Beyond the bug-bitten Dongfang Meiren: Recreating Beipu's Four-Season Tea Calendar

One bud and two leaves, shriveled and curled. Most tea farmers dread pests and diseases, yet the tea farmers of Beipu and Emei in Hsinchu are happier the more severe it gets, because this is the good news of "zhuoxian" (bug-bitten). "Xian means saliva, but the spelling that matches the original Hakka meaning should actually be 'zhuoyan' (catching smoke), because bitten tea leaves turn red, and the whole tea garden looks as if it has been scorched by fire." Yet the more severe the bug-biting, the smaller the leaves shrink and the lower the yield. "This tea garden of nearly six fen of land can probably yield only about five jin."

Unlike the neat tea gardens in people's impressions, the tea bushes here are sparse and uneven, while the creatures and weeds are diverse and unrestrained. Chen Weiping dug several stones out of the ground and said, "Lots of stones mean good drainage and soil rich in trace elements. To chase yield in a tea garden, water, pesticides and fertilizer are all indispensable, but we don't want to interfere with the tea plants' growth. If we give too much fertilizer, they won't reach down for the soil's trace elements."

Forged by Roasting into Fine Charcoal-Baked Tea

Laid-back management and laid-back yields: this is the tea-growing philosophy of Jiang Liqi, Chen Weiping's senior schoolmate and a fourth-generation tea farmer in Beipu. Chen Weiping, whose hometown is in Zhudong, came to Beipu with his father to buy tea when he was a child. In 2012 he visited Beipu again. At first he was merely curious about how tea is made, and he happened to start helping Jiang Liqi make tea. The deeper he got involved, the more he discovered how hard-won a good cup of tea is.

Hand-picked fresh tea leaves must be made into rough tea within 24 hours. "Remove moisture, drive off the green taste, preserve the aroma" sounds simple in nine words, but the process requires knowing how to converse with the tea. "Temperature and humidity, fermentation state, what to do next -- the tea will tell you." Jiang Liqi and Chen Weiping insist on the ancient charcoal-baking method. From breaking the charcoal and starting the fire, just continuously turning the charcoal until it is completely burned through requires enduring 20 hours of high heat, and only when the temperature is stable can the tea be loaded, with baking lasting two to four days. "Charcoal baking isn't about giving the tea a smoky flavor; it's about letting the far-infrared rays released by the charcoal concentrate the tea's aroma and flavor." Chen Weiping once divided the same batch of rough tea and tested the flavors of electric baking versus charcoal baking separately. "Although electric baking is much easier, after two years the flavor of the charcoal-baked tea becomes fuller and fuller."

The story of selling at a high price despite pests and diseases was regarded as "bragging" (pengfeng), and the tea leaves in the amber brew were described by the Queen of England as "Oriental Beauty" dancing, but this legendary Dongfang Meiren is in fact only one of Beipu's tea products.

The recent period drama "Gold Leaf," set against the story of the Jiang family of Beipu, looks back at the rise and fall of the local tea industry producing black tea and green tea from the Japanese colonial period to the postwar era. While reading Beipu's historical documents and chatting with elders, Chen Weiping discovered that tea leaves from outside summer were made into tea products such as Fanzhuang Oolong and Bantouqing. "Bantouqing comes from insufficient temperature and humidity in autumn and winter, which causes incomplete fermentation of the rough tea, so it looks half red and half green. Fanzhuang Oolong is usually made from autumn tea that has not been bug-bitten. According to Liao Yunpan's research into its origin [Note 1], it was probably named because this low-priced tea used to be sold to foreigners [Note 2]. Even now, some tea farmers still call tea of more ordinary quality Fanzhuang Oolong." Yet Dongfang Meiren fetches the best price, so fewer and fewer people are willing to make other teas.

"What do Qingxin Damao leaves taste like when made into black tea and green tea?" Chen Weiping and Jiang Liqi decided to recreate lost tea products, and from this they developed a tea calendar that follows the four seasons: spring tea after Qingming is made into green tea, after Mangzhong they concentrate their efforts on Dongfang Meiren, autumn is for Fanzhuang Oolong, winter is for Bantouqing, and in spring and autumn, when yields are higher, they can also make black tea.