I was in China between May 22nd and June 1st 2007. Links to some of the print and radio work which followed this visit are given at the end of this blog entry.

This journey was along the tea roads rather than in wine country. Since many readers are likely to have a wine background, let’s get my limited experience of Chinese wine out of the way first.

Chickens taking it easy in the shelter of a Taoist temple, Anxi

The Chinese use the word ‘wine’ to describe both low-strength and high-strength rice wine as well as grape wine, so if you want grape wine when in China, it’s best to use that entire phrase, with some emphasis. I only drank one grape wine — the 1995 Wei Long (’Powerful Dragon’) from Yantai in Shandong.

Not a bad red, with some evident wood ageing; like a modest Rioja. ‘Powerful’ must refer to something other than alcohol: it was just 11.5%. Among the rice wines, I preferred the best low-strength versions (low strength here means around 18%), which reminded me of well-rounded oloroso sherry with some added cereal intricacies and a decided umami tang. The high-strength versions (up to 55% or so) were like vodka distilled from sherry. Since they have to be consumed Russian-style, from small brimful glasses as part of a cycle of toasted shots during the course of a meal, there was little chance to linger over their nuances, and my main aim was to avoid slumping face-first into the chilli-strewn razor clams rather than to take detailed tasting notes. The beer (also widely drunk) is forgettable. The tea, by contrast, is sensationally good.

Tea time at the Chun Cheng tea factory in Wuyi Mountains, home of some great oolongs Here in Britain we’re used to thinking of wine as a ’southern’ drink, produced where the sunlight makes midday walks unadvisable, where dinner can be eaten outside by candlight in silk dresses and linen suits, and where time passes as it always has for donkeys and lizards, without frenzy. Carry on further south still, and you reach the sober, searingly hot deserts of North Africa and Arabia where all forms of life are sparse and where everything which moves is watched, from near or far, with a falcon’s eye.

Recording the sound of green tea being fired at the Song Farm
It doesn’t work like that in China. Wine, grape wine, belongs to the north (Yantai and Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula, the main grape-growing area, are just a little lower in latitude than the border between the two Koreas, and nearer to the Yellow River than the Yangtze). Here you find hot dry summers and long hard winters, with brief but brilliant spring and autumn seasons. I haven’t yet visited.

Tea comes from further south, which means in this case not desert austerities but sub-tropical fecundity. The first tea-garden we visited on this trip was at Anxi, inland from Xiamen (at the same latitude as the middle part of Taiwan). We drove up into thick, swirling mists. The first tea plants I have ever seen began to appear in tiny, garden-like patches and terraces by the road side where the rest of the vegetable kingdom was parted, as it were, to make way for them. You could tell by the twists and turns of the road that the scenery was magnificent; of this, we saw nothing.

Ed Eisler contemplates two fine Dragon Well green teas. The mist made the landscape a secret. Its grey ubiquity reminded me of Scotland, which was why the steamy heat (once one stepped out of the air-conditioned vehicle) came as such a shock. “This,” I said to tea merchant Ed Eisler of Jing Teas, who organised the trip and with whom I was travelling, “would be a catastrophe for vines. They’d be a mass of fungus.” A little later, it began to rain. Heavily. As if often did: in 10 days, I saw the sun once. And we were there at the moment at which late spring began to grow summery.

In heat terms, Camellia sinensis is not so different from Vitis vinicola. It likes a warmer spring than vines usually get, but the total heat summation for the growing season is C3,000 +, equivalent to Winkler Region III, though C4,250 (Winkler V) is better and it can take up to C8,000. The big difference is that the tea plant needs air humidity of 80%+, and at least 1000 mm of rain a year, ideally more: well over double what Bordeaux (or London, come to that) ever sees. The diffused light of the cloudy and foggy conditions which dominate the best areas help keep the leaves supple and tender. If you can grow tea well, in sum, don’t even think about vines.

That didn’t stop the points of comparison bubbling up throughout. The very best conditions for tea are on difficult slopes, just like vines in the Mosel, the Douro or the Northern Rhone; indeed ’stone teas’ is a term of approbation. Different teas are grown in different areas using different cultivars: Iron Buddha of Mercy, an oolong, in Anxi for example; contrasting with the subtly smoked Lapsang from Bohea farm in the Wu Yi mountains from wild tea bushes (there will be a lot about this in the radio programme); or the sublime Dragon Well green tea from the Dragon Well 43 cultivar in the West Lake mountains at Hangzhou. The Dragon Well area itself has different ‘crus’, such as Lion’s Peak, Tiger Spring and Mei Jia Wu (the Mei Family Slope). There are said to be 10,000 teas in China. The differences between, for example, Dragon Well and an aged Pu-Erh from Menghai in Yunnan are easily as great as the difference between an old Solera Oloroso and Champagne. If tea culture can rival wine culture for subtlety and nuance (and I think it can), it does so principally in China.

Two tea pickers walk down from the hills after picking bushes in wild gardens at Bohea Farm Trying to find out about all of this is, for the time being, very difficult. A vast literature exists in Chinese, but very little in English, and those who are able to readily translate or interpret are rare. I slowly intend to built up a data bank together with Ed. Perhaps we will write a book together one day. More on tea in the work to come, mentioned above.

The food was wonderfully diverse: no meal consisted of less than seven or eight dishes, and many of those made from vegetables, pork, noodles, clams, crab and fish were magnificent, as were the dim sum. Some aspects of eating in China took a little getting used to. The Chinese have a love for gristle, bone and connective tissue which I don’t share (one often felt one was eating fingernails, and baked heads glower reproachfully back at you from most fish dishes and stews); my “original” chopstick technique caused much tittering; and the habit of serving rice after everything else (to fill up remaining corners) may have been lavishly hospitable but I’d have preferred rice earlier in the meal, to counterbalance the often zesty saltiness, oily richness and heat of the main dishes.

Floating downriver in the Wuyi Mountains. The peak in the foreground is the celebrated Jade MaidenFor westerners used to the three-course restaurant experience, Chinese meals often seem to begin precipitately and end prematurely: you sit down; a lot of food appears; you eat it; and you get up again. Congee for breakfast is a shock — the first time. The second time, it’s rather nice; a new take on porridge. But these are all minor details compared to the major treat of 10 days of Chinese gastronomy. The best meal of all, by the way, was probably in the staff canteen of the Hangzhou University Science Park Campus. When I think back to the execrable meals I endured at British universities …

The pressure of population is everywhere evident, especially in the enormous cities, and it gave me much to think about. I admire the unfussy way in which the Chinese just get on and cope, but (as I have written in the Worldview section) pressure of population remains an enormous environmental challenge of its own, and one which no government seems to give enough attention to. Humanity has to find sane, humane and peaceful ways of slimming its vast bulk. I saw this and felt this acutely in China. I meant to discuss the current status of the ‘one-child’ policy with those I met (at least one of whom, a woman in her thirties, was one of four siblings), but never had a chance to do this. Should not every nation now adopt a one-child policy?

Great Red Cloak tea garden in Wuyi Mountains The air quality in the cities was uniformly bad, and it was hard to see the surge in car ownership (Beijing passed 3 million cars while I was there, according to the China Daily) as a public catastrophe, though it is doubtless considered a private achievement. The ranks of bicycles which were such a familiar image in the past are now thinning as the scooters and cars take over. Driving techniques are, let’s say, innovative and free-spirited; it’s just as well that tourists can’t hire cars. Try to cross the road with someone you would be happy to die with. (Actually the Chinese are impressively adept at avoiding action providing you keep going which is what they will expect you to do.)

I was very impressed with the hospitality and kindness of the Chinese I met (and with the absence of the visible police presence I remembered so well from Eastern Europe prior to 1989). Airports and modern public buildings shame their British equivalents; hotels are well up to western standards; prices for visiting westerners are attractive.

The biggest shock of all, though, was the beauty of the countryside. I will be writing more about this in The Financial Times but if, like me, you had always assumed that Taoist scroll paintings portrayed an imaginary world of the spirit in which the defining relativities of life were gracefully embodied by ant-like humans making their patient and unimportant way about a mist-strewn, all-embracing nature, think again. It really does look like that.
The Buddha of Plenty at Lingyin Buddhist Temple, Hangzhou