Tale of Tea

Dripping with mist-fed perspiration, hulking green forms lurk in front of me, arcing languidly through damp air…

In this heavy haze, absolutely nothing is obvious and the shadowy images become benign gargoyles that stoop and sweep through space, giving the whole vision something of a gothic appeal. Sacred and ancient, these draped forms are tea trees that collectively comprise a forest whose contents have aroused an almost fanatical devotion—in others, and in myself. Tea has been harvested here for more than a thousand years and the trees’ longevity owes much to the meticulous care that the indigenous tribes, who make this geography home, have attended upon them.

In fact, tea’s blessed and rather humble origins can be found here, in southwest China, in an emerald region that is part of Yunnan province. Specifically, it was here, south of the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau, that tea was born and from here that tea spread its potent roots and its addictive powers. Clippings and buds from these trees spread through China, as did legends of the curative powers of teas that originated in the southwest.

A Healthy Obsession

Two gai wan (flared cups) with two different Puer Teas

Tea in Asia has long been used as a cure-all: a deodorizer, a moderator of blood sugars, a liver and kidney cleanser, a diuretic, a detoxifier, a bowel cleanser, and a vegetable compound with more fluoride than any other plant matter on Earth. But tea has also been Asia’s beverage of choice for more than a millennia. For me—long an addict to the green—the journey here is a very willing step into nirvana.

This is quite literally a journey to the source of my obsession. I have come to see tea’s ancient home and its human minders. I have come to pay homage to these most revered of tea-tree ancestors. And I have come to slurp back as much tea as I can manage in the next week.

Two jolting and tea-less hours southwest of Menghai into the famed Bulang Mountains and my addiction and I enter one of tea’s venerated strongholds with an expectant glee. Stifling heat is kept at bay by cooling mists, which lock everything around into a soft-focused world of wet weight.

My comrade on this little tea-junkie jaunt is known simply as Xiao Di (little brother). A short bundle of energy, he has bright eyes and a shirtless paunch belly that he is constantly massaging. Two broad little feet remain unconstrained by shoes. He is, like myself, unable to resist tea for more than an hour and this mutual dependence bonds us as addictions do the world over. In perpetual motion, his restlessness isn’t at all nervous or strange. Rather, it is the kinetic activity of the perpetually tea-starved.

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