Infused

by Henrietta Lovell

  And then the regime starts to soften, and it becomes possible to make a journey into the countryside and explore where wine is made. You happen to be working in France and suddenly you’re able to hire a car and go to Champagne for the first time in anyone’s living memory. It hasn’t been possible; indeed, it’s still considered impossible by most sensible people. But if you just go, it’s all out there to discover.

  That’s what happened on my first trip to Fuding. It’s still not a wellbeaten path, but it’s one I now know well and have witnessed become far easier to travel.

  I had arrived the day before in the city of Xiamen. It was one of the first cities given special status to trade with the West after the Cultural Revolution. It became the new shipping port for some of the best tea in the world, which for a long time had been going nowhere. As in many Chinese cities, there was scant urban planning, and huge towers of glass and steel jostled with crumbling concrete and lines of washing. Vast highways swept through and round and over. The nights were bright with neon and the days dull with dust and smog. Both day and night were loud with car horns and explosions that sounded like thunder but were actually buildings being demolished to make way for taller ones.

  The next day I travelled to Fuzhou and from there up to Fuding. I had hired a car, but I can’t drive. The man I’d employed to drive me, sporting a boy-band haircut too young for his years, was listening to the most torturous tinny pop on the radio. When I asked him – miming, since we shared no language – to turn it off, he glanced angrily at me in the rear-view mirror. He couldn’t keep up the animosity over the four- or five-hour drive and soon lapsed into soft singing to break our silence.

  As we climbed higher, grey was replaced by green. The air cleared. Leaving the city was like a slow crawl in a time machine. The noise and chaos receded with the hours and I felt as though I was traversing millennia, passing paddy fields and bamboo forests.

  Tea is indigenous to China and thrives at high altitudes, like cocoa in the Andes. The mountain terraces were thick and green with tea. Tea pickers – known as ‘pluckers’ – were harvesting the spring leaves, wading slowly through the bushes. They wore hats woven from bamboo to keep off the sun, just as they had for thousands of years. Looking out across the land, it was impossible to place myself with any certainty in the present. There were no powerlines.

  In the town, the streets were lined with small tea-processing workshops. People walked through the narrow alleys with huge baskets of fresh leaves strapped to their backs. Peering through open doors into the unlit interiors, I could see leaf being rolled in woks over charcoal fires. Women sat in doorways sorting buds from leaves: the silver tips I was after. I had a scrap of paper with a Chinese name written on it and I showed it to one of the women who’d looked up at me curiously. She nodded and smiled and began to speak rapidly. I beckoned over the driver, who squatted down in front of her to listen. He thanked her and we returned to the car to follow the directions she had given.

  We drove on, up twisting roads lined with tea bushes, to the top of a round hill, upon which stood a small collection of buildings in wood and concrete. The driver stopped the car and turned in his seat to stare at me but said nothing. I got out and looked out across the flowing terraces of tea stretching away in all directions to the horizon. People dotted the fields in small clusters. I squinted in the bright sunshine. A man emerged from the buildings, he was perhaps in his late forties, tall and dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. I handed him my second piece of paper, which, I hoped, explained that I was curious to see the harvest of the silver tips. He nodded solemnly as he read it, looked up at me and put his hand to his mouth as though stopping his words, then beckoned me to follow. We have been working together ever since.

  He took me out to the pluckers, to walk among them and watch the delicate harvest. Usually the best tea is harvested – not by brute machine but by deft hand – as two leaves and the newly formed bud that if left would become the next set of leaves. White Silver Tip is something else, a step beyond these careful handfuls to the delicate pinch of just the bud alone, not more than a couple of centimetres of precious new growth. This tea is gathered bud by bud from the tip of each new stem.

  Bai Hao Yinzhen – ‘Silver Needle’, or as I prefer to call it, the softer-sounding White Silver Tip – is the first downy spring bud of the Da Bai (‘Large White’) varietal. The buds are plucked during a tiny window of about five days at the start of spring, usually between 20 March and 5 April, when they are on the point of unfurling but have not yet opened. I watched them being painstakingly harvested by the most experienced tea pluckers; old people mostly, their faces creasing deeply as they smiled. Only the women smiled at me, shyly. Back then at the turn of the new millennium, dressed in red like a Chinese bride, I must have looked outlandish. The men kept their distance; some of the older ones peered at me with bemused curiosity. I towered above most of them, though I am only five foot six.

  At lunchtime everyone returned to the farm, where they sat together over round bamboo trays. We ate boiled eggs in a sugary soup and drank the dried harvest from the previous day, dropped loose into tall glasses. The silver tips hung down from the surface, pale green drops, until the water had penetrated their silky depths and, saturated, they sank.

  Talking softly, something that seemed impossible in the city, the pluckers sifted through the freshly harvested buds and removed any extraneous leaves or stems. Then the silver tips were laid out to dry in the soft afternoon sun. Long bamboo frames were positioned to catch the best light; the roofs of the houses, the paths and the terraces were covered in tea. As the sun set, the tea was brought in and the frames stacked like bunk beds. Some years, when the air is damp, the drying is finished with the help of wood fires, which adds a subtle waft of smoke to the flavour.

  That first trip the night sky was clear and full of stars. As evening fell, we sat drinking the fragrant leaves by moonlight, listening to the silent gardens hanging before us like a faded silk screen.

  In 2016 archaeologists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences analysed plant matter from the tomb of the Han dynasty emperor Jing Di, who died in 141 BC, and found the world’s oldest tea. He was a decent fellow, according to most accounts, who lowered taxes to ease the burden on the poor, reduced the power of the aristocracy and shortened prison sentences. The tea they found buried with him was White Silver Tip, tea so precious and beloved of this liberal and enlightened emperor that he could not even die without it, as I cannot live.

  It was the only tea I could drink during chemotherapy and it was soft enough not to make me sick when my insides were in revolt against all the noxious chemicals swilling around in my blood. It was the only delicious thing I could stomach.

  Green tea is often considered better for you than black because it is less processed and retains higher levels of antioxidants. But it is white tea that’s the least processed and thought to have the highest levels of beneficial nutrients. It’s used in skin creams and is undergoing research in Australia as a treatment for skin cancer. I don’t know how good it is. I’m a Tea Lady, not a scientist. But I adore it and it makes me feel good.

  The health benefits are certainly attractive, but it was the incredible flavour that first drew me to the fabled lands around Fuding. You can get industrial white teas in a teabag; perhaps you have tried white tea in a silky, synthetic mesh or even loose and think me a liar because it was neither sweet nor delicious. But there are as many grades of white tea as there are white wines. Often they are not picked in the spring but from later flushes (new leaves) of the bush. And it is not every garden that can produce the same tea.

  Through the year the plant will keep producing flushes, but it is only those first new buds that hold the sweet release of spring. The tea bushes have been hibernating over the frigid winter. All the summer sugars have been stored in the roots to sustain the plant over the long, dark months, waiting for the first pale spring light. The tea bush uses those stored sugars to grow the first new l
eaves, leaves not yet wooed by the sun to unfurl. They have not yet begun to photosynthesise and convert the sugars into energy, which is why the buds are so uniquely sweet.

  On one silver tip trip, I got off a plane in a remote town in Fujian province, in the middle of the night. It was a small, local airport, lit by bright white lights, its floor, ceiling and walls covered in white tiles stained mildew shades from yellow to brown. I was on my own and I had never met the farmer who had promised to meet me. I still spoke no Chinese and we had communicated only by email, and badly. You can imagine my relief when he was there, a skinny man in a shabby suit, holding a sign with my name written on it. As I walked towards him, he kept peering around me as if I was getting in the way of his view. I glanced behind me to see what he was looking at, but there was only the melee of other passengers coming through the arrivals hall. As I got nearer, his eyes slipped onto me for a second and then back over my shoulder. The closer I got, the longer his glance lasted. Eventually his eyes met mine and his face fell. I held out my hand. His disappointment when he realised that the British tea buyer he’d been communicating with for months was a woman was so obvious that I laughed as we shook hands, discombobulating the poor fellow further.

  You might think my name, Henrietta, would be a giveaway. I had assumed he would know it was a woman’s name. But why should a Chinese farmer have any idea about British names, or any names outside China? His culture, language and script are totally different. Though it is increasingly common for Chinese who deal with the West to choose an English name, they are not always recognisable as names to us. Often they are strings of English letters that combine into a pleasing sound. Why be Bob when you can be Starry?

  I never did buy tea from that farmer. His English name was a rather dull David. But I didn’t hold that against him. It wasn’t because he was unaccustomed to, and initially hesitant about, doing business with a woman. When he realised I was Henrietta, he put a brave face on it. China is a meritocracy in commerce; if a woman can do serious business, then she is welcome. It’s not culturally impossible, even if it is less common. I wish I had been afforded the same leeway in the corporate boardroom or during my first attempts to trade in Japan.

  The only real difficulty I have encountered being a woman in China is the spitting. Every tasting room in a tea garden has a spittoon, either an old dented brass one or a shiny new stainless-steel vessel, positioned on the ground next to the tasting table. It has a wide mouth and a narrow neck so that you can spit easily into it without seeing down its throat. It usually stands about waist high and takes the tea so that the taster does not have to swallow his mouthful, much like a sommelier when tasting wine. Where a wine expert would get drunk if they swallowed, a tea taster would get high. And I really do mean high. All that amazing flavour and all the caffeine can send you celestial.

  My first times in China, tasting tea, I just couldn’t spit. To see a woman spit is, mostly, a very intimate thing. Surrounded by a group of unknown men all staring intently at my young, blushing face, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I swallowed. By the end of that tasting I couldn’t stop grinning and I felt like I could walk on any surface of the hotel room – the walls and ceiling holding no challenge in my elated state. I didn’t sleep for days. Tea and jet lag kept me so amped I might have been on a Dexedrine bender like Jack Kerouac when he wrote On the Road. I just wish I’d written a cult novel instead of firing off strings of garbled emails.

  Now I have learnt to spit discreetly, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. Some of the teas I just have to swallow because they are too good to waste. To spit the most exquisite expression of a plant, a harvest, a landscape and a craftsman’s art into a dented metal spittoon still hurts me too much. But anything less than sublime I can give up. When there are hundreds of batches of tea to try, it would be madness to give in to my greed or sense of propriety. I do turn my back to any strange gentleman in the room. A Tea Lady must retain a little mystery. Let them only wonder what my spitting face looks like.

  I never bought David’s tea because it wasn’t all that good. It is not only a specific production method or varietal that yields the best flavour. Teas may have the same name and come from the same place and be made in roughly the same way, but they are not all equal. Please don’t be put off a type of tea if you have only ever tried it once. To rule out all white tea, for example, after having tried only one kind would be like trying one white wine and dismissing all white wine as a bad lot on the evidence of one bottle. Perhaps you didn’t know which one to buy, didn’t want to take too much of a risk, or simply tried the one that was most readily available; for whatever reason, you didn’t get your hands on the most delicious one. When you find it, you’ll know.

  Getting back to my bed tea, my first half-cup of White Silver Tip is just a light infusion, not quite ready. I like those first gentle sips, where it’s mostly all in the aroma: soft, silvery, elusive. I make it at 70°C so it’s not too hot to drink right away. It disappears rapidly. There is still tea in the teapot for another full cup, and by this time it has infused more deeply to an earthier sweetness. It becomes bolder and I am more present. It tastes of the sweet green of spring buds. It’s never, ever disappointing. Every single morning I revel in its delicious, delicate flavour.

  Once the tea is finished, I am awake. Fully awake. If there is time, one of my greatest luxuries is to make a second infusion from the leaves and return to bed to drink it. The water penetrates more deeply into the bud, right to its tender heart. This is the time I have some of my most ridiculous notions and dream up outlandish adventures. What would it be like to blend Wuyi Shan oolong with a Nepali hand-rolled black tea? Shall we make leaf tea at a music festival in an American desert? Could I travel by motorcycle over the Himalayas from China into India? Will I leave London to live beside a lake and drink tea lying on the warm boards of an old wooden jetty, listening to the water lap?

  I don’t usually have time to enjoy the second infusion in bed. I’ll get there one day, but there is always time for a second pot. Often I drink it while I’m putting on my make-up, the last thing I do before I leave the house. My teacups are always edged with scarlet crescents. Those first few moments in bed at the start of the day are full of potential. The last sips before I leave the house I’m conscious anything can happen. Even on the best days, some shit will probably go down. But I do have the power to start my day with truly beautiful tea.

  MAKING WHITE SILVER TIP TEA

  2g of White Silver Tip leaf per cup (150ml) is just enough, but 2.5g won’t hurt. Use water at 70 to 75°C and steep for one to three minutes, depending on your taste.

  The second infusion is better shorter, the bud having softened and the water penetrating the tender interior leaves more easily. I sometimes make a cold infusion with the third, swirling the leaves out of the pot with a cup of cold water and into a lidded jam jar and the fridge. It makes a lovely, refreshing glass of iced tea when I come home in the evening.

  In the darkest part of winter, when those moments out of bed turn my hands white with cold, I long for a hotter cup to hold to my chest. I increase the water temperature to 80°C but decrease the steeping time.

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  For a fuller explanation of how to make a good cup of tea, turn to the end of the book.

  You can also infuse tea in alcohol instead of water. Now seems a good time to celebrate with a tea-cocktail. White Silver Tip Martini is one of my favourites: it’s wonderfully simple, utterly delicious and gets a person thinking about tea in a whole new way.

  WHITE SILVER TIP MARTINI

  For each drink you will need:

  3g White Silver Tip tea (also called White Silver Needle), or you could use a whole-leaf white tea like a White Peony

  60ml good, clean, uncomplicated gin, like the ever-excellent Beefeater

  Cocktail-shaker or jam jar

  Ice

  Martini glass or fine-lipped wine glass

  Tea strainer

  Mix th
e White Silver Tip tea with the gin and stir it round a bit so that the leaves are submerged in the alcohol. Wait five minutes.

  Meanwhile, chill the glass with some ice and a little water.

  Fill the shaker or jam jar with ice, then strain the gin into it. If you don’t want to shake, you can use a spoon to gently stir the gin and ice, slowly chilling and diluting. I think this is better than a shaken martini, despite James Bond. He might be a good-looking man, but he’s also a brutish, misogynist killer. If you shake, ice shards break off, making the dilution uncontrolled and erratic, and those frozen splinters make the drink much more aggressive. A gentle stir is, well, more gentle. It results in an altogether smoother drink. It does take a bit more time than a quick shake. But then the best things often do.

  Empty the icy water from the glasses and pour (leaving the ice in the jar or shaker).

  The wonderfully sweet, grassy notes of the tea combine gloriously with the botanicals of the gin. You don’t need to add dry vermouth, bitters, olives or a lemon twist. It’s perfect just the way it is: clean and balanced.

  If you are feeling generous and making enough to share, use 25g of tea per 750ml bottle and infuse for 15 minutes.

  To keep it for any length of time, double-strain the gin – first through a tea strainer and then through an unbleached coffee filter popped into a funnel; that will catch any tiny particles. Once you’ve done that, the gin will keep indefinitely, without changing a hair – that is, if you can resist drinking it.