An afternoon with a Phoenix Dan Cong grower at altitude

The road up to Wudong stops being a road about two kilometres below the summit. What it becomes after that is a single concrete strip wide enough for one motorbike, scoured by monsoons, banked sharply against the hillside on one side and dropping into pine and bamboo on the other. We arrived a little after noon, sitting three across in the cab of a small blue Wuling truck that had been making this run twice a week since 2014. The driver, Chen Liwei's cousin, stopped at a switchback to let the engine cool and pointed up through the mist at a row of dark green bushes terraced into the slope above us. That, he said, was where we were going. He did not say which bushes were the family's. From down here all of them looked the same.

Chen Liwei is forty-six and the third generation of his family to work this particular ridge of Wudongshan, the highest of the tea-growing peaks in Chaoshan's Phoenix range, in the inland half of eastern Guangdong. His grandfather planted the first bushes on this slope in 1958. His father took over in 1991. Chen took over, formally, in 2009, the year his father broke his ankle climbing down with a basket of fresh leaf and decided the climbing was finished. The plantation is small by any measure outside this county. Forty-two mu, or roughly 2.8 hectares, all of it on a gradient that no tractor will ever reach.

We walked the upper terraces with him in the early afternoon, when the cloud had lifted just enough to show the next ridge across the valley. The bushes here are not planted in rows in the way lowland tea is planted. They sit in twos and threes, irregularly, fitted into whatever pocket of soil the slope allows, and the oldest of them are not bushes at all but small trees, three and four metres high, their trunks the colour of damp slate. Chen stopped beside one that came up to his shoulder and laid a hand on its main stem the way a person rests a hand on a horse. This one, he said, was planted by his grandfather. He did not know the exact year. Somewhere between 1959 and 1962. The leaves it produced each spring went into a single batch and were sold under a single name, the way the family had always done it. The Chaoshan word for the practice is dan cong, single bush.

The leaves themselves were narrower and longer than we had expected, almost willow-shaped, with a pale waxy underside. He pulled one between his fingers, crushed it lightly, and held it under our noses. The smell was specific and immediate, gardenia and warm peach skin and something cool underneath, like wet stone in a cave. That, he said, was the cultivar the family called mi lan xiang, honey-orchid fragrance. There were nine other named fragrances among his bushes, the ten classical aromatic types the county still organises its market around. Ya shi xiang, duck-shit fragrance, named, his grandfather had been told as a young man, to keep the merchants from asking too many questions about a bush that produced too well. Xing ren xiang, almond. Zhi lan xiang, iris. The names are not metaphors. They are the working vocabulary of a place that has been describing its own air to itself for three hundred years.

“They are the working vocabulary of a place that has been describing its own air to itself for three hundred years.”

We sat on a flat stone at the high edge of the plantation and Chen explained, without being asked, why the family had never moved down. The market would have rewarded a move. The slopes below 800 metres yield more leaf, ripen faster, and are easier to pick. What they do not give you, he said, is the slowness. Above a thousand metres the night temperatures drop into the low teens even in May. The bushes shut down for ten or twelve hours, then reopen at first light. The aromatic compounds that build during that long cool pause, the ones a roaster will eventually try not to ruin, are the whole reason a cup of Wudong dan cong tastes the way it does. At 600 metres the leaf is sweeter and softer. At 1,200 it has the cold spine that makes the tea worth the climb.

He paused for a long time after this and then added, almost as an afterthought, that the altitude was also why the family had stayed small. There was no scaling this work. The pickers, all from the village below, climbed up at five in the morning during the spring flush and took only the top three leaves and a bud from each shoot, by hand, into bamboo baskets carried on their hips. A good picker managed twelve kilos of fresh leaf in a day. A good day produced enough finished tea, after withering and bruising and firing and the long roasting still to come, to fill perhaps thirty small tins.

We walked back down to the family house at the foot of the upper terrace as the light began to thin. The roasting room sat at the back, a low structure of brick and timber with a single packed-earth floor and a chimney that climbed into the hillside behind. The wok was set into a brick hearth, blackened to a depth that did not look like seasoning so much as geology, and Chen's father, Chen Senior, was already feeding it lychee-wood charcoal when we came in. He is seventy-three and walks with a stick now, but the roasting is still his work. He nodded at us once and went back to the fire.

The wok, Chen Liwei told us quietly, was the same one his grandfather had bought in the early 1960s from a smith in Fenghuang town. It had been re-bottomed twice, the rim hammered out three times, and the family had been roasting in it without interruption for almost sixty years. The first roast, the one we were about to watch, would last two hours. There would be a second roast in three weeks, lighter, and a third in two months, lighter still. The leaf would lose a quarter of its weight across these passes and gain, in exchange, the dry honeyed depth that the merchants down in Shantou paid for.

The father lowered the bamboo tray of bruised leaf into the wok with both hands and began to turn it, slowly, with a flat wooden paddle. The smell that rose was vegetal at first, then sweeter, then briefly almost burnt, then sweet again. He did not look up. He listened, we realised, more than he looked. The leaf made a soft dry rustle against the iron that we could not have parsed but that he could, and twice he lifted the tray a hand's width higher above the heat without explanation. Outside the door the mist was coming back in over the ridge, and the bushes the grandfather had planted were already cold in it, and the wok went on turning under his son's hands.