by Sarah Rose
Picking places terrible stress on the tea plant. A bush is picked every ten days, from late April, once the rains have stopped, all the way to October, when the rains begin. It is a repeated undermining of the growth process and a wound to the bush, but continuous picking also produces the best brew. Cultivated tea bushes develop a deep network of taproots to compensate for the constant pruning; the roots then push up a rich healing sap that fills the leaves with flavor. Pickers also clear the tea bushes of their fruit and flowers as they move across the mountain. Anything that distracts the efforts of the bush, such as forming fruit to distribute the seeds, detracts from the energy it needs to heal itself after picking to produce more shoots.
It was not a matter of simple academic interest to Fortune that he study tea of fine quality. The price of tea reflected how careful the picker was at the harvest, and a failure to pick discriminately would ultimately cost the farmer at market. If the East India Company planned to produce a premium product, it would need to follow these methods as well.
Along the rocky path, Fortune stopped an old peasant and asked for directions to the local temple where his retinue could stay the night.
The peasant laughed at the request. “There are nearly a thousand temples in the Wuyi Mountains,” he replied.
Fortune walked on toward a large temple lying at the foot of the mountains. The outer walls were imposing, but inside were lotus ponds, arched bridges, and screened promenades. The arrangement of the temple buildings was perfect: Its wide courtyards were aligned to the compass and yet maintained perfect sight lines to the lakes and rivers below and to the treetops and mountains.
Fortune had entered a temple of Buddhism, a religion that exalts Nature and the life force within, and the excellence of all living things. The Buddha lived in India at the time of Confucius. He preached that all beings pass through a series of lives, a cycle of endless reincarnation, paying for the sins of one life with a good deed in the next. Attachment to any one world is a cause of suffering, he said, when we are only ever passing through. Buddha practiced a series of spiritual exercises to end his attachment to this world so that he could focus instead on the one to come. With discipline, he said, we can escape the prison of the self and the cycle of rebirth to enter Nirvana—nonbeing.
In the view of the Buddha, every tree and plant was an honor and a gift, to be treated with veneration and tended with care; in that belief, the monks cultivated the temple grounds lovingly. The trees were all pruned and carefully planted in groups. Beauty was ritualized; nature was choreographed. There were also, un-surprisingly, tea shrubs to be seen in every direction, for tea was the most contemplative of nature’s gifts. Beyond the monastery walls, the forest was entirely untouched, with old trees reaching toward the sky. “In this respect these priests resemble the enlightened monks and abbots of the olden time, to whose taste and care we owe some of the richest and most beautiful sylvan scenery in Europe,” Fortune noted.
A young boy of six or seven who had just received his robes as a novice monk was sitting under a temple porch when he caught sight of the tall mandarin approaching. Noting the stranger’s appearance, and perhaps even noticing the strangeness of his bearing, the boy ran across the courtyard into one of the smaller buildings.
Fortune was weary from the hot morning’s climb, and his silk robes were heavy with sweat. He wandered into the long reception hall, lined with carved chairs and latticed screens, to take a seat out of the sun and to await his official welcome.
Sing Hoo proudly entered the hall to negotiate with the high priest. Fortune’s stay was easily negotiated: Of course he would be received; strangers always were. The mandarin was a man of honor and so would be given the finest room, tobacco, rice, and tea that the monks had to offer. The priest then dispatched the boy with orders to make their esteemed guest comfortable.
He returned with a small iron pot of tea; it was a ripe oolong, with the aroma of orchids and peach pits. The boy palmed the cup, only slightly bigger than a thimble, and bent low as he handed it to Fortune.
“And now I drank the fragrant herb, pure and unadulterated on its native hills. I had never been half so grateful before, or I had never been so much in need of it; for I was thirsty, and weary.”
The monks prepared a banquet lunch to greet the noble stranger. According to Chinese custom, then as now, it is considered a great honor when a host overfeeds a guest. The monks’ meal was generous and lavish, with the best of the mountain’s summer harvest: lotus root, mushrooms, pickles, cabbages, and beans. They drank liberally, and although Fortune was not usually fond of Chinese liquor (which he judged to be “rank poison”), for once he found it “agreeable,” much like “the lighter French wines.”
The entire monastery was in attendance at the meal. One monk had a face ravaged by smallpox, which did little to enhance Fortune’s appetite; another had a face beatified by meekness and prayer, which made Fortune glad to be in faraway Bohea. Although Fortune could just understand the monks’ Chinese, he thought it wiser not to speak in the temple. Sing Hoo, Fortune noted waspishly, “was quite competent to speak for us both.” And yet, despite the distance between his world and the monks’, he felt warmly welcomed and generously treated. He felt at home: “We were the best of friends.”
Sing Hoo, too, enjoyed a distinguished position among the humble priests, for he was a well-traveled man. He had seen the imperial wonders of China. He could describe the emperor’s yellow robes, the pleasures of the Forbidden City in Peking, the marvel of the Grand Canal, and the Great Wall in all its glory. The monks were engaged, provoked by thoughts of the wider world despite their remote life in Bohea. Indeed, Fortune was struck by how little the supplicants engaged in prayer and how involved they were in daily tasks. It seemed to him that his hosts paid “more attention to cultivation of tea than to the rites of their peculiar faith.”
Tea was indeed central to monastery life. It was served at all times of day and at each meal. Within the temple grounds every vista included tea bushes: Tea was in the hedgerow; tea was at the gate; tea was an ornamental decoration. Fortune had arrived at the height of tea-picking season when the second flush had just come on, and picking baskets woven of bamboo were scattered among the bushes where the pickers had dropped them in the fields before leaving to eat and rest. In every courtyard there was a wide, flat bamboo withering tray, full of the morning’s plucking, drying in the sun. Tea was a religion to these monks, a holy charge, and tending tea was a form of meditation.
Wuyi’s monks were also assiduous record keepers, much as monks in the monasteries of Burgundy had noted for centuries which parts of a hillside grew the healthiest vines and faithfully documented the yields of hundreds of harvests. Fortune, too, took profuse field notes on latitude, longitude, rainfall, and the consistency and color of the soil: rocky and well drained.
As much as Fortune believed that the fate of nations rested on his research, his work in Wuyi Shan would also affect how every pot of tea would be prepared in the future. From a factory worker and his morning brew to the housewife with her evening cup, each man and woman in England had an opinion about how to brew the perfect pot of tea, and as Fortune would become the de facto leading expert on the subject in the West, it would be his job to tell them definitively whether or not they were correct.
At first glance Fortune’s attempt to apply scientific methodology to the task of preparing tea seems questionable, given that nothing more sophisticated than a “quiet palate” was generally considered the best way to appreciate tea’s subtleties. Tea is not so much a thing as a cupful of effects, and as such does not lend itself to hard-and-fast rules and rigorous testing. Yet Fortune, ever the diligent shirtsleeves scientist, took notes and analyzed the simple steps behind preparing every cup:Boil water.
Ready cup.
Add dry leaf.
Drink.
Boil Water
The first ingredient of tea—indeed, nearly the entirety—is water. Experts hold that the conditi
on of water in tea making is of greatest importance: its precise temperature, how long it has been boiled before it is poured, and whether it is fresh from the source or stale. As much as Fortune paid attention to the taxonomy of tea, he noted the variations in the preparation of water.
Water could not be merely hot, he wrote, but must be at a boil. It must not be allowed to boil for too long, however, as that would release the concentration of air suspended in the water. Any tea made with overboiled water will taste flat, just as champagne without the bubbles makes for a white wine with little body. Yet for the delicate nose of green tea, the water must not reach a full rolling boil, either.
So how does one measure the ideal tea temperature? Fortune reported a Chinese rule: “Do not boil the water too hastily, as first it begins to sparkle like crab’s eyes, then like fish’s eyes, and lastly it boils up like pearls innumerable, spinning and waving about.”
Ready Cup
In Europe as in China, there was a general preference for the prewarmed cup. To this day the Chinese warm the cup itself with the first of the tea. An entire cup is poured and then discarded unceremoniously. The reason for this is that tea leaves are, like grapes or apples, produce in need of washing, which does not happen at any time during processing. In fact, the finest teas are often processed in a spectacularly dirty fashion. They are left to dry on the ground, in the dust, where they may be visited by rodents and insects, and then stored on a factory floor in open sacks. This first cup is said to be for the demons or “for your enemies.” Pouring out the first brew also has the practical advantage of warming the cup. In Britain hot water was typically run through an empty teapot to heat the pot, which would otherwise cool the tea too hastily as it brewed.
It is said that this practice developed among the lower classes, who did not have servants to clean their teapots properly after each use. Despite the unflattering class assumption—that the lower orders were less than hygienic—prewarming the cup or teapot keeps tea lively longer. Cooling tea, according to the Chinese, is perfection. Cold tea, however, is a sin.
Add Dry Leaf
How much tea goes into the perfect cup? In Fortune’s day there was so much adulteration in the tea exports to Britain, so much twig and stem padding the weight, that it was nearly impossible to predict how strong a pot would be. Then as now there was a general rule by which most tea was brewed: about one teaspoon per cup.
Oversteeping tea makes it “stewey,” in the words of the trade. No self-respecting Chinaman in Wuyi Shan would dream of letting a hand-picked tea brew longer than it ought.
Fortune’s investigations proved that good tea goes further, that less can be used to brew more. His conclusions also reflected a sensible economizing: If better quality tea costs half again as much as that of poorer quality but brews up twice as strong, it is preferable to purchase the finer tea and enjoy the experience more.
In his travels Fortune found much variety between the teas of different regions: the appearance of the leaves, the aroma, the color of the liquor, and the taste. Tea, like wine, has terroir, a flavor that reflects the characteristics of the soil in which it grows. Connoisseurs today enjoy these contrasts and seek them out. In some areas, in some pickings, the leaf grows large and flat because it faces the sun. Some areas grow only small-leafed tea. There is no perfect specimen, nor is there a grand unified recipe for brewing tea. A large tea leaf must be steeped for a long time, a small leaf for a shorter time: It is a function of the ratio between surface area and water. The smallest leaves, the so-called dust-grade tea, which are the component of most tea bags today, brew up the quickest.
Drink
Tea is a stimulant, albeit a mild one, a property that has rendered it the second most popular drink on earth, after water. Tea promotes mental alertness, happiness, and sharper perception. “Tea is of a cooling [yin] nature,” Fortune reported. “And, if drunk too freely, will produce exhaustion and lassitude. . . . It is an exceedingly useful plant; cultivate it, and the benefit will be widely spread; drink it, and the animal spirits will be lively and clear. The chief rulers, dukes, and nobility esteem it; the lower people, the poor and beggarly, will not be destitute of it; all use it daily, and like it. . . . Drinking it tends to clear away all impurities, drives off drowsiness, removes or prevents headache, and it is universally in high esteem.”
The distinctive taste of tea—mildly acidic, with a bit of salt, an astringent—is an amalgam of several different chemicals. Tea contains plant enzymes known as phenolics, which are produced when its leaves brown and are bruised. Phenolics have a brisk, lively taste, which contribute to the sensation of the brew’s being stimulating but gentle. Theanine—a tea-based counterpart to caffeine—is an amino acid that straddles the line between sweet and savory. We know now what effects theanine and caffeine have on the body; the effects have made caffeine the most widely consumed behavior-modifying drug in the world. Caffeine is a chemical alkaloid, a base, which interferes with the way cells signal the body. It stimulates the nervous and cardiovascular systems. It raises mood levels and decreases feelings of fatigue, increasing attention and quickening reactions. It also affects the heart, raising the heart rate, dilating arteries, increasing blood flow, and raising the respiratory and metabolic rates for hours after it is consumed. Caffeine in great quantities results in nervousness, restlessness, and sleeplessness.
It is worth considering which drink, tea or coffee, is the most stimulating. The answer is black tea—but with certain caveats. Per pound, black tea has more caffeine than coffee—but where one pound of tea brews some two hundred cups, a pound of coffee yields barely forty. By the cup, black tea actually contains roughly half as much caffeine as coffee. Green tea, meanwhile, has one-third the caffeine of black, or one-sixth that of a cup of coffee. Medically, it takes about 200 milligrams of caffeine—or about two cups of coffee—to combat drowsiness and fatigue. That amounts to about four cups of black tea and twelve cups of green. Few of us have that amount of time or bladder capacity.
What the world has sought when it sips a cup of tea is a mild effect, a high with neither lift nor letdown, a calming alertness, a drink of moods. What Fortune found in Wuyi Shan was Britain’s reigning temper: the thrill to conquer, but politely.
From the monastery Fortune was within a day’s walk of the Big Red Robe bushes, the Da Hong Pao, source of the most rarefied tea in the world—and certainly the most expensive. The three 200-year-old bushes stood under the three characters Da, Hong, Pao, which had been carved into a rock face and were fiercely protected by the monks.
Legend held that the bushes had arrived in Wuyi after nine evil dragons ravaged the area, causing havoc, destroying crops, and ruining lives. Finally, an ancient and immortal god arrived to confront the menace and restore order to the countryside. A great battle ensued, the skies darkened, and the forces of good and evil were pitted against each other. The god destroyed the dragons one by one, and where each corpse landed, a tall peak formed. It is said that the nine karsts of Wuyi Shan are these dragons, frozen in a fighting stance. The river bent nine times around the nine dragonlike karsts, and the area became known locally as the Jiulongke, the Nine Dragons’ Nest.
That victorious immortal, celebrating his success, wished to leave a memorial to the battle so the people of Wuyi Shan would not forget him or his good deeds on their behalf. High in the ridges of the tall black mountains, above the river and on a sheer cliff where they would be hard to pick, the god left three tea bushes clinging to the rock face. Being of immortal creation, the tea bushes seemed to emit a red light, as if perpetually catching the reflected rays of the setting sun.
In the time of the immortal’s victory over the dragons, an ancient Buddhist abbot, Tie Hua, looked up from his daily meditations and saw the three bright bushes illuminated by the light of the heavens. He was old and frail and could not reach the tea himself, and some said that no human hands could touch the immortal’s gift. But Tie Hua was a man of many resources; he reached into his robe
s and brought out a monkey, his favored pet. The monkey swiftly climbed the precipice, picking his way up the rocks to the overhang where the immortal’s bushes sparkled in the breeze. The monkey’s small hand plucked the tip of the topmost branches, two leaves and a bud. An animal could not harm the trees’ spirit, which was the mixture of heaven and earth.
Tie Hua gathered the tea leaves and returned to his monastery, where a revered local scholar was suffering great agues and chills. The man was bloated, racked with stomach distemper. He could not move and consequently would be forced to miss the imperial examinations for the civil service in Peking, his one chance for greatness and at bringing honor and wealth to his family as well as fame to his village in Wuyi Shan. The scholar was heartsick at the thought that he might not get to the emperor’s court. But Tie Hua brewed the tea leaves and served the drink to the citizen scholar, who was immediately healed. The next day, entirely recovered, the scholar continued his journey to the north to sit for the imperial tests of knowledge, poetry, and character. His mind was alive; his senses were keen; he felt more able than he had ever been. The young man took first place among every scholar in the land.
Upon meeting the emperor, the scholar discovered that the empress was suffering from a similar illness: fevers, fatigue, and nausea. It had continued for weeks, and neither physician nor priest could cure her. The scholar had brought with him a pouch of tea from the immortal’s three red bushes, which he offered in tribute to the emperor. On drinking the tea, the empress was instantly and permanently cured. The emperor demanded that tea from the first flush in Wuyi Shan—that is, the first bloom of spring—be sent north to Peking each year to cure the court’s illnesses. Grateful and magnanimous, the emperor also sent the scholar back home with a generous gift of a large red silk blanket to protect the roots of the immortal’s bushes in the coming frost. The tea has been called Da Hong Pao, the Big Red Robe, ever since.
