Though the light was dim, I could see pavement flying beneath us through a gaping hole in the taxi's floorboard. As a precaution, I took the weight off my feet, but that made it nearly impossible to sit upright. Alternately clutching the back of the seat and balancing against the door as we careened through the streets of Wuyishan City, a tiny town in southeastern China's Fujian Province, I realized the utter absurdity of my position. It was nearly ten o'clock at night. I was in a vehicle whose roadworthiness was, at best, questionable. My driver's English was as nonexistent as my Chinese. And I was on a quest that, if not illegal, was certainly inadvisable. All for a cup of tea.
To his credit, the desk clerk at my hotel had tried to stop me when I slipped down from my room and requested a taxi. "No, no, too late," he said, pointing to the clock behind him.
"But I just want to go to the center of town," I lied.
"Night market closing," he said. From his tone, I couldn't tell whether he was simply trying to be helpful, or whether my request crossed that shadowy bureaucratic barrier that exists, undiscussed but nevertheless quite palpable, wherever a foreigner travels in the People's Republic of China.
I pushed a little harder. "Yes, I know, but I must go tonight. Please."
He made a barely perceptible bow. "Wait here."
A few minutes later, the taxi arrived. Once inside, I showed my driver a small calendar given to me as a memento earlier that day at a tea factory. I pointed repeatedly to the name and address printed at the bottom edge of the calendar, and soon he understood: My destination was not the night market, but a tea factory a few miles up in the mountains. Grasping the implicit promise of a big tip, the driver gave me a broken-toothed grin, executed a deft U-turn, and I was off on my mission.
I was searching for bohea (pronounced "BO-hee"), the tea that in the late 1600s awakened Britain from centuries of beery stupor and in the process became perhaps the single most important trade item in the world.
But over the centuries, bohea vanished beneath a sea of other popular teas, most of them fully fermented or "black" teas in the English breakfast vein. Until recently, it was impossible to determine what true bohea tasted like, or to know for certain whether it was a black or green tea; whether it was fully fermented, partially fermented (called oolong), or not fermented at all; there was even some doubt that it still existed. It was only last year that China scholar Huang Hsing-Tsung argued persuasively that bohea was a Wuyi oolong, a partially fermented tea whose leaves, black when dry, produce a golden liquor.
But Wuyi teas are rare, the best consumed by Japanese and Chinese connoisseurs willing to pay high prices. I knew that if I wanted to experience this tea at its finest, my only choice was to travel to China—and, once there, to go directly to the source. Even if it meant skirting a few regulations.
Some might question my sanity, but I comforted myself with thoughts of my illustrious predecessor, a Scot named Robert Fortune. In the late 1840s, the East India Company dispatched Fortune to the Wuyi Mountains with instructions to bring back tea seeds for transplanting into Indian soil. A relatively easy task, it might seem, but at the time foreigners were strictly forbidden to enter most of China, and the country's tea monopoly was of vital economic importance to it. This foray could easily have resulted in the death of all involved.
So Fortune's local confederates prepared him carefully for his journey. They shaved his eyebrows (scraped them, really) and then the front portion of his head. They exchanged his English clothes for Chinese dress, then had a barber fashion him a glossy black pigtail wig and graft it onto his remaining hair. Still, it was not enough. His men arranged to bear him in a sedan chair, knowing his Western gait would give him away in two steps.
I hadn't gone to those lengths, but my quest for genuine bohea had already resulted in a long and exciting day. My first shock was the stark beauty of the Wuyi cliffs jutting from the morning fog. Samuel Ball, an East India Company official, wrote that the cliffs seemed "as if excavated by spirits," but no description could have prepared me for their bizarre majesty.
The second shock was the instructions I received when I was escorted up a trail through the mist and given a basket to join in the midmorning pluck of a hillside plot of prized cliff tea. "Pick five leaves, six, all the new growth," I was told.
To anyone versed in the accepted protocols for harvesting tea, this was tantamount to being sent into an early-summer vegetable garden with orders to seek out the woodiest radishes and the biggest, toughest green beans. In the harvesting of tea, there is no more universal rule than "Two leaves and the bud." For good reason: Starting three down from the bud, tea leaves become rubbery and will not wither and roll like new growth.
But in Wuyi, the terrain is so steep and the mist so dense that direct sun hardly ever touches the bushes that grow in the alluvial pockets among the cliffs. And the soil, fed by the decaying rock as it washes down the cliff faces, is dark, rich, and acidic. The indirect light and the acidic soil combine to allow the entire profusion of new growth to remain soft and witherable despite weeks of maturation.
So we plucked as we were told. Once our baskets were full, we tromped on narrow paths through mountain defiles and over makeshift bridges to a simple picnic area, which had a protective roof but no walls. Its modest kitchen (two gas contraptions to fire woks and a profusion of wooden chopping surfaces) was all that was needed to produce a wonderful lunch. Starting with a clear broth containing tiny catfish, the meal proceeded through an amazing array of dishes involving five varieties of wild mountain mushrooms and the greenest of wild mountain greens.
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