Place · in Wuyishan
Tongmu
Tongmu is a valley high inside the Wuyishan national nature reserve, reached through a controlled checkpoint, and it is where black tea is generally held to have been invented. It is still a small working village making tea in an area where felling, building and access are all restricted. That is why genuine Tongmu leaf is scarce for reasons that have nothing to do with fashion.
What grows here
Two black teas and a great many imitators. Zhengshan Xiaozhong, sold abroad as Lapsang Souchong, in both the traditional pine-dried form and an unsmoked one, and Jin Jun Mei, the all-bud tea created here in 2005. The rock oolongs are made lower in the range, not up here; Tongmu's product is black tea.
The ground
The valley sits far above the yancha gardens, commonly given as somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 m, inside a reserve of old broadleaf and pine forest rather than in cleared garden country. The gardens are small clearings among the trees along the stream instead of terraced hillsides, which follows from the reserve rules as much as from the ground. It is cool, wet and shaded, with a shorter and later season than the rest of Wuyishan. The pine that the traditional process burns grows on the same slopes, which is the part of the terroir that ends up literally inside the tea.
The bushes
Wuyi Cai Cha, the local seed-grown landrace, rather than a named clone. Every bush is genetically its own, which is the old Chinese pattern and increasingly rare, and the reserve's restrictions on clearing and replanting are a large part of why it survived here. Jin Jun Mei is made from the buds of that same population and not from a special plant, so what separates it from Zhengshan Xiaozhong is picking standard and process, not cultivar.
How it is made here
The qinglou is the thing: a three or four storey smoking house with a pine fire at the bottom, leaf withering on the top floor in the rising warm smoke, oxidising on the middle floors and drying at the bottom nearest the fire. The smoke is there throughout rather than applied at the end, so it is built into the tea instead of laid over it. The pine is the local masson pine, and it is now the constraint: felling inside the reserve is banned and pine wilt rules restrict bringing timber in, so smoked lots run on stockpiled wood. That, and the money in Jin Jun Mei, is why most Tongmu production is unsmoked.
What to look for
Zheng shan means the true mountain, and its opposite, wai shan or outside the mountain, is a live trade term for everything made to the same recipe beyond the reserve boundary. Almost all cheap Lapsang abroad is wai shan leaf smoked hard after drying, which makes it a different product rather than a lower grade of the same one. Jin Jun Mei is the more counterfeited of the two, because genuine all-bud Tongmu output is tiny and the name gets applied to golden-bud blacks from anywhere. Ask for the producer: the village is small enough that names mean something.
How it got here
The origin story is a legend and worth knowing as one: soldiers billeted in the village delayed the processing, the leaf oxidised past rescue and was dried over pine to save it. Better attested is the trade. Tongmu's smoked tea went out through Canton as Souchong from the seventeenth century and became a European staple long before anyone abroad could name the valley. The modern turn is recent. Jin Jun Mei was created here in 2005, and its success moved the village from supplying a cheap export commodity to making one of the most expensive black teas in China inside a few years.
Other places in Wuyishan
- Zhengyan core cliff zone
- Daoshuikeng
- Huiyuankeng
- Liuxiangjian
- Niulankeng
- Wuyuanjian