6-7/10/2024 - South Village, Wuli township, Enshi Prefecture. Old Tea Forest

In the first weekend of October, with my friends Alex from One River Tea Cooperative and Jason, a Canadian student and tea connoisseur, we set off for a trip of exploration. A rugged road took us to Nancun village, far in the mountains of Wuli, on the border with Hunan. It is a region very sparsely inhabited, with pristine wild forests and a karst environment.

Here, in South Village, 800 people mostly elders, the village chief and his brother have recently rediscovered in the jungle at about 1500 meters, an old tea tree forest. They are, surprisingly, of the big leaves variety that according to my knowledge is found, in the world, only in the forests of Yunnan, in Pu'er and other places. We climbed the mountain cutting our way through the wilderness, guided by the village chief. The tea trees are old, as we estimated about 200-300 years of age, and grow to about 3 meters in height.

Back to the house, a huge palace quite ad odds with the village's traditional wooden houses of the local Tujia culture, we were entertained by the chief's family with a sumptuous meal and some tea tasting. A bunch of villagers go collect the leaves of the big trees every year, one month after Qing Ming Festival. They roast and ferment them, in quite a simple way and they sell it to mostly friends and tea enthusiasts. Its flavor its crispy, with a pinch of sweet honey on the back of the tongue, rather wild and strong with flowers scents. What is its mysterious history? I could think of a possibility: merchants that in the last two hundred years, and up to 40-50 years ago were bringing tea on the local branch of the Chamagudao, or Tea Horse Road, that connected Hubei all the way to Tibet. Some of these tea seeds or plants from Yunnan accidentally fel on the side of the road, and then prospered to become the wild tea trees we have now. Another hypothesis would be that Yunnanese merchants would have brought some of their Dayezhong (big leaf) variety and planted them here in this wild part of southern Enshi Prefecture. We are now in the process of further research, I'll keep you posted.