Featured Essay

the tea master of banna

His eyes are soft and sweet, like the air of Xishuangbanna’s mountains. Just as the polluted gray skies of China’s northeast are unreal, so is the beauty of its southwest. Closer to Hanoi than Beijing, Yunnan province would not recognize itself in the China depicted in the media—cloudless skies so blue they seem photoshopped, diverse ethnic minorities wearing their handmade, brightly-colored traditional garb, pure and uncomplicated hearts beating inside its inhabitants. When he smiles, the deep creases at the edges of his brown eyes remind me of the Mekong River’s turbid tributaries. The Mekong, known as the Lancang River in these parts, winds southward from Tibet and cuts through Yunnan, bisecting the ancient home of puer tea.

He is a puer tea master and widely acknowledged as the most skillful of them across the twenty-nine villages that sit on this mountain range. Laoda, we call him, meaning ‘old big’ if translated literally.

He grabs a handful of leaves picked just this morning and brings them to his face, letting the fresh grassiness, the unmistakable orchid-like fragrance characteristic to this batch of leaves envelop him. Much like we close our eyes when kissing, he closes his eyes as he inhales, sharpening the perceptiveness of his other senses.

Spring is the most prolific season for puer. As the buds of the camellia sinensis trees burst forth, tea farmers ready themselves for a month at breakneck pace. After the first flush of tea is picked and processed, tea enthusiasts from the polished tea rooms of China’s eastern seaboard—Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou—will descend upon these nauseatingly winding mountain roads in their shiny black Land Rovers, their passengers with no shortage of time or money.

The sun peeks over streaks of pastel pink in the east. Tea pickers alight from the back of the pickup truck once we reach the tea plantations. “Tea fields” seems more appropriate a term though, due to the wildness of the area with its twenty-foot high, three hundred-year-old trees scattered across the mountainside. There are no neatly cultivated rows of thigh-high tea bushes here. A path is made on the fly, handy machetes carving away at brush as we trek deeper into the forest. Wild banana tree leaves fall at my feet, letting sunlight unevenly filter into the dense expanse of lushness.

We return to Duoyi Village to meet with other tea makers in what I deem its Flatiron building. This association may misleadingly glamorize the stilted two-room wooden building, but it, too, is awkwardly shaped and located at a fork on a major thoroughfare running through town—granted, Duoyi Village has but one.

Laoda balances a cigarette between his lips as he brews tea. He eyeballs eight grams of raw puer that just finished drying yesterday under the fierce afternoon sun. The black of the dirt and charcoal mixture underneath his fingernails contrasts with the white porcelain of the gaiwan, a traditional lidded cup and saucer used to make tea. Gaiwan are simple and unpretentious, like the Hani people that have inhabited this village for 25 generations. It avoids the influence of minerals found in clay teapots, thus representing the purest way of making tea.

His graceful movements belie the roughness of his hands. There are calluses on his fingertips so thick that a shallow knife wound produces neither pain nor blood.

When the cup meets your mouth, everything else falls away. The world narrows to contain just you and the tea. The moment that tea meets tongue, there is no more grasping for facts and reason, no analysis of the tea’s origin and age. There is just the tea.

I am reminded of the importance of not trying so hard to understand. Simply let the complex and changing flavors roll through your mouth and echo through your body. The only requirement is to be present.

He lights a thin agarwood incense, the perfect, some say necessary, pairing to a cup of tea. As the delicate smoke swirls and dances toward me, I have a Proustian moment. I am transported to Ritan Park in Beijing. It was there that I met a monk, a monk who had the same, distinctly fragrant scent of agarwood about him. He asked me if I knew why trees outlived humans. I replied that I did not. He pointed to a millennia-old cypress tree and told me to look at it. “Trees do not move; they are able to remain still,” he instructed before disappearing in a crowd of tourists.

I am called back to the present by Laoda motioning to me to look at a picture of a new type of portable tea panning wok on his phone. He passes the phone around the table, and a debate ensues in the local Hani dialect regarding the wok’s pros and cons and, of course, its price. The consensus is “not quite ten thousand yuan,” which comes to USD1500.

The sun shines directly overhead, meaning that the pickers will soon be back with tea leaves gathered in the morning and break for lunch. The leaves are left to wilt in the shade. A businesswoman from Shenzhen insists 10cm is the optimal height for piling leaves during wilting. Laoda shrugs as if to say, “Forget your numbers and facts. Feeling reigns supreme.”

After being held hostage in a bag all morning, the tea leaves need time to breathe and oxidize evenly. Three hours later on this hot spring day, it is time to rock and roll.

Laoda is on his way to the tea panning warehouse in a car with more dirt visible than paint.

Ready the wood. Light the fires. Separate the leaves into baskets. Too little or too much make it difficult to manage evenly in the wok. He arrives. He checks the fires, shifts the firewood, dons gloves to protect his hands from the scalding wok, and flips his cap backwards.

His hand hovers a few inches above the wok to check the heat. Experience renders a thermometer superfluous. The tea leaves go in, the basket gets thrown behind, clattering on the concrete floor. Continuous flicks of the wrist keep the leaves from sticking to the wok. From the outside, the motions looks deceptively elegant and gentle, but his forearms are taut. He watches, smells, and listens to the leaves.

Crackle, crackle, crackle.

Pop, pop, pop.

The sweat trickles downward, tracing his jaw line. A few drops fall onto the concrete, a few into the wok. My mind wanders aimlessly on the interaction between sweat and tea. From a thousand years ago, when Europe was in the Dark Ages, up until 1949 when the Communists gained control of China, tea traveled by mule and porter from Yunnan to Tibet. During the 14,000-mile journey, the sweat and heat from the mules and sun worked its way into the tea. Tibetans became fond of the resulting flavor. In the same way, I think some people become accustomed to the taste of the tea master’s sweat.

Small clouds of steam rise from the leaves. He shouts for another piece of wood to be added to the fire. The tea master ensures that the leaves are cooked just through, not overdone, not underdone. Just right.

Between batches, he gulps down a cup of warm water followed by a marinated tofu kebab that disappears in three bites. Without looking, he flings the wooden skewer into the fire.

Next basket up.

The nonstop action continues until dinner. Dinner takes place around a fire. A proper fire. Everyone crouches on small, hand-woven bamboo stools, knees touching. The homemade duoyi fruit kombucha is brought out. As passed down through at least three generations, the tart, green-yellow, golfball-sized duoyi fruit—for which Duoyi Village is named—is said to reduce inner heat and clear toxins. Wild honey, brown sugar, and dried duoyi fruit are combined and left to ferment for six months. Laoda swears on its ability to treat any stomach ailment.

The reason eating family-style is so-named must be because it makes you feel like immediate family with those sharing the meal. Chopsticks belonging to strangers dive from all sides into the chicken porridge, a hearty regional specialty. Just that morning, I had heard that chicken’s hoarse cacaw. How quickly fate can strike.

I meditate on the impermanence of life as I unsteadily walk outside after dinner, having underestimated the strength of the duoyi fruit concoction. The air is heavy with the smell of burning firewood.

He finds me at my favorite spot: his outdoor deck for drying tea leaves. The wind comes in mighty gusts.

He walks over to me, struggling to light a cigarette. Gazing upward in the direction of the Big Dipper, he exhales. In an instant, the smoke vanishes into the night, blown away to some unsuspecting corner of the universe. He says with certainty that I will return to these mountains within two years.

I would not take the other side of that bet.