Fourth chapter: China and green tea

If the English have imposed on Europe the taste for black tea, which they drink sweetened with a cloud of milk, green tea that has been consumed in China for five thousand years remains the drink of the vast majority of the peoples of Asia and the Maghreb. The best green tea gardens are found in mainland China, Formosa, and Japan. In China, the preparation of this tea has been more or less the same for immemorial time. In artisanal factories of cooperatives, the tea is roasted for less than a minute in large tanks, in order to destroy the enzymes of the leaves that could alter the quality of the beverage later on. Then the leaves processed by machines are piled up and dried for about ten hours while being continuously mixed. They are then rolled, according to the desired grade, and finally selected, sorted, and cleaned. Once these operations were done by hand, today, as often happens, they have been replaced by machine processing. The sorting separates the tea according to its grade. No visitor is allowed in the most important gardens in China, which are shrouded in an eerie aura of mystery. The vast majority of Chinese people themselves are unaware of their existence and only know state cooperatives that produce standardized green or black tea. However, some standards are of high quality, especially those destined for export, such as the imperial Yunnan from the southern highlands or the sweet imperial Keemun from the mountains of Anhui province. Outside the cooperatives, the secret gardens are called by those who know them "sacred gardens," and the tea produced there is exclusively reserved for high-ranking regime dignitaries and is not commercialized. Halfway between the cooperatives and the sacred gardens in China, there are gardens where Chinese tea can be purchased, provided that privileged relationships are established with certain authorities. In the mountainous provinces of Kiangsu or Sichuan, high-quality green teas are produced: Pi Lo Chun "spring jade spiral," Lung Ching "dragon well".... these latter seem rather common when compared to a tea that is almost worth its weight in gold and is not white tea (not roasted, only dried). It is Yin Zhen "silver needles," a true miracle from the Fujian province. Its garden is one of the very few plantations located on one of the Chinese plateaus where the harvest is still carried out today according to the method that was once reserved for the emperor and some very high-ranking court members, that is, the "imperial harvest" based on which only the bud and the first leaf are selected on the bush, and sometimes, as for Yin Zhen, only the bud. Taken from "The Book of Green Tea" Idea Libri

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