Category: Yanshan, Jiangxi, 2023
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Finding The True “Lapsang Souchong”
Mr. Zhan, a local tea farmer, told me about the traditional production process of topic of the Lapsang Souchong (“正山小种” in Chinese) tea. In the traditional method, the tea is spread on bamboo sieves after being rolled and then placed on the lower racks of a “Qing Lou” (a drying building). It’s dried over a…
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One-Size-Fits-All
My observations tell me that the Chinese government often prefers to shift from unregulated to regulated practices in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ manner. I observed similar things in Yanshan. The first issue is the land distribution among local tea growers. In the 1970s and 1980s, tea growers could freely reclaim land. The amount of land they cultivated…
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Yanshan People: Walking in and out
Yanshan is a beautiful place, part of the Wuyi Mountain National Park. However, what makes a place prosperous is not its beautiful environment, but its people. During my stay in Yanshan, I noticed a deep-rooted aspiration among the locals to “step out of the mountains.” Motel manager Mr. Xu wants his second son to study…
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About Poverty Alleviation…
This is very interesting. In mid-2021, the Chinese government announced that the nation had “completely eradicated poverty” and achieved the goal of “building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.” At that time, CCTV’s program almost daily promoted how local government policies helped achieve the poverty alleviation goals. I’ve always been curious about how these…
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The Yanshan Tea: A latecomer’s advantage or disadvantage?
The Wuyi Mountain tea from Fujian has been developing for twenty years and has naturally formed a relatively mature tea industry. The “Jin Jun Mei,” invented since 2005, quickly seized the market after mass production and has surely become one of the industry’s unquestionable leaders. Tea from Jiangxi, on the other hand, is somewhat inferior.…