Place · in Wuzhou
Liubao
Liubao is a small town in Cangwu county, up a tributary of the Xi river from Wuzhou. The name is administrative rather than poetic: under the Qing the surrounding township was cut into numbered wards and this was the sixth. The tea named after it is now made across a far wider area than the town, which is the first thing a buyer has to take on board. The second is that its reputation was made abroad: it became the daily tea of Chinese labourers in Malaya, and the aged stocks that define the style accumulated in Malaysia and Singapore, with Hong Kong the warehouse and re-export point on the way, rather than in China.
What grows here
Liu Bao dark tea and effectively nothing else that leaves the area. It is made in two quite different ways, a modern factory process and a lighter farmhouse one, and both go out under the same name.
The ground
Hill country in eastern Guangxi, hot and very humid, drained by the Liubao river down to the Xi and on toward Guangdong. The humidity is the working terroir here rather than the soil. It is what makes the pile fermentation behave, and it is what lets Wuzhou's ageing cellars, including tunnels cut into the hills under the city, hold a steady warm dampness all year with no climate control at all. Around the town itself the old village production areas were graded against each other, with Heishi and Gongzhou rated highest; the names that still turn up on lots today are Heishi, Buyi (the former Gongzhou), Tangping and Siliu.
The bushes
Small-leaf Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, which is worth stating plainly because the obvious comparison, puerh, is made from large-leaf assamica. The material is local seed-grown population stock rather than a named clone. Two dark teas that look similar in the cup are not made from the same plant, and that is part of why they age along different lines.
How it is made here
The factory process is specific, modern and datable. Cold-water piling, wetting the dried leaf and fermenting it in a covered heap, was worked out at the Wuzhou state factory in 1958 for the Hong Kong and Southeast Asian trade, and it is what separates modern Liu Bao from everything made before it. It displaced the older Wuzhou method it grew out of, a hot double steaming and double pressing that is still run for some lots. The farmhouse teas take a lighter pile and rely on years in storage instead, which is why they are not simply an older version of the same tea.
What to look for
Most Liu Bao is not from Liubao town. Raw material is drawn from across the region, so ask about the producer and the year rather than about the village. Decide first between factory and farmhouse, since they are different products. Factory lots carry a numbered grade running from special down through one to six, which describes how small and tender the leaf was, not how the tea drinks; coarse old-grade Liu Bao is a style choice, not a failure. Age claims are unverifiable, which makes the storage story the actual product: dry Malaysian warehouse and humid Hong Kong storage give different teas and both are honest if stated.