Description
The six legendary tea mountains, close to Yiwu, in the region of Xishuangbanna. We are in the subtropical rainforests of South-West China, just North of Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar : the home of tigers and wild elephants. It is here that our journey to the land of tea starts. We witness the harvest of wild tea, from the original and gigantic tea trees (camelia sinensis) but also the collecting of cultivated tea, the famous Pu’er Tea which is still cultivated here in the olden ways, by traditional tea planter families who have been here for centuries. The cultivation of tea, the harvest and sorting of the tea leaves, its fermentation and conditionning in cake and brick-like units to faciliate transportation on horseback is handled here to this day according to rituals thousands of years old. In each valley, within each ethnical group, sometimes even within a tribe or extended family, the tea producers have their very own secrets in the process of tea making, carried forward generation by generation. But with all their differences, these tea people have one thing in common : their love of tea which has become their lifeline. During and after the first harvesting, the caravans prepare themselves to carry the priced green gold covering the more than 4.000 kilometers distance which separate the Tea Kingdom from the famous tea market in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital on the Roof of the World and final point of China’s most ancient caravan route.
