The Real Deal in Your Cup of Da Hong Pao Oolong Tea
In 1972, during his groundbreaking visit to China, then U.S. president Richard Nixon received a special gift from Chairman Mao – a small pack of about 400 grams of Chinese Da Hong Pao oolong tea The president joked:”This is little”, to which Chairman Mao replied:”No, that’s not little at all. Half of what China has is in here.”.
That’s true!The annual production of Da Hong Pao in China was merely a kilo at the time400 grams, that’s a whole lot
The question is: why such an extreme rarity of the tea?
That’s because there were only six Da Hong Pao oolong tea trees in all of China. One kilo of tea, that’s the production for a whole year.
Also, the tree s grow high up some stiff cliffs in the Wu Yi Mountain that is often out of human touch. In old times, monkeys were trained to pick the tea leaves.
But, if the Da Hong Pao oolong tea is so rare, what’s in your cup anyway?
The truth is: it’s still Da Hong Pao, but not made of tea leaves from the six original tea trees.
In 1982, after years of petition, the famous oolong tea expert Chen De Hua received five twigs from the original Da Hong Pao trees and was assigned to cultivate more Da Hong Pao tea trees. Chen transplanted the twigs in his experimental field, and grew them with extreme care. Soon, the twigs began to bud. And only a few years later, they’d grown big enough to produce juicy and aromatic tea leaves.
Chen’s re-plantation of Da Hong Pao ended in a big success. Soon, oolong tea farmers in the area all came for a batch of Da Hong Pao saplings
Today, over 40,000 acres of Da Hong Pao are grown in the Wu Yi Mountain, producing nearly 1,700 tons of tea leaves every year.
At the same time, another tea expert pioneered the effort to improve the ‘texture’ 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 knowledgeable as him didn’t have a clear idea as how the Da Hong Pao should be processed.
Although Da Hong Pao is known to every tea lover in China, very few knew how to make it. The area where the 6 original Da Hong Pao shrubs grow used to be a private property owned by a nearby Buddhist temple. 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.
That’s not the case anymore today, as fans from around the world come to venerate the six Da Hong Pao mother trees and get a peek into its once mysterious processing techniques.
And you, too, can brew yourself a perfect cup at home with ease and delight.
