The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  As with the ceremonial and romance, so with the business. I had asked on every street corner down below for the address of the Jiujiang Tea Company, from whose wharves thousands of cases of oolongs and pekoes and souchongs had once been placed on the waiting clippers for London. But the company was nowhere to be found, and the only remark I heard was a disdainful ‘red tea – no good' from a grizzled ancient who remembered when the town did still export a fair amount of the stuff, back in the thirties.

  Red tea is what the Chinese call black tea, and they loathe it. It is what, generally speaking, westerners drink. Black tea is what has vanished from the Chinese scene, and good riddance to it, most Chinese seem to say.

  It used to be said – a myth, I suspect – that black tea was the result of the first reaction of a Chinese tea merchant on being told that the foreign devils, the Portuguese in Canton, actually wanted to buy tea. He had no reason to suppose barbarians could appreciate anything of good quality, so he took the meanest-looking sticks and twigs and leathery leaves and stuffed them in bags and dropped them into the hold of a Europe-bound ship. By journey's end in Lisbon they had rotted and turned black – but the Europeans liked the infusion that resulted, and they demanded more. The Chinese were happy to oblige. They were happy to supply Europe with the leavings of their own green tea crop, letting it mature and ferment over the period of a long ocean crossing.

  There is a measure of truth to the story. Black tea (the Chinese call it red because of the colour of the infusion; we call it black because of the colour of the leaves) is nothing more than green tea that has undergone processing, heating and fermenting.

  The most commonly accepted process for making modern tea is known as CTC – in which the tea leaves plucked from the bushes (two-leaves-and-a-bud, the same formula taught to tea pickers whether they are in Sri Lanka or on the hills beside the Yangtze) are first crushed, to release their aromas and their more potent alkaloid chemicals;* then torn, to pop their leaf cells; and finally curled, so that the surface area available for fermentation is expanded.

  Crushed, torn and curled tea leaves are then gently withered, roasted, dried and finally packaged – sometimes in the process scented with bergamot (as in Earl Grey) or rope tar (as in Lapsang Souchong). The craft of tea making is as infinitely subtle and complicated a business as the making of wine – and the steady advance of crush-tear-curl machines, which are to be found in all tea factories from Nepal to Nairobi, is deplored by those who think they know. It brings mechanized mediocrity, they say, to a once original little universe of good taste.

  But in any case little such machinery is available any more in China. For although a small amount of the half-processed half-fermented tea known as oolong is made here, almost all the tea sold within and exported from China is green tea – tea that is picked and steam-blasted and then dried without being allowed to ferment at all. Green tea is raw tea, or in some senses dead tea. Whether it is good or not depends almost totally on the quality of the leaf, and not nearly so much on the quality of the processing. Lushan Misty Clouds Green Tea was famous throughout China because of where it came from – because of the legends about the fullness of the bushes, the youth and beauty of the women who picked it, the roll call of all the Courts that drank it – not, to any great extent, on how it was made.

  And so it was with a sense of mounting excitement that I eventually tracked down the gate to the Lushan Tea Research Institute. It had taken us two hours of patient searching along the butterfly-filled lanes of the hilltop – past caves and waterfalls and beside cliffs that loomed high over the whorls of the distant Yangtze – before I found what I wanted. It was three in the afternoon, pleasantly warm, the air filled with scents of late spring – an appropriate time I thought to see the Lushan Institute, the cosmic centre of whatever was left of the world of Chinese tea.

  ‘Go away!’ was the first thing anybody said. ‘This place has nothing to do with tea.’

  Three policemen were sprawled on the sun-dappled grass outside a decrepit mansion. One of them, the man who had shouted, got to his feet and started swinging a black-metal billy club. ‘Electric tip,’ warned Lily. She had pointed out clubs like this before, back in Shanghai. They had batteries and a coil inside, and were used for crowd control. They could inflict a nasty shock if the policeman didn't like you.

  I pointed to the brass plaque on the gate outside. ‘Not here,’ said the guard. ‘Next door.’

  We walked next door, to a small outhouse of a building that was connected to the old mansion by a low corridor. It seemed empty, except that in one office on the second floor we found one old woman asleep at her desk. Was this the research institute? we asked. No, she said. Over the road. We crossed the lane to a third building, Grecian style, overlooking gardens. There was a receptionist here. Tea institute? we said. Not here, she replied. Over the road. Building on the left. The very building, as it happened, from which we had been ejected in the first place.

  The policemen were still there, and this time they lay mutely as we marched past them. This building turned out to be empty too, although there was a poster showing a young woman picking tea on a misty hillside, which augured well. We peered into each office on all three of the floors. It had been a foreign-built club, by the look of things, perhaps a summertime chum-mery. There was no one there. On the way down the back staircase, however, we met a man – middle-aged, smoking, sandals, a querulous look on his long and lugubrious face. He appeared to have been woken up, and he rubbed his eyes with surprise on seeing us.

  Tea institute? we asked again. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, in a tone of sleepy exasperation. ‘This is the place. Come to my office, building across the road. I will telephone.’ He picked up an old black bakelite telephone and bellowed into it, assuming that I wouldn't understand. ‘Ling! Wake up, Ling!’ he said. ‘There's a blessed foreigner here. Round up everybody. Go to the meeting room!’

  Five minutes later and we were sitting in his office on pink polyester-ruched armchairs in a room furnished like a schoolroom. The lugubrious man, who introduced himself as Dr Ye, had by now assembled three equally sleepy-looking men, one of whom was Ling. The door kept opening to admit latecomers. None looked very good-tempered. A very old woman came in staggering under the weight of a huge iron kettle and did the rounds of the room, filling everyone's beakers with well-boiled tea. Most people lit cigarettes and sat staring at me. It was ten minutes before everyone was assembled, and then Dr Ye looked across, waiting for a question.

  I said something about how sad it was that China's tea industry had withered away. Maybe – maybe this august research institute was going to breathe new life into it, I ventured, hopefully. There was a long pause.

  ‘Rice,’ said Dr Ye eventually. It was not exactly what I had been expecting.

  ‘Come again?’ I inquired.

  ‘Rice. Jiujiang is a big rice-exporting town.’ He looked around him. There were nods of approval, then silence again. One man was already falling asleep, his cigarette dangling dangerously.

  I tried to focus Dr Ye's mind. ‘But wasn't this a big tea city, once upon a time?’ There was a further long pause, broken only by snoring. His next declaration made me start.

  ‘They employ virgin girls,’ he said. ‘They used to pierce their tongues with needles. They were the best:’

  This conversation was generating a sort of strange fog, although through it I could discern small dark objects that did seem to relate to tea, if peripherally. I had once heard an old story to the effect that the finest Lushan teas were picked only by virgin girls, and that the green leaves were sent by courier to the Emperor himself. Why the girls pricked their tongues with needles was never clear, and Dr Ye did not choose to enlighten me.

  ‘We have developed a machine for picking.’ He let this remark hang in the smoky air. So this is where the conversation was going. It did have a certain time-lapse logic about it. Rice had supplanted tea as the region's major export; once virgin girls were used to pick the tw
o-leaves-and-a-bud, and now the scientists of the Lushan Institute – these sleepy, bad-tempered men assembled here, perhaps – had developed a tea-plucking machine.

  If this was so, it was a clear breakthrough. The Georgians once tried to put a modified hedge-cutter to lop the leaves in their Caucasus foothills; and the Japanese made something that looked like a pelican. But both were disasters. Only humans – young, agile, and willing to work for a pittance – could pick tea properly. That was a reality the industry had been living with for hundreds of years, though the dreamers continued to dream.

  ‘Really,’ I said, suddenly interested. ‘Can I see it? Where is it?’

  Dr Ye's knees suddenly started to vibrate in a most curious way, as though they were seismograph needles recording a distant earthquake. Several men closed their eyes – meaning that, with the number already asleep, the whole room looked to be at prayer. But Dr Ye, left alone to answer the question, looked uneasy.

  ‘It is not here,’ he replied. Where is it? I asked.

  ‘Nanchang,’ he said.

  Had he a picture of it?

  ‘The film is being developed.’

  A paper I could glance at? An article?

  ‘It is in the office, but' – and he brightened – ‘there is no key!’

  So I tried to press him on what else the Lushan Institute did.

  ‘We have one hundred people here,’ he replied. His knees had stopped shaking. The quake was past. He said with evident pride: ‘They spread the knowledge of tea.’

  The room fell silent again, except for some gentle snoring in a corner. So could I see some people picking tea? I asked. ‘It is not the season,’ said Dr Ye, and laughed gently. Then – could I perhaps look in on the processing plant? ‘So sorry. It is being cleaned. Maintenance time.’

  The tea I was drinking today – the tea in the big kettle which the aged woman was bringing around again, weaving her way unsteadily between the sprawled feet of the snoozing ancients – was this Lushan Misty Clouds Green Tea?

  ‘I don't know,’ said Dr Ye. ‘I think we don't have any. Maybe at the shop.’

  Lily rolled her eyes, and suggested that we leave. We were learning little. We stood up. Immediately the room came alive, the men rubbing their eyes, lighting fresh cigarettes, smiling.

  Dr Ye led us out. ‘We are so glad you could come. May we have your business card please. You are interested in investing here, maybe?’

  In the car I laughed, but Lily erupted. ‘This kind of thing makes me really ashamed of China, you know. That you should see such people. They are idiots. These fucking cadres.’ I hadn't heard her employ such colourful language before: I was starting to enjoy this. There was no stopping her now.

  ‘Old Communists, useless old men who get put into jobs like this where they do nothing, nothing. They just sit around and talk and smoke all day, and get paid fat salaries and live in nice houses. You think it's your fault that there's no China tea industry? Well, maybe it is – but it is also half the fault of idiots like that.

  ‘You know, the sad thing is – there really is good tea here. Look at the hills, look at the weather. They could make it famous around the world. But I'll bet you can't get Lushan tea in your Macy's or your Bloomingdale's? You should be able to – but you can't and it's because of idiots like these.

  ‘You know the solution? Make it private. Everything that is state-run is useless. Everything that is private is better.’

  She brightened suddenly. ‘I have an idea. Why not come and live here and run the tea business in Lushan?’ She was joking, but only half. ‘You could be happy. You would make money. You would be living in a lovely place. The old British houses would make you comfortable, make you feel you were at home. And you could make people have work here. You could bring it back to life.’

  She said later she had thought better of it; and I in turn told Lily about those old army couples who had stayed on in some of the Indian hill stations, long after the end of British India, and how wretchedly most of their stories turned out. I doubt if anyone from the old China days had ever wanted to stay on in Lushan, even if the Communists had agreed. It might still have the look of a colonial hill station, it might have the cool pine-tree smell of a hill station and on a crisp late afternoon like this it might look and feel a little like Perthshire in September, or Vermont in October. But only a little, in truth: just a little below the surface it still was China, very much so.

  Each time I mentioned Lushan to Lily in the weeks that followed she bristled at the memory. ‘Awful men!’ she would say. ‘Their wretched machine. Of course they never made one. Cheats and liars, all of them. Pah!’

  At the People's Theatre, on the road that led from the institute back up to Guling, there was no mistaking the town's Chineseness. There was a car park full of buses, a huge crowd of people, cross-faced girls with small plastic megaphones, tour leaders with yellow flags urging elderly men and women to follow, to hurry up, step lively! and not lag behind. They were all here today – twenty thousand like them come every day of the year, it is said – to see where some of the most momentous decisions of the Communist leadership were made.

  Within this ugly little building with its three entrance arches, which looked like the kind of cinema-turned-bingo-hall that is found in blighted industrial suburbs in the English Midlands, China's oldest and most powerful men met, fell out and argued and fought, and performed acts, signed papers and changed policies that affected – and usually for the worse – the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people. The most notable decisions were those taken in early July 1959, during what has been called High Noon at Lushan. Nearly all of the pictures that were on display for the benefit of the tourists – most of whom were brought here in buses by their work units: there were groups of several hundred from a steel factory in Wuhan on this day – were taken during that unseemly week of brawling. It was a week when the rulers of China took decisions that can rightly be said to have provided, for millions, hell's foundations.

  1959 was the second year of the Great Leap Forward. So it was a time when some kind of an evaluation could be made of Chairman Mao's bold plan to increase, drastically, China's agricultural and industrial production. His plan had been radical, and in many senses, bizarre: it had called for the establishment of giant agricultural communes, for the transfer of millions of city dwellers to work on grandiose irrigation projects, for the building of tens of thousands of ‘backyard furnaces' that would turn steelmaking into a nationwide cottage industry and swell production. People were told to hand in their pots and pans for melting; communal feeding halls were set up as household kitchens vanished. Society underwent a profound change, with unanticipated and often haphazard consequences, and all in the vain hope of elevating the world's most populous nation into the international premier league.

  The Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster – perhaps the most searing indictment of a command economy since Stalin had forced collectivization on the Ukraine in the thirties. Anyone with any insight who gathered in Lushan that summer, for the eighth plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee, knew that it was a disaster – or at the very least that it was going badly wrong. But hardly anyone had the courage or the folly to say so – no one, that is, except for a tiny group of moderates led by the ill-educated but shrewd bulldog of a defence minister, a man who has since been pilloried and victimized into legend, Peng Dehuai. Peng alone felt able to say that what was going on was madness; and in a letter sent from his cool bungalow at one side of Guling to Mao's compound on the other, he told him so.

  Given the cruel imperium that was beginning to grip Mao's rule, the result was predictable. The Chairman began by admitting to some mistakes – though in his own defence said that Lenin and Marx had made errors too, but were brilliant and invincible nonetheless – and tried to give the impression of flexibility. It was merely a feint: for the rest of the Lushan meeting Mao tore into Peng and those few men who dared support him – with the result that when a
ll trooped down from the hills at the end of that July, Peng was out of a job, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was firmly under the hand of Mao, and Peng himself was dispatched into a six-year political exile in a slum on the outskirts of Beijing, sweeping his own floors and carrying out his own night soil, reduced from a hero to a scapegoat in the blink of an eye.

  If it was possible to make a connection in Lushan between the growing of tea and the eventual collapse of Imperial China, so it turns out also to be possible, and also in Lushan, to construct a filigree of connections between the angry exchanges in the People's Theatre in 1959 and the terrors that were unleashed in Beijing by Mao and his supporters seven years later that came to be known as the Cultural Revolution. The connections might seem tenuous, only half visible: but unlike the saga of tea and opium and war and treaties, where the links are mostly commercial, political, western and obvious, those that link Peng's sacking and the start of the madness of 1966 are very Chinese, relying as they do to deliver their force on hints, allusions, literature and legend. It is a complicated story, but it is one that has Lushan as its backdrop, and manages to be of huge importance in the history of the country.

  Peng Dehuai had found himself in trouble simply because he had told the truth. Doubtless he saw himself as a martyr, though he left no written record saying so. But the deputy mayor of Beijing, a noted and brilliant Chinese historian, party propagandist and occasional essayist named Wu Han, essentially said as much in an article in the People's Daily shortly after the Lushan meeting, alluding in well-turned historical phrasings to all that had happened. Wu did not mention Peng by name. Instead, he used his stature as a historian to reprise a famous and often told story from the Ming dynasty: that of the summary sacking and imprisonment, in February 1566, of a devout, honest and well-loved court official named Hai Rui.