Zhu Xiaoqing learns about the situation at the border-sale tea raw material reserve warehouse.
“Rather go three days without grain than one day without tea” — in ethnic minority regions such as Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Tibet, tea is the drink of life. As a traditional daily necessity of the ethnic minority peoples of the Northwest, border-sale tea holds an especially important position: it is an ethnic-trade product that sustains national unity, economic prosperity, and social stability in the northwestern borderlands. To guarantee supply and stabilize prices, border-sale tea is managed and allocated uniformly by the state under a licensed monopoly policy: in the production areas, designated border-sale tea enterprises are responsible for production and processing; in the border sales regions, provincial-level supply and marketing cooperatives are responsible for reserves, supply, and sales. Thus, in the border regions, border-sale tea is affectionately called “policy tea” and “ethnic unity tea” by the minority peoples. Hunan Province’s Yiyang Tea Factory, Baishaxi Tea Factory, Linxiang Tea Industry, and others have been designated by the state as appointed border-sale tea producers, and for many years they have undertaken the task of supplying border-sale tea for the nation.
In the border regions of Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Gansu, and Ningxia, the supply and marketing cooperatives of these provinces have, over the years, kept the big picture in mind and taken up the responsibility on their own initiative, fulfilling their supply tasks with assured quality and quantity and delivering fine tea into the hands of their ethnic minority brothers.
On August 19–20, Zhu Xiaoqing, Party Group Secretary and Director of the Council of the Qinghai Provincial Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, led heads of relevant provincial cooperative departments, Ma Quanhu, Chairman of the Qinghai Provincial Tea Company, and others, braving the scorching summer heat into Hunan to inspect and research the border-sale tea producers that mainly supply Qinghai Province — Hunan Yiyang Tea Factory and Baishaxi Tea Factory. Yang Likai, Party Group member and Deputy Director of the Council of the Hunan Provincial Supply and Marketing Cooperative; Yan Wenkai, Party Group Secretary and Director of the Council of the Yiyang Municipal Supply and Marketing Cooperative; Chu Shijiong, Discipline Inspection Commission Secretary of Hunan Tea Industry Group and Manager of the Border-Sale Tea Department; and others accompanied the visit.
Safeguarding Reassuring Tea for the People of Qinghai
At Yiyang Tea Factory Co., Ltd., Zhu Xiaoqing first came to the border-sale tea raw material reserve warehouse. Standing inside the wooden raw-material storehouse, he was awed by the fragrance of tea filling the warehouse and the neatly stacked “mountains of tea.” When he learned that the company undertakes one-third of the national reserve of border-sale tea raw materials and a reserve task of 30,000 dan of finished border-sale tea, and that in the standardized reserve warehouses the black maocha raw materials are stored strictly in separate warehouses by picking season, region, year, and grade, he warmly praised Yiyang Tea Factory’s practices.
Zhu Xiaoqing examines black maocha raw materials of various grades.
In the production workshop, Zhu Xiaoqing visited the industry-leading screening equipment and the Xiangyi 4.0 intelligent production line. Throughout the complete border-sale tea processing flow, the tea never touches the ground and stays clean and hygienic, which both reduces labor intensity and raises production efficiency. In the “golden flower” fermentation room, he inspected the flowering of Xiangyi Fu bricks and saw the bricks in the drying room covered in “golden flowers.” At the Xiangyi Tea Museum, he learned in detail about the history and culture of border-sale tea and the company’s development. When the guide said, “Cars run on oil; the Kazakhs run on tea,” Zhu Xiaoqing deeply agreed, noting that in Qinghai wedding customs the Fu brick is an indispensable gift. At the Hunan Agricultural University tea science doctoral research workstation set up in the company, he visited the testing laboratory and the tasting room, comparing black maocha raw materials of various grades and different Xiangyi products. Zhu Xiaoqing was especially interested in the “golden flowers” in Xiangyi Fu tea, asking in detail about how they form and carefully comparing them as seen by the naked eye, magnified a hundred times, and magnified a thousand times. Zhu Xiaoqing fully affirmed the company’s combination of traditional craftsmanship with modern technology, saying that what the people of Qinghai drink is “reassuring tea.”
During the visit, Zhu Xiaoqing mentioned that years ago, in a temple in Qinghai, he had by chance drunk a Fu brick produced by Yiyang Tea Factory in 1968 and found the taste exceptional — that was when he first felt the charm of Fu tea. In the Xiangyi Experience Hall, he also savored new Xiangyi teas and aged Fu teas more than thirty years old, remarking that drinking Xiangyi Fu tea at Yiyang Tea Factory has a flavor all its own.
Zhu Xiaoqing learns about Qianliang tea at the Baishaxi Dark Tea Museum.
At Baishaxi Tea Factory, Zhu Xiaoqing and his party successively visited the Baishaxi riverside scenic belt, the dark tea culture corridor, the Qianliang tea sunning grounds, the Qianliang tea treading workshop, the Baishaxi tea wharf, and the Baishaxi Dark Tea Culture Museum, learning in detail about Baishaxi’s 83-year history. Along the way they enjoyed the landscape of the Zi River, with waves of tea fragrance, birdsong, and the hum of cicadas. Gazing at the Tao Shu mausoleum gardens and the Junzeyuan organic ecological tea garden across the river, company General Manager Liu Xin’an introduced: “The Junzeyuan tea garden on the opposite bank has forest amid the tea and tea amid the forest. We will plant colorful cherry trees in this garden to create the most beautiful cherry-blossom tea garden in the country, linking the Baishaxi Dark Tea Culture Industrial Park, the nationally protected cultural relic site of the Tao Shu Mausoleum, and the Baishaxi Junzeyuan colorful cherry-blossom organic ecological tea garden into one whole, building it into a national 4A-level tourist attraction.” Zhu Xiaoqing said that Baishaxi’s scenery is beautiful — a true piece of feng shui treasure land — and that building a 4A-level scenic area holds great promise.
Zhu Xiaoqing and his party asked in detail about the craftsmanship of Anhua dark tea, tourist reception, study-tour programs, and the origin of the Baishaxi factory name, even asking which “three bricks” the “source of the three bricks” refers to, and about the tea gardens’ recent drought prevention and relief. Inside the Baishaxi Dark Tea Culture Museum, when he saw in the “Hall of Legends” a record from A Brief History of Contemporary Qinghai — “By the end of 1951, 100% of the ethnic minorities in the Northwest were drinking Fu tea. The peoples of the Northwest, full of deep feeling, called border-sale tea ‘Communist Party tea’ and ‘Chairman Mao tea'” — Zhu Xiaoqing was deeply moved and said with emotion: border-sale tea is not merely a tea for daily life; it is a tea of unity, a tea of the nation.
The Commitment of Yiyang Tea Factory and Baishaxi Tea Factory
As one of the first enterprises designated by the state as an appointed border-sale tea producer, Hunan Yiyang Tea Factory has, since its founding, kept the borderlands at heart and dared to shoulder responsibility, always treating the production of quality-assured products for ethnic minority regions as a political task. At its founding, the factory dispatched a team of workers to be stationed year-round in Xinjiang and Qinghai, traveling all over the land north and south of the Tianshan Mountains, visiting villages and households to understand the tea-drinking habits of the ethnic minorities and gather their opinions on tea quality. From Hunan to Xinjiang and Qinghai, some of Yiyang Tea Factory’s sales staff stayed for twenty years at a stretch; as one group returned, another was sent — a relay that has never been broken for 64 years.
At present, as a major appointed border-sale tea producer, Yiyang Tea Factory’s production and sales of border-sale tea account for one-quarter of the national total, and its border-sale tea raw material reserves for one-third of the nation’s. The company has become a leading and benchmark enterprise in the border-sale tea industry, and Xiangyi Fu tea holds a 90% share of the Qinghai market. For 64 years, the company has been the only producer able to maintain stable production and an uninterrupted, quality-assured supply of border-sale tea to the northwestern borderlands, having cumulatively allocated more than 500,000 tons of border-sale tea to Xinjiang, Qinghai, Tibet, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and other provinces and autonomous regions — making positive contributions to implementing the Party and state’s ethnic policies, strengthening ethnic unity, maintaining social stability in the border regions, and ensuring the long-term stable supply of border-sale tea. Over the years, Yiyang Tea Factory has been named a “Hunan Province Model Collective for Ethnic Unity and Progress” by the Hunan Provincial Ethnic and Religious Affairs Commission and the Hunan Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security.
Baishaxi Tea Factory is also among the earlier appointed border-sale tea producers. The northwestern market is the traditional market for Anhua dark tea, and Qinghai Province is the home base for the development of the “Baishaxi” brand. This year, Baishaxi has carried out many “Healthy Tea Drinking · Tea Delivered to Homes” campaigns in Qinghai, Gansu, and elsewhere, winning praise from local governments and all sectors of society. Baishaxi will continue to uphold its mission of “raising the quality of border-sale tea, stabilizing its supply, and ensuring that the people of the border regions can afford tea and drink good tea,” striving to build a healthy twenty-first-century drink serving all people and dedicating healthy, safe, reassuring tea to the people of Qinghai.
The Qinghai Custom of “Simmered Tea” (Ao Cha)
The fragrance of milk tea, deep in feeling and meaning — this is a true portrait of the lives of nomadic peoples such as the Tibetans and Mongolians living in the pastoral regions. If you travel or visit in Qinghai’s pastoral areas, the moment you arrive before a herder’s tent, the hospitable host will invite you in, and soon the hostess will bring you a steaming bowl of milk tea to enjoy. Milk tea is generally made with the yak milk unique to the plateau; when brewing, dried cow dung is used as fuel. The brick tea is first boiled in a copper or aluminum pot; once the tea comes to a boil, fresh milk is added, and as it boils the tea is repeatedly ladled high and poured back until tea and milk are fully blended. The tea leaves and stems are then removed, and salt and butter are added before serving.
The traditional way of boiling tea.
Qinghai Province has a population of nearly 6 million, with 54 ethnic minority groups; minorities make up half of the province’s population, mainly Tibetans, Hui, Tu, Salar, and Mongolians. They all love drinking Xiangyi Fu tea and Anhua dark tea — their fondness for Hunan dark tea is carved into their bones.
For simmered tea, Qinghai people use only Fu tea, mainly Fu bricks produced in Hunan. When boiling Fu tea, rock salt and Sichuan pepper must be added; otherwise, as the Qinghai jingle goes, “tea without salt is like plain water.” The more particular also add ginger and schizonepeta, which makes the taste even more authentic. Qinghai simmered tea is not just for quenching thirst; it is often an accompaniment to meals — beyond savoring the tea’s flavor, it cuts greasiness and aids digestion.
In the Qinghai of earlier years, due to the climate and various other reasons, vegetable growing was greatly limited. Especially in winter, getting a bite of fresh vegetables was not easy. So the people living here, besides eating homemade pickles, ate beef and mutton. Yet too much meat becomes greasy and easily affects the stomach’s digestive function, so something to cut the grease was needed — and tea became the people’s first choice. Relying on simmered tea to cut grease and aid digestion has long been a Qinghai tradition. From a health perspective, besides cutting grease, lowering blood pressure and fat, promoting saliva and quenching thirst, Fu tea also has benefits such as lowering blood sugar and resisting aging.
In their long life practice, Qinghai people have borrowed, absorbed, and developed a way of drinking tea suited to local health preservation, with very evident health benefits and a distinctive local character. In Qinghai, simmered tea is not only a tea but also a fine health tonic, and it has become a “delicacy on the tip of the tongue” that Qinghai people cannot live without.
Produced by: China Cooperation Times · Tea Weekly All-Media
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Author: Lam Sam (LamSam), the Old Tea Head
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