Out of Eden Walk: Among the tea pickers and plantations in Sichuan, China

Paul Salopek: Yeah, so for about 250 years, until the last dynasty finished in China, there was a stream of, imagine these high kinds of eastern outliers of the Himalaya mountains, and they’re a stream of porters going back and forth over a stretch of almost, I don’t know, about 200 km. That would be like 130 miles up mountain passes, down into canyons … all of them staggering in one direction towards Tibet, carrying, kind of, cheap black tea from Sichuan into Tibet. And these porters were amazing athletes, [with] almost superhuman feats of crossing these passes, carrying up to 400 pounds of dried tea on their back, wrapped in bamboo packets. It’s hard to imagine.

Well, the mountains there are just so rugged that they defied the construction of roads for generations. This began, I think, back in the 1700s under the Qing. And I actually interviewed one of the last porters. He was an 89-year-old man who carried tea when he was a teenager. But these walking trails, these tea kid porter trails they called beifu,the porters, basically faded away in the early 1950s when the Chinese government began pushing roads into this area.

Well, it wasn’t easy to find one to begin with, because the last of them walked in the 1950s before being replaced by trucks. But I did, in one village, ask around, and found a guy named Wang Shi Cong, and he was 89. He had carried tea when he was [around] 17 or 18, quite young. And he was this elderly man, his face was kind of a mask of leathery flesh, his eyes glittering in it. And he remembered rheumatic knees, exhaustion, sleeping in bamboo inns along these mountains as he carried his load. And he said, “Paul, there were bandits in these mountains back then. You know, today, you get to walk through China. You don’t have to fear about bandits. But we did.” And he said, “They’d never stole the tea from us. What can you do with 400 pounds of tea in the middle of a wilderness, right? They waited until we got paid, and then they hit us when we had a few coins in our pocket on our way back home.” Hazard of the job.

Tea plantations are always stunningly beautiful. They look like manicured hedgerows. Here’s this Woody Bush — the genus and species is Camellia Sinensis, it’s the classic tea bush. It evolved in this area, southwestern China, which is part of today’s Tibet, maybe a bit of Burma, and northeastern India. This is the epicenter of tea cultivation, going back 3,000 years. And so, it was a real treat.

Absolutely. It’s considered like premium tea. You know, machine cutting would never make the cut for quality. So, handpicked tea is often the best. These folks were masters at it, as you might imagine. They were quite old. This is not just this tea plantation, but everywhere in China, in rural China, it’s mainly elderly people who are left knowing kinds of farming jobs, including this remote hilltop plantation. People in their 70s, even older in their 80s, use their thumbnail and index finger to pluck off the last tiny tip of the branch, which they call white tea. The palest, youngest little tips of leaves, premium tea.

As far as people know, I mean, it’s really hard to pinpoint it. There are all kinds of legends, and everybody wants to be the cradle of tea. But botanists say pretty much wild tea, if you date back the genes through time, probably originated in these hills. Yeah, it was the first sip of tea that happened somewhere around this temple.

Oh my God, Carolyn. I mean, if you like tea, it is like being in heaven. Because they have black teas, they have green teas. They have brown teas. They have yellow teas. They have white teas. White tea being kind of the most elite, which is what these people were harvesting. It was quite an essential experience. Yeah.

Well, you know, for better or for worse, coffee has invaded China. So, in the big cities and cosmopolitan centers, younger people do not drink as much tea as their elders. They’re drinking Starbucks or the Chinese versions of Starbucks, right? So, tea has some competition now.

You know, I don’t know the answer to that, but my sense is no, I don’t think, I don’t want to go that far. I mean, it’s so embedded in a sense of comfort, a sense of greeting, a sense of welcome is to have a little glass of tea. It’s ingrained in almost, kind of, daily rituals.