Wrongly planted white tea unexpectedly brings a road to prosperity; Yuqing village makes the best of the mistake

Liang Fuzhen picking tea in the tea garden

In Huashan Miao Ethnic Township by the shore of Feilong Lake in Yuqing County, the fragrance of tea fills the air across a thousand-mu white tea garden. It is said that local white tea cultivation originated from a "blunder."

On April 14, on Geshanmen Mountain in Huashan Miao Ethnic Township, the Zhu Guangfa and Zhu Guangxi brothers, both in their 40s, were tending the white tea on the hillside. A week earlier, the Zhu brothers had welcomed the first harvest season of 199 mu of white tea, earning a net profit of 150,000 yuan.

"If it hadn't been for the 'peach blossom snow' in early March, there would have been no problem earning 400,000 yuan this year," Zhu Guangfa said. By next year and the year after, when the tea garden enters its peak production period, the harvest will multiply several times over.

It is understood that Huashan Miao Ethnic Township currently has more than 1,100 mu of white tea. Although most of it is newly planted tea gardens that have not yet reached production, the villagers are full of confidence. But what is unexpected is that Huashan Miao Ethnic Township's development of white tea cultivation stems from a "mistake" made many years ago.

In 2009, the Yuqing County Tea Office purchased a batch of green tea saplings from another province and distributed them free of charge to impoverished villagers in Huashan Miao Ethnic Township. "The following spring, many of the young leaves the tea trees put out were white," said a township official. There were about more than 100,000 albino tea trees, and everyone thought the tea trees had fallen ill.

Specimens of the tea trees were sent to an authoritative institution for identification, which found that this was a white tea variety more precious than ordinary green tea, with an amino acid content in the leaves far higher than other tea varieties.

White tea is a kind of tea with albino leaves. This peculiar tea has a picking period of only about 20 days each year, and only produces albino young leaves when the temperature is between 15 and 25 degrees. If the albino young leaves are not picked in time, they will become the same as ordinary green tea.

"In other words, we picked up a 'treasure,'" said the official who lived through this "tea disease incident." It is estimated that when the seller from outside the province sent the tea saplings, some white tea saplings were mistakenly mixed in with the ordinary green tea saplings.

Liang Fuzhen, 51, of Huilong Village, said: "When picking white tea in early spring, the fresh tea leaves sold for more than 4,000 yuan; the green tea now has also sold for more than 1,000 yuan." In her family's tea garden of about 1.5 mu, white tea accounts for about 20%.

The white tea obtained by accident showed the villagers a business opportunity, so they all asked to develop white tea. In 2012, after the Zhu Guangfa and Zhu Guangxi brothers obtained more than 200 mu of barren hills through auction, they planted all of it with white tea.

According to the leaders of the Huashan Miao Ethnic Township government, at present most of the thousand-mu white tea has not yet gone into production, but tea merchants have already built 7 processing plants in Huashan, and some have even signed purchase agreements with villagers early on, preparing for the purchase and processing of large quantities of fresh tea leaves two years from now.