The Truth about China Tea Making…

On my trip through Guangxi recently, I visited a tea farm where the owner has been making tea for over 50 years. It was a real honour for me to learn the ancient Chinese tradition of tea making directly from the owner of the farm, Wei Jie Chun, who is 67 years old and has been making tea by hand since she was a teenager. Here in China, she is known as an inheritor of the Chinese traditional culture of tea making in this area. So she's recognised not only throughout all of China, but even internationally by many countries who import tea directly from her farm. Welcome to Liubao tea factory up in the mountains of Liubao. Tea factory here has been here for 40 years and it's absolutely gorgeous up in the mountains. Let's go pick some tea together guys. Here we are. So it's new, new stems. Kind of the new ones. The fresh, young looking ones. And everything is organic and natural. There's no funny sprays on it or anything. That's why you have the insects that they do bite the leaves because there's no, you know, chemicals that they spray. It's all natural. It's really good healthy stuff. And this is a really steep hill, steep hillside. It is beautiful out here. It's very natural, nice and quiet. And all you can hear are the birds and the insects. Now onto cooking. I was amazed at the level of detail involved in having everything just right. Like the temperature, which had to stay between 250 and 280 degrees Celsius. And as you'll see in a moment, we needed to keep the tea leaves moving to avoid burning. I'm amazed she's not burning her hands actually. This looks scary. I'm taking a risk now. I'm putting my hands in 250 degree oven. Oh, that's warm. And then you just, you just do this. Is that right? Oh, it's very, very warm in there. Oh, she's really making it look easy. Let me, let me try with this. Like this. The same direction. And, and does she push down hard or just gently? You have to follow the direction of the tea leaves. It's like a massage. Right. Okay. I think I can kind of feel it because the tea wants to fall apart. I'm getting it everywhere. She's keeping it as a beautiful, neat ball. And mine's just a big mess. It's sticky. So what do you think this tea is best for? In the body. What is it best for? Okay. That's a traditional Chinese medicine term, dampness. Okay. If you have too much dampness and you need to decrease the dampness, the tea helps with that. Okay. It's obviously something that leads to making you sick. By this time, I'm so keen to drink some of this tea for myself. In this canister here is tea from 1985, around about 1985. So let's open and have a smell. It's very faint. I think the older the tea, the more faint the smell. That's from around about 1985, that tea. Pretty amazing, huh? So let's drink some tea today. It does taste good. There's a lot of flavor there. Maybe the older tea will taste a little bit more strong. What's something you've learned over 51 years of tea making that maybe you can teach young people some wisdom about life? Basically, her response translates to passing down history and culture from herself to her family, her community and abroad, especially tea culture. In fact, she told me that she has taught her grandsons every step of the process and they love making tea. Here in the storeroom, they have thousands of bags of tea being aged. As you can see, each have a different year printed on the tags. We actually drank some tea earlier and it tastes like awesome quality tea. Tastes really, really good. Very floral and flowery. Depends on the age. So every five years that the tea ages, actually it tastes very different. They said they can get six different flavors from the same harvest depending on how old the tea is and how long they age that tea. Pretty cool. So I really enjoyed the day today to just slow down a little, go into nature, sit down with some lovely people and just talk over some lovely, amazing tea. The tea here is actually exported to all corners of the earth, which is really cool. I pick tea, we cook tea and we drank tea today. It's a great place to visit if you're in the area or you want to do something a little bit different, come and visit this area, drive through. This is a most scenic, beautiful, gorgeous area and very natural too. Even the farm here, they use nothing chemical or artificial. Everything is organic and natural out here. It's a great place to visit and see for yourself. See you next time.