Green tea and bamboo

Purple bamboo shoot tea bushes and bamboo at Great Tang Dynasty Tribute Tea Museum - Seven Cups Tea photo

Tea in China is grown in some of the most beautiful landscapes, ideally in valleys shaded during the  hottest time of the day, and in some places in the shelter of bamboo forests.  There are two varieties of tea plants:  Camellia assamica grown in India, Sri Lanka, and Kenya, has larger leaves, is more treelike, has deeper roots, and is usually used for black teas.  Camellia sinensis has smaller leaves, is more bush like, is more susceptible to drought, and is the tea plant cultivated in China.

Mrs. Pei, Purple bamboo shoot tea master

Picking tea is the first step in the tea making process, and it could be one bud and two leaves, or one bud and four leaves, or, for the very finest teas, just the bud.  

Timing is everything.  Tea picked before the Qing Ming holiday (early April) is prized as having the most intense flavor and for many green and prestige teas (more in a later post), the picking season is only about a month or 6 weeks long  There are teas that are picked after mid-April, some even through the summer, but these will be made into the more highly oxidized teas (e.g. rock wulong or black tea).

Tea pickers are often hired from rural areas for the intense spring picking season, 4-6 weeks, and for most of them it is their one opportunity all year to earn some cash  An experienced picker can pick 5 kg a day, which when processed produces 1 kg of dry tea.  

Tea tour group with Purple bamboo shoot tea pickers - Seven Cups Tea photo

After picking, the leaves are wilted and allowed to oxidize (the longer, the darker), sometimes with added heat.

The "sha qing" step involves subjecting the wilted, oxidized leaves to high heat to stop the oxidation process.  

After cooling, the leaves are dried at a more moderate temperature over charcoal for a more extended period of time to reduce the moisture content to ideally less than 5%.

The Purple Bamboo Shoot tea farm was our first real farm visit.  A smaller operation, the tea is handpicked by extended family members, and the tea is entirely hand processed under the oversight of tea master Mrs. Pei who is 76 years old.  In April they produce 150 kg of green tea.  From the end of April to July they produce 300 kg of black tea.  Their Purple Bamboo Shoot tea bushes have a legacy reaching back to the 8th century when this tea bush was promoted and grown to produce tribute tea.  At that time 30,000 pickers were conscripted to pick for one month, the leaves were wilted, steamed, mashed, pressed into molds and baked, wrapped in yellow silk, and delivered to the emperor in Xian by horse (ten full days of riding), in time for the Qing Ming holiday.  

April is also the season for fresh bamboo shoots, and we had dish after dish of wonderful bamboo shoots in many different forms.  Unfortunately I was always way too busy eating to take individual pictures of the many dishes we were served.  

Bamboo shoots drying

Closeup of drying bamboo shoots

Our meal at Purple Bamboo Shoot tea farm

Tea and Bamboo