 |
A Day in the Life of a Tea Harvester
Written by: Winnie Yu
Spring for us means Easter, Mother's Day, wisteria hanging hazily from the trellises, roses bursting with fragrance, and trees aflame with cherry blossoms. For the farmers in China, it means the beginning of a non-stop month of harvesting, processing, and finishing their tea. The leaves will grow with relish after the rains of Ching Ming (Ching Ming means 'Clear and Bright', a traditional holiday to visit one's ancestral graves.) That is also the marker for the torrents of spring rain, after which it is time to harvest tea by hand.
The cycle of tea production in China and Taiwan starts with harvesting at 9am until around 4pm daily, when the sun has been out a sufficient amount to dry the leaves. There is no reason to pick the leaves that were too saturated from the night fog and morning dew, so better to wait until nature has reduced some of the moisture. That gives the farmers time from 5am to 9am to feed the live stock and the kids, send them to school, collect some bamboo shoots, pickle some vegetables, chat with the friends and relatives in the village, sort some tea from the night before, get the charcoal pit going for roasting tea later. Mrs. Su, my friend from Tung Ting Village, Taiwan, one of the direct descendents of the founders of that famous village with the tea of its namesake, has 3 boys to worry about. At times, she even tries to get them to rise early so they can call me and practice their English before going to school. But they seldom do. She herself rises before even the roosters crow.
Harvesting by hand means scanning a steep ocean of buds and leaves, and determining, with accuracy and speed, which buds are the right sizes to pick. Picking a pound of tea requires about 30,000 or more buds. To harvest for sparrow's tongue type teas like Mao Feng, one tiny bud must accompany one very tender young leaf, forming what they call a 'spear' shape. To harvest for Oolong tea, the leaves have to be more mature, and must form the exact perfect configuration of opposing mature leaves and one bud. With some leaves, how the leaves are placed into the basket once they have been picked is also very important. Too much force and the leaves will bruise each other prematurely. The harvested leaves have to float gently like a feather into the basket. The hand must not contact the leaves too long or heat from will oxidize the leaves.
This arduous harvesting happens over steep grades of 45 to 75 degree hills at elevations often over 800 meters (2600 feet). Sometimes the tea pickers are bent from the waist all day, depending on the width of terraces the tea bushes grow and whether they can accommodate a foothold. An experienced tea picker can pick 10kgs or more a day. But even the most accomplished pickers at E Mei Shan, though, can only harvest 1/2 lb. of buds per day! The pickers are usually women, ages well over their 40s, sometimes 60-80 years old. It takes that long to become a good tea picker, should you grow up at the farm and start harvesting in your late teens and early twenties. Nowadays, due to a lack of such skilled labor, inexperienced workers from Indonesia or elsewhere are brought in. They work at such excruciating snail's paces that I wonder if I should stop importing tea to the U.S. and just drink it all myself.
Speed is of the essence. The leaves do not stop sprouting, whether your back hurts or your eyes are glued shut. Tea pickers usually have great attitude. After all, they are usually friends and family, and tea picking time is also their social gossip time. So and so's son went to university, another nephew lost his shirt selling tea in China, one of the villagers fell off a terrace.... Falling off those steep, narrow terraces, must not be terribly uncommon. Most of these high mountains are shrouded in blinding fog, and the cliffs are slippery and the soil, wet and spongy. Hence the name 'Tung Ting' meaning cold summit, and 'Monkey Picked' for the impossible cliffs they have to scale to pick the tea.
It may be backbreaking work, but this is the life of the tea farmer. If only tea drinkers here 10,000 miles away can imagine a day in their lives, every leaf then becomes precious, and no one will ever again waste a steeping!
|
|
|
