Detailed list to follow
Whole Leaf
SFTGFOP:Special fine tippy golden flowery orange pekoe (smallest whole leaf)
FTGFOP:Fine tippy golden flowery orange pekoe (medium whole leaf)
TGFOP:Tippy golden flowery orange pekoe (medium whole leaf)
GFOP:Golden flowery orange pekoe (large whole leaf)
FOP:Flowery orange pekoe (extra-large or large whole leaf)
FP:Flowery pekoe
OP:Orange Pekoe
Broken Leaf
GFBOP:Golden flowery broken orange pekoe
GBOP:Golden broken orange pekoe
FBOP:Flowery broken orange pekoe
BOP 1:Broken orange pekoe one
BOP:Broken orange pekoe
BPS:Broken pekoe souchong
CTC (cut-tear-curl) tea production. Instead of undergoing the traditional rolling process, CTC teas are put into cutting machines that chop the tea and distribute the cell sap over the surface of the finely cut bits of tea. Unlike the internal cell sap changes brought on by the rolling of orthodox teas, the cutting machines do not allow for the natural internal changes within the leaf. After cutting, the tea is quickly rolled into granular pieces and then moved to the oxidation room.
The goal of CTC production is the opposite of that behind traditionally made orthodox tea. CTC teas were created to fill the need of teabag packers, who desired tea that would be less bulky and thereby easier to use when filling teabags. Subtlety of style and flavor finesse is not the goal of CTC teas; rather, these teas produce a strong, gutsy, and some would say chewy cup of tea. They are less costly to produce and are now considered by some of the countries who make them to have compromised their tea industries. CTC tea cannot fetch the high price on the world tea market that orthodox tea can, so prices have fallen to a level that makes it difficult for many tea factories to support their manufacture. This overabundance of CTC tea puts many jobs at risk, as the tea factories and tea farmers cannot make the tea pay for the costs involved with bringing the leaf to market. As tea drinkers worldwide become more educated and sophisticated about what tea they choose to drink, CTC tea will be at an even greater disadvantage as demand for specialty orthodox tea increases.
CTC teas are classified as broken leaf, fannings, and dust, and are graded by particle size in each class. For example, broken-leaf CTC teas would be listed from top to bottom in order of largest to smallest particle size. Table 4.3 outlines this system.
Table 4.3. Grades of CTC Tea
Detailed list to follow
Broken Leaf
FP:Flowery pekoe
PEK:Pekoe
BOP:Broken orange pekoe
BP 1:Broken pekoe one
BP:Broken pekoe
BPS:Broken pekoe souchong
The Russian Federation and Georgia: Chinese Tea Crosses the Steppe
In the sixteenth century, Russia explored and conquered the vast territories of Siberia. Cossack soldiers developed towns and settlements, which gave the Russians strategic trading posts for establishing and conducting trade with China and the rest of Asia. Russian soldiers and members of the Russian court would have most likely encountered tea in Siberia or Mongolia some time before official trade with China began, either from firsthand experience from a taste of the intriguing hot beverage or from the tales of those returning from afar who had experienced its potent charms. In 1618 a Russian trade mission left Tobolsk in Siberia for China. The route took them south through Mongolia, where they most likely would have been offered cups of hot tea. This beverage would have been entirely familiar to the Mongols from the former days that Kublai Khan’s Yuan dynasty ruled China (1271–1368).
In 1638 a Russian envoy was sent to visit the Mongol Khan Altyn at Lake Ubsa-Nur in Mongolia. The khan is reported to have sent two hundred packages of tea back to Russia to Czar Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov, who, as it was reported, did not care for the superflous articles and would have preferred an “equivalent in sables.” Direct contact with the Chinese Manchu emperor Shunzhi (r. 1644–1661) occurred in 1654 and 1658, also resulting in gifts of tea sent by China to Russian, although there are reports of some tea being sold along the way for purchases of jewels. It was not until 1689, however, when the Chinese emperor Kangxi (r. 1661–1722) and the Russia czar Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov signed the Nerchinsky Treaty, that a measurable exchange of goods and materials, including Chinese tea, began to flow between China and Russia through Mongolia and Siberia.
THE CAMEL TEA CARAVANS
The one-way, five-thousand-mile trip from China to Russia was made by the best method of the day—camel caravans consisting of as many as two hundred to three hundred animals each carrying an immense cargo of goods strapped to their backs. These “ships of the desert” would slowly parade single file across the desert thoroughfare, back and forth from Peking to Moscow, laden with all manner of luxury goods. These caravans involved thousands of men and required the support of village outposts along the way to meet their needs and disperse the goods. The route started in the Mongolian city of Kalgan, which lay just beyond China’s Great Wall near Peking (today’s Bejing), and wended its way to Moscow. In Kalgan, Russian representatives made their purchases of tea from the Chinese, loaded the camels with as many chests of tea and other supplies as each animal could carry, and sent the caravans on their way. These trade routes are now collectively called the Silk Road.
This long and arduous journey took sixteen months on average to complete round-trip. A major trading post for the camel caravans was established at Kiakhta, in Buryatia in southern Siberia. Here chests of tea—heady mixtures of smoky blacks and fragrant oolongs—were received and exchanged for furs, food, and other household goods. Once the tea arrived in Kiakhta, it was unpacked and sorted. Expensive leaf tea bound for the court was wrapped first in paper then in foil and carefully packed into bamboo boxes for safekeeping the remainder of the journey. Lesser-quality tea was packed into animal hides called tsybics and brought to the town of Irbit in western Siberia, where it was sold in local markets for disbursement across Russia. Tsybics were eventually replaced by Chinese tea bricks. These ingeniously devised compressed blocks of tea allowed each animal to carry large quantities of tea in a more compact manner and to remain impervious to changes in the weather and traveling conditions.
During the reign of Catherine the Great (r. 1763–1796), Chinese loose-leaf “camel caravan tea” became a necessary luxury at court and for the privileged few. In 1783, the empress gave a gift of tea to Georgia’s King Irakli II, although it is most likely that the Georgian court was already familiar with tea, acquired from Turkish traders who bartered Mongolian goods with the Georgians or from Persian traders in Iran. Many of these goods arrived from China, coming by way of camel caravans that roamed across Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and finally reaching Georgia.
TEA CULTIVATED IN GEORGIA
As Russia needed more supplies of tea in the mid-nineteenth century to satisfy the growing appetite for the beverage, agriculturally rich Georgia became the prime site. The western edge of Georgia forms a crescent-shaped shoreline along the Black Sea. Here, as one travels from north to south, the temperate climate becomes almost languid. Against a backdrop of gently rolling hills, this location creates a bountiful agricultural oasis. The first experimental tea gardens were started in Sokhumi in 1847. Success with these gardens led in 1893 to commercial cultivation at Sokhumi and later more gardens along the southern coast of Georgia near Bat’umi, not far from the Turkish border.
The late nineteenth century also brought an increased supply of low-grade tea from China. This change started to occur in 1886, when China began to allow foreign countries to own or lease property and conduct business in certain port or “concession” areas. In the port city of Hankow, located about five hundred miles up the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, the countries of England, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia were granted concession rights. China had previously never allowe
d foreign operations to establish settlements in ports. Hankow controlled the distribution of tea produced in southern China as well as the production of most of the tea bricks going to Russia. Under the terms of the concession, however, Russian tea companies were able to produce tea bricks in Hankow, significantly reducing the cost of the tea. This extra production at a lower cost allowed many average Russians the opportunity to find warmth and comfort in a daily glass of hot, stimulating tea.
Another change was soon to take place that would alter the Russian supply of tea, as well. Construction for the Trans-Siberian Railway was started in 1891 and completed in 1916, which connected Moscow to Vladivostik via southern Siberia. This brought Russia into the modern age, ending the era of the camel tea caravans. By the time of their disappearance, camels making the trek each year had been estimated to reach ten thousand. Rail shipments of tea could now reach Moscow in a matter of weeks by rail, increasing supply and decreasing prices, which in turn helped incorporate tea drinking into the lives of all Russians.
Obstacles to tea production. Tea continues to be grown in Georgia today. However, war, political instability, and revolution created paralyzing obstacles to tea production in the twentieth century. The Georgian tea industry was decimated by skirmishes during World War I. Ramifications from the February and October Russian revolution (1917), the Russian civil war (1918–1920), and the great famine of 1921 all conspired to reduce tea production to a trickle. The tea industry built itself up again and achieved its greatest point in the mid-1940s, when production reached an output of fifty thousand tons per year from 138 state-owned factories. Internal turmoil developed again when independence was gained from Russia in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the tea industry without direction, and it is still floundering to regain its place. In 2003 then-president of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze initiated government-funded programs to rehabilitate the tea plantations and rejuvenate the plantings.
Georgian tea comes from both state-owned and private tea plantations. The private sector is comprised of family-operated village tea producers who are dedicated to returning to producing good-quality tea. Georgia now produces a mere five thousand tons of tea a year, a portion of which is consumed locally and the balance is sold to the Russian Federation, to other countries of the CIS, such as Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgystan, Siberia, and Ukraine, and a small amount to English tea blenders. It is necessary for producers to sell their tea for its cash value even while Georgia must supplement its own tea needs with tea from other places.
For Georgian tea to remain a viable player in the tea market, the growers and producers have realized that they need to upgrade the quality. Their goal is to return Georgian tea to the quality, hand-plucked, orthodox leaf of former days and to be able to stop producing the machine-picked, mass-produced, low-quality CTC tea that they were encouraged to grow during Soviet times. As a consequence of these former practices, the price of Georgian tea is now extremely low. The current ample availability of other low-priced tea in the global marketplace represents a twist from twenty years ago, when Georgia was on top of its game and many new producers had not yet come on line.
Compressed tea bricks. The tea brick (plitochnyi chai) business in Georgia is thriving, however. Tonus Limited in the Guria region produces four quality grades of tea bricks, in both black and green tea varieties. The old Chakvi Tea Press Factory, which began pressing tea bricks in 1932 under the direction of the minister of agriculture, is also having a renewal in business. The factory employs 130 people and presses two quality-grade types of green tea bricks. The tea is purchased from five farms, of which 60 percent are privately owned and 40 percent are state owned. The factory hopes to purchase an additional four hundred brick forms to add to their assembly line process.
Recently the Chakvi factory has had to change the design on the back of the tea brick to distinguish the Georgian original from counterfeit tea bricks being peddled by the Chinese in Mongolia. Threats from competition aside, the front of the tea bricks still bears the impression of the hammer and sickle emblem. Just over 50 percent of the Chakvi brick production goes to the Russian Federation and other CIS countries. The remaining tea is earmarked for Mongolia. Sales of this crude, cheap-quality tea move especially briskly in Buriatia, in southern Siberia in the vicinity of Lake Baikal, where Buriat families still prepare tea in traditional ways. Once a nomadic people who migrated to Siberia from Mongolia, they make Nogoon sai/zelenyi chai from green brick tea and milk, to which a pinch of salt and some melted butter is added. Zuttaraan sai is made from black loose tea or green brick tea, which has been boiled in water and added to a paste of wheat flour that has been fried in mutton and lightly salted. Ironically, despite all of the ups and downs in the tea trade, most Georgians prefer to drink strong Turkish-style coffee.
Taiwan: A Small Country Famous for Tea
Across the Formosa Strait from Fujian Province, China, lies the island of Taiwan, a mere speck of land anchored in the South China Sea. Once named Ilha Formosa by Portuguese traders, the Chinese renamed the island Taiwan in the nineteenth century. Taiwan is 235 miles long and 90 miles wide, about twice the size of New Jersey. Although it is dwarfed in size by Mainland China, it is a power-producer of fine, mountain-grown oolong tea. Taiwan’s modern tea industry is relatively new, however. The first exports of tea occurred in 1865, during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Taiwan’s tea industry was sparked by an exodus of Chinese immigrants to the island from Fujian in the mid-1850s. These migrants brought tea-growing and tea-processing skills with them, as well as tea seeds and tea bush cuttings. It is estimated that by the end of the nineteenth century, close to two million former residents of Fujian had made the trip to Taiwan.
Linguistically speaking, Taiwan’s aboriginal inhabitants are not of Chinese descent; rather, they are considered to be of Polynesian background, belonging to the Austronesian language family. Eleven aboriginal tribes still maintain viable populations there, and for members of these tribes tea cultivation and production is a traditional livelihood. Prior to the arrival of the first Fujianese Chinese, these native Taiwanese people cultivated tea from wild-growing tea trees found in the protected high reaches of the mountains. Under Dutch rule, from 1624 to 1662, the Dutch began to relocate Fujian Chinese citizens from China to Taiwan to work as laborers. Many of these Fujianese had experience in the tea trade, and they taught the native aboriginal people Chinese methods of tea cultivation by establishing tea gardens in various locations in the interior mountainous parts of the island with tea bush cuttings that they brought with them from China. After the Chinese expelled the Dutch from Taiwan in the mid-seventeenth century, Fujianese continued to relocate to Taiwan. Since then, the special nature of Taiwan teas is reflective not just of the geography and climate of the island but also of the unique history of the people involved in developing these fragrant and distinctive teas. The result has been the development of a vibrant tea industry that supports and is maintained by close to six thousand small family-owned tea farms and is world renowned for excellence.
The terrain and climate of Taiwan has proved to be conducive to the growing of high-quality tea. Two-thirds of the island is covered with forested mountains, and a subtropical climate brings summer rains to the southern part of the island and winter rains to the north. The expansion of tea into Taiwan proved to be a profitable venture. In the 1860s Taiwan’s tea exports accounted for less than 10 percent of their total export sales, but by the 1890s that amount had increased to almost 65 percent.
During the Japanese occupation of Taiwan some green tea was produced for export to Japan at the end of the first Chinese-Japanese War in 1895. When the Chinese regained control of Taiwan after Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II, the green tea industry’s export trade remained. Today, Taiwan produces and exports a small quantity of sencha-style green tea to Japan, to cover demand in iced-tea beverages and bottled tea drinks. During the 1970s and 1980s members of the tea farmers associations, tea manufacturers associatio
ns, and tea scholars joined forces with the Taiwan Provincial Government’s Department of Agriculture and Forestry to develop teahouses throughout the island devoted to the promotion of tea culture.
The Taiwanese take tea so seriously that government business, such as banks and civic offices, serve tea to customers waiting in line. The Taiwanese prefer to drink oolong tea hot, but they also love iced-tea beverages. It is reported that the Taiwanese have concocted more than a hundred different iced-tea flavors. One such modern-day creation is Bubble Tea—a sweet, vividly colored cold beverage concoction of tea, fruit, and tapioca pearls that is slurped through an oversized straw.
Taiwan exports approximately 60 to 70 percent of its annual tea production, and the rest is consumed locally. In recent years demand for high-quality leaf has refocused Taiwan’s tea production to emphasize the manufacture of traditional, high-quality, mountain-grown oolong teas that are unique to Taiwan. Although Taiwan produces a small amount of both black tea for local consumption and green tea for export, Taiwan is famous for light, refreshing, and fragrant oolong teas that are distinctively different from those produced in Mainland China.
TAIWAN’S TEA-GROWING REGIONS
Taiwan has three distinct tea-growing regions—north, central, and southern—with the heaviest concentration of tea gardens in the center of the island. Seven prime tea-producing areas dot the landscape, and favorable weather allows for five plucking seasons—spring, summer, second summer, fall, and winter. Winter temperatures hover around 65°F (18°C), providing nearly year-round picking opportunity and year-round sales of these village-made teas.
Each of Taiwan’s oolong teas has very different flavor characteristics, color in the cup, and identifiable leaf shape. Some of these teas are rolled into tight balls; others are loosely rolled into a half-ball. Some are lightly withered, brownish, and curled; others are very dark in color, long, and slightly twisted. The main characteristic of Taiwanese oolongs is a tendency to go toward the “greener” side of oolong manufacture; their oxidation levels are lower than that of neighboring Fujian Province, ranging from just 10 percent to 40 percent. This gives the teas a lighter, deliciously drinkable style and slightly woodsy flavor and peachy aroma.
The Story of Tea Page 26