Pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Tea
by James Norwood Pratt

Whoever said "the past is not dead it's not even past" could have been speaking of tea history, for the history of tea lives on in the cups we drink every day. A taste that's been known sometimes for centuries comes back to life. There is not a tea you can ask for which does not bear witness to strange and wonderful stories, if only one cares to discover them. Every tea contains history. It is a history which begins thousands of years before we Westerners first began drinking tea only 400 years ago and stretches right back to ancient-most China.

Every one who takes much of an interest in tea runs considerable risk of falling into a love affair, sooner or later, with the homeland of tea. After long infatuation, last September I boarded a flight from San Francisco to Shanghai as part of a special tour in pursuit of romance. The next morning I headed south of Shanghai on the road to Yi-xing, home of China's famous purple sand clay earthenware teapots. Teapots have been made since about the time of Christopher Columbus, which makes the teapot a fairly recent development in the history of China tea, if anything in China may be considered recent. To watch these master potters was to witness antiquity alive and vibrant in the present moment.

From Yi-xing we continued south through the hills around Lake Taihu where Lu Yu lived while he wrote the world's first book about tea over twelve hundred years ago. The rows of tea hugging the contours of the hills produce the famous Biluochun and Guzhu or "Purple Bamboo Shoot" just as they did when Lu Yu lived there and enjoyed them, though under different names. By nightfall I entered Hangzhou, one of the most beautiful cities in China (or anywhere else) and the ancient capital of the Song dynasty. Longjing the incomparable green tea we call Dragon Well--grows nearby on the surrounding hillsides.

Plucking tender shoots off the Dragon Well tea plants with my own fingers and pressing the mass of leaf against the bottom of a hot wok with my own hand gave the product of these labors a fresher, sweeter taste. We drank the tea we'd made while cruising Hangzhou's West Lake aboard a "dragon boat" and listening to classical Chinese music played on traditional instruments. To be at its best, ancient authorities always agreed, Dragon Well should be made with water from Tiger Run Spring, a source miraculously discovered in the hills above West Lake when Lingyin Temple was founded there by Chan (Zen) Buddhists well over a thousand years ago. Ancient Authority is spot on. This spring water will float a Chinese penny, and makes Dragon Well elegance itself, exactly as claimed Following a short flight south to Fuzhou, directly across the straits from Taiwan, we are welcomed with a jasmine oolong Buddhist banquet at Drum Mountain monastery, after sunset chants as old as stone. Gongs' unforgettable peace. Vegetarian delicacies to go with our Drum Mountain tea after dark.

Six hours by train up river, deep in the interior of Fujian Province, grows "Bohea" meaning oolong tea, from the obsolete English word for Wuyi, the Chinese name for a spectacular mountain range and the oolongs produced there. Wuyi-shan looks like China the way Disney would do it's dizzy cliffs to climb and clefts mysterious to enter. Entranced, I float down Nine Bend Creek on a bamboo raft, or is it the peaks and precipices which are floating past as if in a dream? When you enter the canyon where the ancient plants grow and drink the greatest Wuyi yancha or "cliff tea" in situ, you see it's no wonder they worshipped Da Hong Pao.

Awesome Beijings like Buddhism is inseparable from the culture that tea came from, and, of course, we had to visit. Its splendors included unforgettable teas at a pavilion in Prince Gong's garden-mansion, and dinners prepared in the Imperial kitchens at Fangshan Restaurant. For fourteen days all told, the spirit of ancient China always inhabited whatever tea we drank. Then back to San Francisco. Never to be the same again, of course, returning transformed, as if from pilgrimage to a holy land, but back.

This is not simply a tea tour or tour for tea lovers only, but tea is the thread we will follow through all the aspects of Chinese culture we experience, just as wine runs through Mediterranean culture from agriculture, cusine and custom to recreation and worship. A 5 Star Deluxe Tour throughout (except in Wuyishan where there is only a 4 Star Hotel) with luxurious accommodations and service, this is also a Culinary Tour well worth taking for the food alone. Exceptional and sometimes world-famous--restaurants were chosen and menus for every meal carefully orchestrated and expertly presented. For example, one banquet in Beijing (of approximately 40 courses) is prepared from imperial recipes in the kitchens of the Winter Palace and served in the dining pavilion once used by the Dowager Empress.

The Buddhist temples, tea plantations and numerous sites to be visited will accord us special access and VIP treatment, like first-tier box seats for the breath-taking acrobatic and musical performances of the Beijing Opera. We will be among the small handful of Westerners ever to pluck our own tea in a classic Dragon Well garden and be tutored in firing it, to enter the legendary oolong gardens of the Wuyi ("Bohea") Mountains, or take tea in Prince Gong s library pavilion in Beijing. This is truly an invitation to experience the tradition...

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