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.
Meanwhile, factory employees had taken our baskets and spread the morning's harvest on tarps across a vast, flat outdoor area near the building. The tea was now slowly withering in the cool air, and I couldn't wait to learn how these large leaves were processed. Unfortunately, because the day's pluck would be withering well into the evening, the factory's processing rooms were dormant during the hours of our visit. To my chagrin, the guide seemed to think that this justified rushing us through the tumbling, firing, rolling, and drying rooms, and he brushed aside my questions.
Much more time was devoted to introductions, ceremonial tea preparation, and tasting in the factory's reception room. The teas we sipped were deeply flavorful and intriguing, some with scents of citrus and stone fruit, others surprisingly smoky. But how did these teas relate to bohea? What about the teas we had picked that day? My questions earned me nothing but a derisive glance from the guide, and we were soon escorted back to the inn for yet another carefully organized feast.
I had come a long way to retrace Fortune's footsteps. I believed that the tea that was called bohea 150 years ago must still be made today in the Wuyi hills. I wanted to taste it, to see for myself how it was produced. But apparently I was not going to be allowed to observe the teamaking process unless I somehow struck out on my own. And so my late-night ride back to the factory.
Stepping from the cab into the darkness, I walked directly into the tumbling room. Three of the four tumblers—perforated metal cylinders about ten feet long and three feet in diameter mounted horizontally in frames—were turning noisily. The room was dark, but small charcoal fires in little metal devices similar to the chimney I use to start my patio grill glowed bright and smokeless. The staff jumped up when I entered the room, acting as if they were delighted to see me again.
One of them went to get the boss, who soon appeared wearing a suit jacket over red and yellow silk pajamas, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with one hand and shaking mine with the other. Not sure what to do next, they did what the Chinese always do when they're not sure what to do next: They made tea.
Drawing more on my charades experience than on my language skills, I made it understood that I wanted to see for myself how they processed the tea. I learned that the tea would continue to bruise in the tumblers for four more hours. Until then, there was nothing to see. They led me to an upstairs storeroom and showed me a bed tucked in a corner. An older woman, the one I would later learn was the teamaker, reached as high as she could to gesture knock, knock, knock on my forehead. Three fingers, wristwatch, knock, knock, knock. And so we agreed that someone would rouse me at 3 A.M.
I awoke spontaneously to find that a thermos of hot water and a guywan loaded with tea leaves had been set on a crate beside my bed. It was 2:35. I poured the water and sipped a gorgeous floral oolong with a lingering apricot flavor and very large leaves. The only sound was the muffled rumble of the tumblers, the only light the faint illumination seeping from the factory doors below. I could feel the vibration of the machinery through the concrete beneath my feet.
Shrugging off slumber, I walked down to the factory. With the appearance of my rumpled form, the teamaker jumped up and switched off one of the tumblers. She opened a panel cover on the side of the cylinder, pulled a fistful of leaves to her nose, then another and another, gesturing for me to do likewise. I did, and was rewarded with a rich harmony of leafy garden greens and ripe apples. This fragrant batch, she gestured, was the tea I had helped pick that morning.
She waited a few more minutes before switching off the tumbler and pulling the leaves into six big baskets to carry into the firing room. There, they were placed in devices that resembled front-loading Laundromat dryers warmed by wood fires. The leaves came out of the drums looking like sautéed greens, the apple aroma replaced by a rich muskiness indicating that the fermentation had stopped and the time had come to shape and dry the leaves. A series of intricate steps then ensued—rolling, twisting, squeezing together and breaking apart, the teamaker's judgment determining the timing of each step. Finally, the tea was ready to be dried.
The drying room looked largely as it would have in Fortune's time. A banquette of clay, running the length of the back wall, housed a row of fire pits filled with glowing embers. The tea was placed on flat woven trays, and these in turn were set into hourglass-shaped baskets sized to cover the fires.
From time to time, each basket was removed from the fire, the tea gently turned, and the basket replaced. This task was never performed over the fire pits themselves, lest a scrap of leaf should fall into the embers and create smoke, which would then taint the tea.
The woman who had promised to wake me was clearly in charge. She knocked on everyone's head at least once before the night was over. In the predawn, I watched an older man (he turned out to be her husband) remove each basket in turn, gingerly mull the leaves, and replace each basket over its fire before taking down the next. Small particles of tea collected on the flat tray upon which this procedure was performed. After a dozen baskets had been mulled, he picked up the tray and poured its contents over one of the open baskets. A few minutes later, the woman in charge walked the row, peered at each batch, and when she reached the one where the scraps were disposed, she recoiled, bent low to smell it, and then let out a piercing shriek. She removed the basket and scolded the man severely, alternately knocking on his forehead and pointing to the trickle of smoke now rising from the exposed pit. He looked down at his feet and waited for the torrent of derision to subside.
Several young women performed the final, tedious step: picking out by hand the dried stems and some of the leaves, those with a light straw color amidst the almost black majority. With a smile, one showed me in the morning light how the properly finished tea has the shape of a wu lung (oolong), a black dragon.
I had breakfast with the owner of the factory in a dark, slightly smoky basement kitchen. Seated at a round wooden table with a tiny dog underfoot, we ate congee, a steaming rice porridge enlivened by spicy, salty bits of dried fish, tiny shrimp, and hot pickled vegetables. It was a long, leisurely meal, its menu not altered for my benefit, and the sincerity of my welcome was plain.
And then came the tea, a traditional Wuyi oolong. Gazing into the cup in my hands, I realized that the partially fermented tea I was about to drink was in fact the grandchild of the vaunted bohea, the very tea that Fortune had gone to such extremes to find. The liquor in my cup was a golden color, more like ale than either green or black tea. Its nose was distinctively floral and fruity, with the predominant scent of stone fruits—of peaches and plums and apricots. It tasted smooth, nutty, and slightly malty. I sipped, and sitting there in the kitchen of that Chinese craftsman, I understood how a beverage brewed from the leaves of shrubs growing among those nearby misty cliffs could invigorate the culture of a powerful island nation halfway around the globe and, in the process, change the world.