Chinese Tea --- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Tea Production

A new tea plant must grow for five years before its leaves can be picked. At 30 years of age, it will be too old to be productive. The trunk of the old plant must then be cut off to force new stems to grow out of the roots in the coming year. By repeated rehabilitation in this way, a plant may serve for about l00 years .

To fertilize tea gardens, soybean cakes or other varieties of organic manure are generally used; seldom chemical fertilizers. When pests are discovered, the affected plants will be removed to prevent spreading and also to avoid the use of pesticides. The season of tea-picking depends on local climate and varies from area to area. On the shores of West Lake in Hangzhou, where the famous green tea Longjing (Dragon Well) comes from, picking starts at the end of March and lasts through October, with a total of 20-30 pickings from the same plants at intervals of seven to ten days. Longer interval cause the quality of the tea to deteriorate.

A skilled picker can gather only 600 grams (a little over a pound) of green tea leaves in a day.

The new leaves must be parched in tea cauldrons. This work , which used to be done manually, has been largely mechanized. Top-grade Dragon Well tea, however, still has to be stir-parched by hand, doing only 250 grams every half hour. The tea-cauldrons are heated electrically to a temperature of about 25 degrees C. or 74 degrees F. It takes four pounds of fresh leaves to produce one pound of parched tea.

The best Dragon Well tea is gathered several days before Qingming (Pure Brightness, 5th solar term) when new twigs have just begun to grow and carry "one leaf and a bud." To make one kilogram (2.2 lbs) of finished tea, 60,000 tender leaves have to be plucked. In old days, Dragon Well tea of this grade was meant solely for the imperial household and therefore known as "tribute tea".

For the processes of grinding, parching, rolling, shaping and drying other grades of tea, various machines have been developed, turning out about 100 kilograms of finished tea an hour and relieving the workers from much of the drudgery.