normally a professional tea grower can harvest 1 kilogram of fresh tea leaves in 10 hours, according to Wang.
"The work gets more intense when the weather gets warmer. That's because the tea grows faster, so you have to work in areas you have harvested before to discover new sprouts."
Processing tea
We went back to Wang's home during the lunch break. Her husband Wang Shuozhou was pressing fresh leaves into a big bamboo basket in order to dry them. The process is called "tan- qing." Before 1984 firewood was used to heat a wok in which the tea was toasted and people who were responsible for adding firewood to the stove were called "shifu" (professional workers) because they controlled the temperature. Now electric woks are widely used so that only one laborer is needed to produce the tea.
Wang Shuozhou has 45 years of experience in tea production. He heated the wok to 160 degrees, then put about 125 grams of fresh leaves in. "This is ‘qingguo,' drying and shaping the tea by hand pressure," said Wang. When asked if the temperature was not too hot to work, he said: "If you just touch the tea, it won't be that hot, but my hands always suffer from the steam." It took 15 minutes to complete the process of qingguo, but the work was not yet finished. All the leaves needed to be heated and stirred again for 20 minutes at 80 degrees, a process called "huiguo." The finished Dragon Well Tea is "green in hue, strong in fragrance, mellow in taste and pretty in appearance." Wang made 3 kilograms of tea that day, worth 12,000 yuan (US$1,500), but he claimed this doesn't happen all the time, "just for very short periods starting from late March. The price of the tea will fall from US$500 to US$60 per kilogram after April 5 because the tea leaves will no longer be as tender and the taste will be stronger." Tea harvesting and production will end by the middle of next month, which means Wang can put his feet up and have a long holiday until next March. Although his two daughters have moved back home, neither of them are interested in harvesting and tea production. Wang cannot help worrying who will carry on the heritage of tea production.
Before I left, they made a cup of tea for me to show their hospitality. I felt a bit guilty as they were reluctant to make it for themselves.
I am not a tea enthusiast, but after seeing the tea looking like a flower in the glass, after tasting it and inhaling its fresh fragrance, I thought I would probably add it to my pantry

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