Pioneering Organic Tea in the Phoenix Mountains

It’s late November when I visit Guangdong, China, and winter has finally come to the southern province. While the temperature is mild, even in the mountains of Chaozhou, a heavy mist hangs over the famous peaks, making the climate feel cooler.

Fenghuang Shan, also known as the Phoenix Mountains, sits about 450 kilometers east of Guangzhou’s provincial capital, near the Fujian border. While green tea may top the list for domestic consumption in China, here in Chaozhou, local oolongs reign. Dancong (pronounced dan-chong locally or dan-tsong in Mandarin) translates to ‘single bush’ or ‘single tree’, named for how the oolong was once harvested from plants growing individually rather than in terraced rows.

Dancong is a chameleon of an oolong: it has 10 major flavour profiles, such as ‘almond fragrance’ and ‘gardenia fragrance’, of which mi lan xiang (honey orchid fragrance) is probably the best known outside of China and subcategory ya shi xiang (duck shit fragrance) a recent popular contender. These are Chaozhou varietals of shui xian trees originally from Fujian province, which owe their wide range of flavors and aromas to the different biomes of Chaozhou.

Our small group arrives in Chaozhou at lunchtime, where we meet our host for the next two days, Huang Huan (黄寰), president of Jiaming Tea Manufacturing Company (嘉茗茶). As we feast, he frets about the weather – it has been drizzling all morning, which means the tea leaves might be too wet to pick for the production demonstration he has planned for us that evening.

Huang clarifies that it’s not his tea that’ll be picked but a neighboring estate’s. Jiaming only has a spring harvest for reasons he elaborates on later, but he has arranged delivery of a special batch of an associate’s winter harvest for us, his guests.

By the time we toured the nearby Chaozhou Fenghuang Dancong Tea Museum, where we visit the retired Song Zhong mother tree (said to date back to the Song Dynasty) and sat for a few rounds of dancong in its modern teahouse, the rain had eased and a few kilograms of leaves are on their way to the factory.

The Jiaming estate is a short drive from Sanping village and is surrounded by three mountains. The positioning is strategic: the 200 mu (almost 33 acres) garden is organic, the first of its kind for a dancong producer, and is nestled in a pocket of the range, helping to separate it from its non-organic neighbors.

We park in front of a split-level residence, a set of apartments that have been purpose-built for visitors to stay in, our accommodation for the night. On the lowest level is a basic kitchen and dining area; on the main ground floor is a large reception room with a tea table and gongfu setup; and upstairs are bedrooms and bathrooms, each with a central lounge area also equipped with a kettle and gongfu teaware. This is a place where drinking tea is encouraged at every opportunity.

(We discovered that Huang’s estate house sits on top of the factory where he stays during production; he also keeps a residence in the city where his young family can be closer to amenities.)

A young leader

The 33-year-old pioneer was exposed to tea at a young age, about three years old, and his interest grew from there. “My father used to be a journalist in the ‘80s. At the time, it was a very reputable position because he met with important people, including famous tea people. Huang Rui Guang was the tea master of the Chaozhou region and that’s how I got into tea, through my father’s connection to him.”

In 2016, Huang was working at a Guangzhou TV company that was about to merge with another media entity. He chose that moment to quit and return to his hometown of Chaozhou where his family had been custodians of a tea garden since 2009. “At that time the garden was under bad management and wasn’t making its value,” he says.

His vision was to turn it organic. Part of this, Huang admits, was self-serving. “Since this land has been purchased and made into a tea farm we’ve wanted to do organic tea so that my family can enjoy organic tea, making it for ourselves so we don’t need to buy it from anywhere else where it contains pesticides, herbicides.”

On the other hand, he saw organic produce as a worthy trend at a consumer level. “If the economy is growing and people have a higher standard of living, people will naturally buy higher quality tea and organic tea, which is good for us.”

No one was doing it for dancong, and Huang has some disdain for other attempts. “There are some tea gardens with an organic label, but they are all commercially grown, and the tea quality is really bad, usually. Rarely you will find someone who is doing organic tea of great quality,” he explains. “I want to use this land to set an example and take the lead for the whole industry to produce high quality tea. At the same time, people could learn from it. Building this tea farm is really for the whole trend and maybe everyone will look for better tea in the future.”

Being a pioneer isn’t easy. To make the estate organic, Huang used the guidelines for China’s official green label for organic farming as a foundation and then took courses at South China Agricultural University and Hunan Agricultural University.

That wasn’t the hardest part, though. The biggest challenge with being a pioneer? “No money,” says Huang—his hands gesture outwards, imitating a river of cash flowing away from him. A rough estimate puts his initial investment at CNY30 million (USD$4 million). “In the beginning of the farm, building it, you have cash flow issues. It’s very painful.”

Jiaming uses no chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizer. The estate does have chickens, which feed on pests and fertilize the plants, but everything else Huang and his team do manually. That includes regular physical inspections of each of the garden’s 10,000 trees, and when they find signs of pests that bore into tea branches, they remove them manually with electronic scissors.

The brand produces 2000 kilograms of dancong oolong per year from one season – spring. Because he doesn’t use fertilizer, Huang’s trees don’t produce enough for a winter harvest, hence the need to borrow a neighbor’s leaves (pesticide- and herbicide-free but fertilized) to do a production demo for us.

The investment has paid off, however. “It is making a profit now,” he affirms. The tea has won awards at local, national, and international levels. The estate itself has been named in the top 10 of Chaozhou’s most beautiful.

Before we head to the garden’s central pavilion, where Huang’s wife will brew us some of his premium tea (a delicate and complex tea with a subtle spiciness and long finish), I ask him one more question: “What is the most rewarding part of what you do?”

“I am a master,” he replies proudly in English.

This is the first of a three-part series on Chaozhou. The writer traveled at her own expense as part of a tea tour arranged by Cathy Zhang. The interview with Huang was conducted in Mandarin. Translation by Cathy Zhang. Photos by the author.

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Adeline Teoh is a writer based in Sydney, Australia. She runs events through the Sydney Tea Meetup and writes about tea culture and paraphernalia at teashirts.com.au.