The Truth in Your Cup of Da Hong Pao Oolong Tea

During his historical visit to China in 1972, then U.S. president Richard Nixon received a special gift from Chairman Mao – a small pack of 400 grams of top quality Da Hong Pao oolong tea The president joked:”It’s a tiny quantity”, to which Chairman Mao responded:”No, that’s not tiny at all. Half of what China has is in here.”.

Chairman Mao was rightChina at the time produced only less than a kilo of Da Hong Pao each year400 grams, that’s a lot

But how could the tea be so rare?

That’s because a petty number of only 6 Da Hong Pao tea trees grew in China at the time. A total of one kilo of tea, that’s all the six trees could produce a year.

Also, harvesting the tea leaves was challenging, for the tea trees grow half way up a soaring cliff in the Wu Yi Mountain. In ancient times, monkeys had to be trained to pick the tea.

But, if Da Hong Pao is rarely available, what do you have in your cup anyway?

The truth is: it’s still Da Hong Pao, but the leaves are not from the original 6 tea trees now venerated as ‘mother’ of all Da Hong Pao.

In 1982, after years of request, an oolong tea expert named Chen De Hua received a batch of five Da Hong Pao twigs. Chen re-planted all the five twigs in his experimental field, and nurtured thm with great care. Soon, the twigs took root. And without long, they grew big enough for tea leaf harvesting.

Chen’s re-plantation of Da Hong Pao ended in a big success. A while later, oolong tea farmers in the area all came in the hope of buying a small batch of the precious Da Hong Pao saplings

Today, the area grows as many as 40,000 acres of Da Hong Pao with the its annual production reaching 1,700 tons.

Meanwhile, another tea expert joined the effort to improve the flavor of Da Hong Pao. He is Zhang Tian Fu, a 101-year-old tea master who has been studying oolong tea for the past 70 years. And even someone as adept as him didn’t know the mysterious recipe for Da Hong Pao processing.

Although the name of Da Hong Pao was a common coin in China, few Chinese knew how to make it. The area where the original Da Hong Pao tea trees grow used to be the property of a nearby Buddhist monastery. For centuries, no one was allowed to get near the tea trees except the abbots, who carefully kept the secret recipe from other monks and nearby villagers.

Things have changed, and today, fans of Da Hong Pao from around the world come to visit the ‘mother’ tea trees and take a peek into its once mysterious processing techniques.

And you, too, can enjoy a perfect cup feeling delighted and worry-free.