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Other entries in Anji

a tea paradise

ii love rain. i always tell people that the sun can make you just as depressed as the rain, if it lasts for too long. usually what follows is their smirk followed by "yeah right. get sick of the sun." or some kind of "are you a lunatic?" stare. but really... when you grow up in a place where you barely see more than a few millimeters of rain each year and get accosted day after day by blinding, drying, life sucking sun, rain is somewhat of a godsend.

anyway, it's been raining for the past 20 days straight. literally... not even so much as a BREAK in the clouds... i am talking heavy, dark, dank, wet cloudcover for more than 2 weeks. i have a pile of laundry sitting idle, starting to rot. i also have various shirts and pants lining my living room, which i had incidentally washed on the day the rain started. it has taken 20 days for them to dry, i am not kidding. also, my hot water is generated by solar power, which means that the 20 days of rain left me with 20 degree water, literally. after SEVERAL attempts at bathing by boiling water in my teapot (unsuccessful), i finally had the school install an electric heater into the water tank for use on cloudy days. of course, the day they got the heater up and going, the sun came out again. a surefire way to bring it back!

my colleague, ivy, has been inviting me to her family's home in the countryside for months, but it never materialized until today. under the lovely weather, we met up at the bus station at 9 am and boarded a rickety bus full of farmers and children for the 30 minute ride north into anji county's countryside. the sun has been shining all day and the skies are clear, since the rain brought down all the smog and pollution with it.

as i have said before, anji is famous for white tea. the white tea plant, it turns out, was just discovered a decade ago in the mountains near anji. some smart farmers uprooted the tea bush and brought it down in the valleys north of dipu town (where i live), to create a better harvesting area. ivy's parents lucked into this initial spread of white tea and now have acres upon acres of land to harvest tea. they also have a kind of homestead for drying and preparing the tea leaves, and even boxing and selling it. ivy's father is also interested in farming other types of things, like chestnuts, apples, oranges, bayberries, etc.

her mom cooked us a simple lunch of pork, chicken, cabbage, and vegetables, and we spent the morning roaming the pathways and small roads that meander through the tea fields. this village is essentially the only place in the world where white tea is grown, and the local farmers have started selling out tea bushes to neighboring provinces for harvest there. but they call this particular place the white tea paradise.

i also learned a little something about the tea harvesting, and about the farmers' lives. the leaves are only ripe for harvest for a few weeks of the year, during spring. so at that time, ivy told me, the hills which were eerily quiet today, are filled with workers upon the tiered hillsides, shouting and laughing and working. also, these white tea farmers, the few that exist, pay no tax on their land, so all the benefits they get from selling the tea are theirs to keep. that and the fact that anji white tea is incredibly rare, thus quite expensive, means these particular villagers can live quiet comfortable lives... they all have big, two-storey homes and small sort of chinese estates.

i felt, walking down the narrow dirt paths between the tea fields, that i was able to experience something totally unique and priceless.

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