Thursday January 16, 2014 | 13 comments
Which brings us back to Lapsang Souchong, the strong smoked version of Zhenshan Xiaozhong. The accurate name in Chinese is Yan (smoked) Zhengshan Xiaozhong, which is the most familiar in the West, at least in the present day. This tea comes from the lesser grades of the chopping that occurred after the first 48 hours of processing. If it were still Tongmu tea that was being used, it would be roasted with a more intense wood called songming to finish the process. Songming is horsetail pine that is allowed to season. Because of the knottiness of this type of pine, a lot of resin has hardened in the knots, giving the tea its distinct tarry quality (like certain single malt scotches) which some drinkers find strongly addicting. Tongmu tea is so rich, even with this strong smoke, that the fruitiness is still easily noted and its complexity is evident. This is a tea with very few ambivalent drinkers: either you love it or hate it. Be assured, those who love it are many.
When Tongmu was declared an UNESCO World Heritage Site, it coincided with China opening up to international trade again. That brought authentic Tongmu Lapsang Souchong back into the global market. Having to compete with the commodity market made profits low, but demand was high. It wasn’t long before Tongmu reached its capacity, which is about 40 tons per year in sales. UNESCO restrictions blocked producers from expanding their gardens, so they looked to Hubei to solve their supply problem. Producers started buying cheap tea from Hubei and smoking it in their local factories. At its height, around 2000 tons of Lapsang Souchong from Hubei were being smoked in the village. Even with this production size, the profit realized was still very small – perhaps just a cent or two per kilo. Tongmu tea makers used their homegrown tea to make the better quality Bohea (Teding and Teji) using the songmu process, and still do at this time.
In 2006, another innovation took place in Tongmu. A Fujian official asked Jiang Yuanxun, the biggest manufacturer in Tongmu, to make some tea for a gift, using bud tea without the familiar smoking. The tea was made by Liange Junde, the tea master that worked for Mr. Jiang at the time, and the tea Jin Jun Mei was born. In 2007, it went into full-scale production and rapidly became the most expensive black tea ever sold in China. This tea and its lesser grade, Yin Jun Mei, have brought wealth to Tongmu. It is a village that cannot grow, but tea farms are getting the maximum return on their limited acreage. These teas have once again spawned many fakes, but the character of the local bushes and the local high mountain terroir are unmatched.
Over the years, factors have changed to make it no longer financially attractive for Tongmu to bring tea from elsewhere and smoke it, so even that practice has declined. It is still possible, in theory, to contract someone to use Tongmu harvested tea to make Lapsang Souchong from Tongmu bushes. The tea would cost five times as much, the buyer would have to deal directly with the tea maker in Tongmu and they would have to have a solid relationship to guarantee authenticity. This complicated process raises the question as to why a buyer should even bother doing that when there are tea producing areas outside of Tongmu (but still in the Wuyishan area) that are selling Lapsang Souchong at a lower price. However, even these areas have become scarcer in recent years.
Images courtesy of the author. Main Image: Lainge Junde, inventor of Jin Jun Mei; Image 1: On the road to Tongmu.
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts about Tongmu Lapsang Souchong. You can read Part 1 here; and Part 2 here. The fourth and final post of the series will publish next Thursday, January 23.
Austin Hodge is the founder of sevencups.com.
I’m very surprised that this exceptional tea used lower grade tea. I imagine the smokey flavor disguised a bit of the taste, just as blends using fruit flavors disguise the taste of lower quality tea.
Michelle, do ALL blends use low quality tea? I’m questioning the generality because I have purchased and consumed some awesome blends from Tea Spot, Harney & Sons, Lochan, Mighty Leaf, Teavana, and JusTea. My palate is notoriously lacking any snob training, which is perhaps why I find generalities about tea to be just as inaccurate as generalities in general.
When I first visited Tongmu I did not know it was so deep into the history of tea and my second visit to Wuyishan to see the rock tea was also not so interesting as I met Mr. Jiang in his office only and we discussed lot of history only but the ITC trip to Wuyishan only completed the circuit and now I trace your writing Austin to go deeper and deeper into this…maybe next time we go there together…
I would say, years ago, that was common practice. Today, good tea companies are using a better grade of tea but my guess is that it’s still not as fine quality as orthodox whole leaf tea offerings of the highest quality.
I would love to get feedback from someone who does tea blending.
Rajiv, This thread gets more and more interesting the more I pull on it. I’ve discovered a whole lot more since I wrote this article, and well giving a lecture on it in Toronto at the Tea conference there in a couple of weeks.
Michele & Rafe, the issues with quality I mentioned had to do with how tea is judged in Tongmu and China in general. It has to do with how broken the tea leaf is. Chinese tea is almost never blended or flavored, at least in China. The tea that comes from India, Sri Lanka, Africa, etc, have traditionally been flavored and blended. The issue of quality is a very different issue than with Chinese tea and by extension Japanese tea and Korean tea that follow more the Chinese. These to worlds of tea can not be compared in any meaningful way, still people continue to try. Both bring a great deal of pleasure to the people that consume their. That is one of the magic things about tea.
@Austin, I just can’t agree more.
Yes Austin you are right the teas can be classified as oriental and occidental teas on the basis of the teas developed in China, Japan, Taiwan & Korea by natural selection and the teas developed on more industrial and trade needs in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Kenya..should we take Darjeeling as an exception or an accident?
Rajiv.. I guess you could probably look at Darjeeling as having conditions that best matched China. From seeing how tea evolved in China to adapt itself to the local ares where it was plant, over many hundreds go centuries, I think that you can think of Darjeeling and other areas as evolving. I think that is to of the production techniques as well. That has also been true in China. It’s too bad that you and I can’t live for a couple of hundred more years. As far as flavoring is concerned, we should not forget that the first couple of thousand years the Chinese used tea as an ingredient.
My nicknaming Darjeeling as Xi Fang Mei Ren has further created interests in China because that completes the opposite in Dong Fang Mei Ren from Taiwan and gives yet another tea reason to the Zhong Guo being the right tea meaning of China.
Dear sir Rajiv and sir Austin I cant follow this story any more.
So please give me the basic of your disagreement.
This because it became a bit,the whole Lapsang story,
messy for me since my knowledge about tea is not as developed as yours.
I’m sorry Bart, but I don’t think we are disagreeing. The connection between Laspsang Souchong and Darjeeling is that Darjeeling is the only place in India where Chinese tea was planted and thrived, and the source of those plants was Robert Fortune who brought them from the Wuyishan area. Darjeeling tea have won a distinction for quality that rises above other tea that were established by the British.
thanks very much sir Austin
This trail must go on Austin and recently because of my chance bumping into Jeff Fuchs who now lives in Sangrila or erstwhile Zhongdian in Yunnan and have covered the ancient tea horse roads thru Lahsa from Xishuangbanna to Kalimpong, again a part of Darjeeling, has further intrigued me to go deeper and deeper now.