By Helen Xu Fei
Anji county nestles at the northern foot of the Tianmu Mountain in northwest Zhejiang, four hours drive away from Shanghai. The mountainous county is a heaven of greenery, and is famous for its bamboo, white tea and eco-tourism.
Anji harbors the largest commercial bamboo forest and bamboo nursery in the country. The aesthetic bamboo scenery captured in the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was shot here. It is also the motherland of the unique Anji white tea, a temperature-sensitive albescence species yielding off-white leaves in early Spring. Tea produced from this bush tastes superbly refreshing with an underlying sweetness.
White-leaf tea is a rare natural mutant. It was once appraised as the best tea of the country by 12th century Song Dynasty emperor Zhaoji, who was a doomed ruler but a great artist and a passionate lover of tea. He concluded in his book The Treatise on Tea that "white-leaf tea is exceptional, and is unlike any other teas. Its branches are intricately winding, and its leaves are delicately translucent. It is rare and grows only by nature in foliage mountains…just one or two bushes are found…" However, as time passed, the rare white-leaf tea was reduced to a legendary tea and nowhere to found.
Accidental discoveryAnd then a wide white-leaf tea plant more than 100-years old was accidentally discovered at Anji in the summer of 1980. The bush was growing at an altitude above 800 meters in the Tianhuangping Scenic Zone.
The exciting discovery brought with it the hope of reproducing the once highly esteemed white-leaf tea, and the county government funded a resurrection project. In 1982, 537 cuttings were obtained from the well-prepared wild bush, 288 out of which were rooted in the nursery.
About a year later, 82 young plants from the nursery were transplanted into a trial field, and successfully bred into 75 clone bushes. In 1987, cuttings from these clone bushes were planted in the Anji White-leaf Tea Development Field and grew into 0.37ha of white-leaf tea by 1990.
The first batch of Anji white tea won the First Class awards in Zhejiang Gourmet Tea Contest in 1989, and more honors were achieved in following years.
Promotional packages to encourage local planting of Anji white tea were implemented in 1997, successfully raising plantation coverage and output volume. By the end of 2008, Anji has developed over 6,000ha of white-leaf tea producing an annual output of 675 tons with a value of RMB0.675 billion (US$99 million).
In the process, Anji white tea has successfully grown from a single wide bush into an eminent gourmet tea industry for the county.
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More amino acidsAnji white-leaf tea is temperature sensitive; it sprouts in early Spring when temperature passes 10o C, like other teas, although it produces off-white leaves when the temperature stays below 23°C. Once the temperature passes that threshold, the leaves will turn normal tea-green. Tests found that the chemical composition of the leaf changes with the color: the off-white leaf contains 2-4 times more amino acids but less chlorophyll when compared with its green successor or other normal green-leaf species. This extreme high amino acid content is the main reason behind the outstandingly refreshing and sweet taste, so only off-white leaves are plucked to make Anji white tea.
The plucking season is very short. Once the leaves turn green, they are no longer fit for processing. Normally, harvest season is restricted to about a month or so until the leaves turn green. The plucking is strictly manual, and most pluckers are recruited from less-developed provinces. Plucking standard is a bud and one leaf in the early- and mid-harvest period, followed by a bud and two or three leaves near the end of the harvest. Strict leaf standards and the shorter harvest period greatly limits the supply of top quality Anji:, a skillful tea plucker typically gathers around 1kg of fresh leaves (by the a bud and one leaf standard) a day, which would make about 200 gram of Anji white tea.
Phoenix and DragonThere are six basic groups of Chinese tea: green, red (which is popularly known as black tea in the English speaking worlds), oolong, white, yellow, and the Chinese black tea (a post-fermented tea like ripened puerh).
Anji white tea is produced by the green tea method, though it is named white tea, it is a green tea and doesn’t belong to the white tea group. There are two types of Anji white tea on the market, the Phoenix and the Dragon. The former is the dominant type, sporting a feather-like shape, while the latter is pressed into flat pieces like the famous Longjing tea (Dragon Well). There are 5,800 Anji white-leaf tea growers and 350 Anji white tea factories in the county. Many growers and factories have organized themselves into cooperatives for uniform development. The largest cooperative now has over 350 growers and over 200 factories. There is also a women’s cooperative dedicated to helping female growers and small producers.
ProcessingThe processing of Anji white tea is simple yet delicate. Fresh leaves are firstly spread into a even layer, either in-doors or under sun-sheds, and left unturned for a couple of hours to cool down and wilt slightly,. Top grade flushes need to be sorted before spreading.
When the leaves turn soft, they are heated for few minutes to deactivate oxidative enzymes and further reduce leaf moisture.
In the next shaping stage, the heated leaves are cooled and shaped into either Phoenix or Dragon type through different treatments or by different tea machines. Basically, the Phoenix type will have the leaves straightened in the loose leaf form, and the Dragon type needs to be pressed flat.
Drying is done in two stages. An initial dry at about 100-120oC evaporates 90% the remaining moisture, then the tea is spread thinly to cool down for ten or more minutes. The final dry at around 80-90oC produces the fully dried tea with a moisture content of about 5%. Due to increasing labor costs, most Anji white tea is now produced by machines.
Esteemed teaIn less than two decades, Anji white tea has grown into an esteemed gourmet green tea, and is now protected under Appellation of Origin and GI labels. Last April at a Shanghai green tea auction, Anji white tea fetched a record high auction price for China when 50 grams Anji white tea was bought for RMB50,000 (about USD7,350) by a Beijing buyer.
Over 60% of Anji white tea is consumed in the Yangtze Delta region (Shanghai, southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang province), a well-off market with a tradition of enjoying gourmet green tea.
Northern China is traditionally a jasmine tea market yet it has adapted to gourmet green tea in recent decade.
Beijing and Shandong are the main markets in the North for Anji white tea.
Exports remains marginal due to strong domestic demand, the limited supply and the local culture that favors quality tea.
Cuttings industryThe Anji white tea boom has also triggered the white-leaf tea cuttings industry. Local growers find it easier to earn quick money through selling white-leaf tea cuttings.
The higher price of Anji white tea also attracted non-Anji tea growers to buy the white-leaf tea cuttings. Now the volume of non-Anji origin white-leaf tea has surpassed the original Anji white. Though white-leaf tea can be transplanted, the unique geographic and ecosystem of Anji cannot be replicated, so non-origin white tea cannot achieve the same flavor-taste profile as the original.
On the market, non-Anji origin white-leaf tea is sold cheaper than Anji white tea. To protect the authenticity of Anji white tea, Anji county has set up a traceability system covering producers within the geographical region, and only tea produced in the very origin can use the name "Anji white tea".