A Mengding shan spring garden at dawn

The bamboo gate at the foot of the path had been propped open with a flat stone, and at five past five on a damp April morning we could hear, from somewhere above us in the cloud, the dull tin-on-tin of a thermos being set down on a cart. The path up Mengding shan was wet from the night's rain and smelled of broken pine needle and turned earth. We climbed in single file behind Master Wu, who had said almost nothing since the village and who carried, slung from one shoulder, a folded cotton bag and a short pair of bamboo shears worn pale at the grip.

Mengding sits at fourteen hundred metres in Ya'an prefecture, two hours west of Chengdu, where the Sichuan basin meets the first folds of the Tibetan plateau and the cloud almost never fully clears. The mountain is, by the long memory of Chinese tea, the place where cultivated tea begins. A Han-dynasty monk called Wu Lizhen is said to have set seven bushes on this ridge in the first century before the common era, and from those seven, the local chronicle insists, the rest of the cultivated industry descends. We were not asked to take this literally. Master Wu, when we asked, shrugged and said the bushes have been here long enough that the question is not interesting.

The garden Wu tends sits on a south-facing shoulder of the ridge, terraced into the slope in narrow bands no wider than a man's reach. The bushes are old. He counted them, when pressed, as something between sixty and ninety years for the youngest row and beyond his ability to date for the highest band, which he inherited from a great-aunt who inherited them in turn from a woman whose name his family no longer remembers. The leaves we were coming to pick were the first flush of the year, no more than two and a half centimetres long, the bud still sheathed in fine white hair.

He worked his way along the highest band without speaking, the shears in his right hand barely used, most of the picking done with the nail of his thumb against the pad of his index finger. The motion was small and almost dismissive. A bud and a single half-opened leaf went into the cotton bag at his hip. He did not look down at his hands. He looked, instead, at the next bush, the way a reader looks ahead to the next line.

“We asked him, while we picked alongside him at a much slower pace, what made Mengding tea Mengding tea.”

We asked him, while we picked alongside him at a much slower pace, what made Mengding tea Mengding tea. He thought for a while. The cloud, he said eventually, is the thing. Mengding has roughly two hundred and eighty days a year of mist, fog, or low cloud, which means the leaves develop under filtered light for most of their growing season. Filtered light, he said, slows the leaf. A slow leaf accumulates more of the amino acid the brewers call theanine and less of the harsh polyphenols that the sun draws out. The cup that comes from a slow leaf, he said, tastes of melon, of fresh bamboo shoot, of something cool at the back of the throat. The cup that comes from a fast leaf tastes of grass.

He held a freshly picked bud up to the grey light and turned it between two fingers. You could see the white hair along its spine catching the moisture from the air. He set it in the bag without comment.

By half past nine the bag was perhaps a third full and the cloud had thickened enough that the bushes two terraces below were no longer visible. We followed him back down to the firing room, a single-storey building of wood and plaster at the lower edge of the garden, where his wife Mrs Wu had a wok already at temperature over a hardwood fire. The wok was iron, blackened, and broad enough that he could have lain his forearm flat across its bottom. He weighed the morning's pick on a small brass balance. Six hundred and forty grams of leaf would, by the end of the day, become roughly a hundred and forty grams of finished Mengding Ganlu, sweet dew, the rolled green tea the mountain has produced under that name since at least the Tang.

He worked the leaves in the wok with bare hands. The temperature was, he said when we asked, between one hundred and forty and one hundred and sixty degrees Celsius at the surface of the wok and considerably less in the centre of the heap. He had no thermometer. He had a wrist, which had been doing this work for forty-one years, and which told him when to lift the heap, when to press, when to fold the leaves back over themselves. The leaves softened, gave up their grass, and began to smell, faintly, of warm chestnut.

A little after eleven he set the day's first finished leaf out on a bamboo tray and brewed three grams of it in a small glass for us to taste. The liquor was the colour of a pale green olive oil and almost transparent. The first sip was almost nothing, only warmth and a faint vegetal sweetness. The second sip arrived in two parts, the body and then, a few seconds after we had swallowed, the cool return at the soft palate that he had described in the garden, melon and cold bamboo and something I had no better word for than wet stone.

He drank his own cup without ceremony, looking out the open door at the bushes disappearing back into the cloud. The kettle behind him had begun to rattle again. He refilled the glass and did not speak.