Rare and Precious: the Mother Plants of All Da Hong Pao Chinese Tea
Posted by Guest Author on December 24th, 2009 filed in Reader Articles
Oct, 2007, a special donation was endowed to China National Museum. It wasn’t the normal donation of antique porcelain, or a painting, or artifacts. It was a small batch of 20 grams of Da Hong Pao – the finest oolong Chinese tea.
For the first time, China’s most admired museum included tea into its treasured collections.
The reason is simple: the tea is like no other tea. The tea came from 6 sacred tea trees believed to be the mother of all Da Hong Pao Chinese tea. The trees have grown quietly on some of the most challenging cliffs known to man for almost 500 years.
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It is no coincidence that the trees have grown here for so many years, overlooking a secret basin deep in the famous Wu Yi Mountain in southern China.
In the basin a favorable weather pattern exists: the surrounding ridges stop the cold air coming from the north and creating a microclimate that is foggy for most of the year. That is exactly the recipe for high quality Da Hong Pao, for the fogs allow tea nutrients to built up in the tea leaves, and eventually make the tea a good health booster.
The porous, acidic red sandstone soil is perfect for the growth of the tea trees, giving it the signature deep and crisp flavor. And clear streams trickle by, allowing the plants to grow the unusual large and juicy tea leaves.
No wonder that Wu Yi Mountain is home to over 300 sub-varieties of oolong Chinese teas!
Yet, only 500 grams of oolong tea leaves can be produced each year by the six Da Hong Pao oolong teas. The rarity makes the tea so highly sought after in the market that in the year of 2005, a batch of 20 grams from the harvest fetched surprisingly 40,000 US dollars.
Despite all the profits, however, the local authorities decided to stop cropping the mother Da Hong Pao tea plants to better protect them. That is to say that the small batch donated to China’s National Museum could be the very last one ever picked from the mother Da Hong Pao tea bushes.
Today, the sacred ‘mother’ trees grow without disturbance like it had once been for hundreds of years. Each year, visitors from across the world come to the Wu Yi Mountain to sample and buy the tea, and pay a tribute to the six ‘mother tea trees’.
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