Bai Lin Red Tea

The weather in Fu Ding is getting cold, especially nights. Add the chilliness of the cold mountain air of 700 meters and it’s no surprise that I’ve been reaching for more reds teas than white teas recently. So much so that I started to run out of reds. Therefore it was time to look into a tea that I’ve been curious about since I got to the region, Fu Ding red tea.

As I’ve mentioned a few times before Fu Ding’s focus on white tea is only in the last 20 years or so. Before that the area did a variety of teas from red to greens. While lots of areas within the Fu Ding region produces red tea, it hasn’t been a focus for them. Except for one area, Bai Lin.

Bai Lin is located a mere twenty minutes from Fu Ding city. I would later learn that its placement was smack dab in the middle of a few trading routes making it’s tea very popular. The tea they were famous for was Bai Lin Gong Fu, or as many English speakers know it Congou aka Golden Monkey.

As my red tea stash dwindled I decided it was time to begin looking into this tea. So last Wednesday morning I woke up, walked the dogs, and headed out.
After looking at the map afew times I found the best route was to take a bus to Fu Ding then take the taxi. As I sat on the bus I looked at videos of Bai Lin. In these videos I saw two type of places. I saw videos from a small town with a beautiful and historic Old Street. I also saw videos from a town that was like many other towns in China and had probably never seen a foreigner. I wasnt sure which town I would find, I ended up finding both.

I got out of the taxi in Bai Lin and within two minutes I found old street. It was beautiful.

Many areas of China have an Old Street. A street that historically was the center of town and in modern times the town has kept the historic look with a mix of old authentic architecture and a bit of retro but recently built structures. While Huang Shan has an OId Street, Bai Lin’s was clearly more authentic. The street was a mix of small tea shops and peoples homes. Old folks sat outside in the sun gossiping as shop owners unboarded their windows.

I got there at noon and many shops were surprisingly still not open. One shop was and I went in to take a look.

In my travels I’ve met many kinds of shop owners. Some love the tea art, the fancy pouring and incense. Some like to see themselves as tea masters who are full of valuable tea knowledge that you, the luckey patron who walked into his shop, should absorb.  Some don’t particularly feel strongly about tea and just see this as a way to earn a living. And Some truly love the tea. The owner of the shop I walked into was the third one. He just loved tea. I walked in and he immediately asked me to sit down and started brewing a very sweet, but slightly dead, gong mei. After the usual conversation where I explained where I’m from and such I asked him about Bai Lin’s history of red tea. The simple tea room conversation quickly turned into a tea lesson.

To be honest I didn’t understand most of the first half. He had gone way back in time and I really only understood once he reached the 1800s as I have some knowledge of this time and was able to figure things out. What I did grasp was that Bai Lin was on a few trading routes, tea traders even walking down the same old street we sat on hundreds of years ago.

When you look at famous teas you often see that their historical location is on a trading route. Huang Shan for example is next to a river that tea was ferried down. For areas like this its common for young men to leave their village and become merchants on these routes that start in the country and often lead to areas like Shanghai or Guangzhou. This helps the tea that these young men come from to become popular. After he finished his lesson which included him pulling down books and showing me a list of all the tea shops on old street in the 1800s (a true tea geek) I asked him about golden monkey tea. He had no idea. He had heard of white hair monkey tea, but not golden monkey. He paused for a moment and then went to his shelf and brought down two red teas, bud heavy and therefore covered in golden hairs. I laughed “yup that’s it. That’s golden monkey.” He laughed “We call this Ya Hao tea.” I laughed again “In America we call it Hao Ya” Together we laughed at the way names change when they go from one place to another. I had found the source of some of the original chinese blacks that many people drink when they are first starting their tea journey.

We tasted the teas and they unfortunately fell alittle short. In retrospect he served me these teas cause I asked for them and so he may have better teas. From my experiences so far Bai Lin teas are smooth, bold, rich and very malty. “Sweet, soft, aromatic.” He said to he as he poured the teas. (甜柔香）This seemed to be the mantra of Bai Lin tea’s according to him. While they were not very complex they were in fact sweet, soft and aromatic. After tasting the teas I we added wechats and I told him I was going to walk around. I headed out the door and went in search of more tea.

Part Two coming soon