A classy mu dan grade for pleasant sipping that highlights all the best parts of tea from pristine Jinping village wild heirloom gardens.

With a refined and crisp character, this tea is notable in its simplicity, resiliency over many steeps, and by just being super clean, without any unpleasant characteristics. Around the mid-session the tea packs some heft with a full and rich mouthfeel and intriguing aromatics on the gaiwan lid and empty cup. The late steeps can mine deep into a nutritive rich mineral character. Its charm is in its well-balanced understated perfection.

Jinping, a timeless gem

Jinping Village is a small high elevation ancient silver-mining village, and is located in the greater Zhenghe tea producing region just south of the provincial Fujian-Zhejiang border in the Xianxia Mountains at 900 meters elevation. Headwaters coming down from the mountains around Jinping form the crystalline Jinxi River that flows through this village, flowing into the Chongyang, and eventually to the Min river system. Amazingly, Jinping Village and its surrounding wilderness has held onto over 4000 亩 (~650 acres) of ancient seed-propagated heirloom 小菜茶 Xiao Cai Cha tea gardens with most specimens over 100 years old in addition to over 1000 亩 (~160 acres) of naturally managed Zhenghe Da Bai cultivar tea gardens.  Tea garden areas range from 900 meters up to over 1300 meters in elevation.

Jinping can trace its tea history back to the early Song Dynasty, some thousand years ago, flourishing in the mid Qing Dynasty, and contributing to the distinction of the greater Zhenghe area as its own tea production zone. During the Qing, Jinping village notably served as a starting as well as relay point on a trade route used to take tea and silver to Fu’an, onto Fuzhou, and then by boat to be traded as Bohea Tea in Canton, modern day Hong Kong, to merchants who would then sail back to Britain, Europe, and the Americas. Usage of this trade route ramped up as the port of Fuzhou was opened up for foreign trade in the mid 1800s.  The same porters that relayed tea on their backs and loaded it onto the docks would return to Jinping with exchanged-for salt, giving this trade corridor the name the 茶盐古道 cha yan gu dao “ancient tea salt road”.

红茶 Red Tea Roots

The type of tea traded for and produced in Jinping at the time was primarily 红茶 hong cha or red tea, more commonly known to the global traders it would eventually reach as black tea — likely more specifically Bohea black tea — as the more oxidized teas from the greater northern Fujian / Wuyi Mountain orogeny was broadly known.

Jinping is a core origin for the advent of a regionally specific namesake for red tea from this part of Fujian: Zhenghe Gong Fu Hong Cha. The Gong Fu red tea class of northern Fujian — a triad consisting of Zhenghe Gong Fu, Bailin Gong Fu (in Fuding) Tanyang Gong Fu (in Fu’an) — are now a nearly forgotten about class of reds with a history beginning in the mid-late 1800s that not only predates but greatly inspired Qimen reds in the late 1800s. During these early years, other Zhenghe producers hadn’t yet adapted to making this red tea style being produced in Jinping, and Jinping’s new red tea was called 遂应仙岩工夫 Suiying Xianyang Gong Fu (遂应场 Suiying Chang was Jinping's former name). Shortly after, non-local merchants standardized the origin identification to the more broad “Zhenghe Gong Fu” and around the same time other producers around Zhenghe county began making red tea. Tea historians not only see Suiying Xianyang Gong Fu as the progenitor to the entire Zhenghe Gong Fu genre, but also a specified high elevation regional sub-classification under the Zhenghe Gong Fu name, as expressed in its original use of the characters 仙岩 xianyan (literally “mountain immortal”) referring to the pristine, misty, fairy-like, high elevation mountainous terrain of the area around modern day Jinping.

Ancient Heirloom

Like all historic tea production areas that predate the wave of 20th-century advancements in cultivar development propagated through asexual cuttings, Jinping’s tea gardens were comprised of locally adapted heirloom tea bushes grown from seed, with each plant slightly genetically different from its neighboring organisms. This is evident in the complex fragrance and flavor of these teas as well as the unshowy and non-uniform look of the buds on the tippier grades of tea. Cultivars developed for their uniformity and appearance like Da Bai and Da Hao will have a more uniform and distinctively plump bud, a giveaway when visually assessing whether or not a tea has heirloom genetics versus is from a more newly developed cultivar.

Today the majority of Jinping’s ancient tea gardens still consist of descendant tea trees from this heirloom germplasm adapted to this specific environment, left to grow old amongst the natural landscape and continually reseed itself, hosting thousands of century-old tea bushes, with some specimens considered to be over 200 years old. Walking through these tea gardens, one can see many old tea trees growing in rocky terrain, interspersed with generations of naturally propagated offspring. The tea gardens are mostly distributed on the edges of forests dominated by bamboo groves, that rise up steep mountain slopes, with clear streams running through the entire landscape.

Tea leaves from old growth tea trees grown in ecologically diverse, high elevation forested environments like this will have much more amino acids and secondary metabolites, expressing in a more nutritive, complex, smooth, and compelling way than tea grown in full-sun monoculture gardens at lower elevations.

No man’s land

Outside of Southern Yunnan and select pockets of the Phoenix Mountains in Guangdong, pristine old growth tea gardens of this caliber are exceptionally special and rare. How did this small village on the Fujian-Zhejiang come to have so many untouched ancient tea trees?

During the cultural turmoil of the twentieth century when old ways were being uprooted, remote Jinping’s fecund tea gardens survived simply by being forgotten about, and continued to grow old while tea culture and other antiquities were dismantled or made taboo. This neglect is due to the fact that at the time this micro village wasn’t incorporated into a larger township or city—considered a 三不管地帶 “No man’s land”—and therefore mandates to reform industry and livelihoods of that time simply didn’t reach Jinping.

What’s equally as remarkable: during the resurgence of the domestic tea market in the decades around the turn of the century during China’s economic growth period, Jinping’s ancient tea gardens weren’t removed and replaced by newly developed predictably performing cultivars that now dominate that modern tea industry.

These tea trees managed to hang on through these bottlenecks until a time they were valued as what they are: heirloom ancient tea gardens in an exceptionally clean and high elevation mountain area. Jinping’s ancient tea gardens offer a rare look at how precious and timeless heirloom tea environments could have been in eastern China without the cultural upheaval and market demands of the seven or eight decades.

Inheritance

Among the twenty core families producing tea back in the tea-salt road days, the Xu family was the first to incorporate their business.  Today the Xu family—either through outright ownership or by heading up a cooperative that shares plots—has access to the majority of the ancient tea gardens of Jinping. Having Jinping’s clean ecology and the related health benefits of drinking tea from this ancient and pristine of an environment at the forefront of their marketing, the Xu family does not use any pesticides on their tea gardens. Not only that, they also don’t use germination-inducing fertilizers either. Even though the tea grows slow and can’t be harvested many times, annually they’re able to take a competitive quantity of tea to market simply because of the sheer amount of tea garden acreage they have access to.

Xu Wu Quan is a seventh generation tea maker and is a county level intangible cultural inheritor of Zhenghe white tea and his brother, Wu Song, is a prefecture level inheritor of the Zhenghe Gong Fu red tea style, both producing tea in Jinping.