The hills are very, very steep. One with vertigo would not do well in this excursion of ours deep in the mountains of Siping, home of Tieguanyin. The elevation ranges from 800 meters to 1200 meters, some maybe more, and many newly planted hillsides feature clippings from 50 year old bushes from the area. Available wind from all directions, red clay soil full of iron, and severe trims down to…
Tieguanyin mountains
Old tea, new tea
For me, Tieguanyin is a good representative of the transitional times in the history of our tea world. It is one of the oldest and most beloved of tea traditions, that Iron Bodhisattva tea, always elegant and refined, with that characteristic ‘yun’ note of long lingering fragrance in the palate. It was also, for hundreds of years, a generally darker and more highly oxidized style of oolong, with a…
Worth its price in Yellow Gold
Yellow Gold oolong was one of the common varieties of oolong that is not Tieguanyin but grown in this region. It is not currently in fashion, and prices are not through the roof. A great Yellow Gold was often compared to being ‘reminiscient of Tieguanyin’, and hardly ever appreciated on its own. But we discovered that in fact, there were three different sub-varietals of Yellow Gold (Huang Jin Gui)…
Deep in the heart of Tieguanyin mountains
Tea of the Bodhisattva
Experiencing tea in a farm is quite different from sitting with some overly branded tea booth in a trade fair. Fortunately for me, most of my tea experiences have been at farms, in a mountain, sitting on a rickety stool with some farmers, drinking through sometimes hundreds of slightly varying batches of the same tea. In this case, it’s Tieguanyin all the way, as we finally ended up in Siping, the…