蟠溪鎮, Pan Xi Village right outside of Bailin. Hand pulled noodles for lunch. Rainy day- not good. This year’s Bailin Gongfu is made with the Small White Varietal, as opposed to the Large White Varietal ‘Da Bai’, used to make white teas. White teas this year skyrocketing….
Parsing down to exactly how Dragonwell is classified，there are about 3 main regions, of which Westlake Dragonwell region is tops. Within the Westlake region, Lion’s Peak series of hills are the utmost. Of Lion’s Peak, Hu Gong Miao 胡公廟 is supreme because of its elevation and soil made up of white sand clay. This is superior to Niu Huang Shan, which has a mix of white sand and more yellow clay. The price difference? About 1.5 times more expensive just for that slight difference.
Having tasted the 100% handmade Dragonwell, I am completely and irrevocably unhinged and madly obsessed. I asked the tea master to make some handmade lot from Hu Gong Miao, so it’s the supreme of the supreme. In a couple days, the Pre-Rain lot might even be remotely affordable!
Me and tea on Westlake
‘嘆世界’ Tan Sai Gai in Cantonese means ‘Enjoying life’, roughly. It means sitting right on the lake, watching the boats go by, the fishes hopping out of the water every few minutes, sipping some of that Dragonwell, as the sun sets on the lake. Nothing replaces history, that molding and refining that happens to a place over time. Tea is the cultural beverage of mankind, the oldest and deepest and most refined of them all. Just the fact that I was drinking tea grown on thousand year old plants on the same spot as Emperor Qian Long from the 1700s appreciating a lake in a city considered the most prosperous in the country in the Song Dynasty (1200s AD?) makes one feel, if ever so grandly, timeless. Watching the world go by.
Tea knowledge is endless. Today I discovered that these original seed grown Dragonwell roots are in fact, a few hundred, maybe even a thousand years old. The roots can live that long even for these bush type ‘Guan Mu’ types, as long as they are pruned to the roots every decade. If left to itself without management, the roots will die in 50 or so years. The old seed grown varietals are fleshier than Longjing #43, the ‘improved’ varietal, that sprouts early but is slightly bitter and much less sophisticated in taste and has none of that orchid fragrance as the seed grown old bushes.
Tea is truly a cultural history that mere machinery and a nice hillside can not replace.
Late afternoon on the Westlake。 The Chinese saying: ‘above there is heaven, below there is Hangzhou’
That means the most beautiful place next to heaven is deemed to be Hangzhou…..
內涵 -The idea of Nei Han is difficult to translate. It means ‘internal value’, or intrinsic value perhaps, or even, inner meaning. That is how they describe handmade Dragonwell, an increasingly rare treasure of the past. It takes a person over 20 years to master this level of skill, and so, no machine can replace someone’s brain, dexterity, dedication, and ability to endure hardship (220 C hot wok by bare hand, no sleep for days….), all requirements to make Dragonwell completely by hand.
I will have about a Jin or so of this soon, I’ve asked the tea master to make some just for those of us who want this out of the world experience.