The village of Chang Xi displays signs of its former, tea-derived wealth - but though the tea-growing tradition is still strong, the affluence is gone, writes Fintan O'Toole in Jiangxi Province
It takes five hours to drive to the village of Chang Xi from Nanchang, capital of the heavily agricultural south-central Chinese province of Jiangxi, but the last hour is by far the most interesting. After the long haul across flat, prairie-sized stretches of rice paddies, the road rises steadily, and blue mountains, blurry in the fading autumn light, hang across the horizon. Entering the hills, the road narrows, and its sides are occupied by people, young and old, doing things their ancestors did in the distant past: walking a cow to feed along the grass margin; herding ducks from one watery field to another, with a long bamboo pole to keep them in line; hauling water in heavy buckets perched on the four ends of two poles that are balanced on the shoulders and give the gait a motion that seems at once heavy and teetering. Only after many inquiries at houses along the way do we turn back and find the way to Chang Xi, an unmarked trail that opens narrowly between two clumps of trees.
Not that Chang Xi is off the beaten track. It is, rather, literally on a beaten track. The road, which winds up through a rocky ravine with a broad, lazy river on one side and dense woods on the other, is unpaved - a metre-wide dirt trail littered with fallen branches and pocked with muddy holes. The 12km from the main road takes an hour to drive, and by now it is pitch dark. Even when we get to the village, there is a single light on. Electricity arrived here 25 years ago, but the villagers still follow the habits of pre-modern times, going to bed when it's dark and getting up with the dawn.
Isolated places are rare in populous China, but Chang Xi is one of them. The villagers tell me that I am the first foreigner ever to set foot in the place. The older people, used only to their local dialect, find it hard to understand standard Chinese. The dirt road itself was only carved out in the late 1980s - before that the only way in and out was over the mountain - and the necessities of life (oil, soy sauce, rice, clothing) were carried in on the villagers' backs.
This night, the place is illuminated solely by the narrow beams of a flash lamp, and it is only in the morning that I can see that Chang Xi is anything but the desultory village its isolation might suggest. It has, in fact, a grandeur no less striking for being down-at-heel. The bank of the clear river that runs alongside the village is paved with stone, as are the narrow streets that run between the houses. The houses are startlingly distinctive, utterly unlike the redbrick courtyards of most of rural China. They are tall, oblong, two-storey whitewashed structures, with sloping roofs, elegantly pointed gables, narrow windows and high, thin doors. The windows, high up on the walls and just large enough to shoot through, are obviously built for defence from bandits, suggesting that Chang Xi was once rich enough to be worth raiding. And the finer houses offer confirmation of a former prosperity. The doorways are topped with elaborate carved patterns in wood or stone, and the outer walls have fading paintings of birds, fairy-tale princesses, fish, flowers. Some of the houses have wooden balconies with extravagant tracery. The grandly spacious interiors have vast kitchens and a wooden upper floor supported by richly carved columns whose smoke-darkened surfaces reveal the faces of lions and birds. It is obvious that Chang Xi was once a rich village, or at least a village with a fair few rich people.
The reason for that wealth was the reason I went to Chang Xi: tea. One of the reasons for doubting that Marco Polo - for all his elaborate and sometimes accurate tales - was ever in China, is that he never mentions tea. It is one of the staples of Chinese culture, cultivated for at least 1,800 years and made from wild plants from at least the third century BC. It is consumed in vast quantities, and always offered to a guest. Its myriad varieties are discussed by connoisseurs with the same intricacy, the same precision and some of the same snobbery that western buffs bring to the appreciation of wine. In an economy where most things are cheap, tea can be very expensive: its prestige, its medicinal qualities and the relative scarcity of some varieties make tea a luxury worth paying for.
BUT TEA IS also an emblem of China's historic losses. When, in Ireland, we use the Chinese word cha as a synonym for tea, or talk of something being worth more than "all the tea in China", we are unconsciously remembering a time when tea was exclusively Chinese and when the burgeoning European taste for the beverage brought wealth to Chinese farmers. But the demand for Chinese tea was so great that Britain launched the opium trade as a quid pro quo, and when the Chinese objected, used its military muscle to enforce the exchange. The British also set about undermining China's near-monopoly on tea production. Chinese plants and tea-makers were taken to Assam, and from the 1830s onwards tea was grown on plantations in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Burma. One of the few economic strengths that China had in its dealings with the West was lost.
Chang Xi's grand houses are a legacy of the good times, built, say the locals, in the 18th century. The village has a recorded history of 500 years, but the villagers told me that it originated 400 years earlier, established by people fleeing southwards with the Song Dynasty when its northern strongholds were overthrown. Its founder, they say, was an important court official seeking refuge in the mountains. They point to the surname of almost everyone in the village, Dai (a word denoting high esteem), and say it was given to them by the Emperor.
These high notions are also connected to the tea they grow, which they call "palace tea" because, they say, it was served at the imperial court. This may be true. The tea is good enough to be still served at the equivalent of an emperor's court, the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. And the grandeur of some of the village's houses certainly supports the notion that, as the locals claim, they were occupied in the 18th and 19th centuries by tea-growers who traded their produce far beyond Jiangxi.
THE LUSH WOODED hills that completely enclose Chang Xi are no good for growing rice or corn, but are suited to tea plants. Indeed, tea-growing is so central to the villagers' collective identity that they boast of the motto, "A thousand peasants, no fields". It is almost literally true. There are some small patches of cleared land in the river valley where the locals grow the vegetables - chillis, marrows and what we call Chinese leaves - that form the bulk of their diet, flavoured now and then with some of the chicken, duck or pork raised by the women. Some income is derived from cutting wood in the forests, and some of the young people send back money earned in Chinese cities. Their one cash crop, though, is tea.
TEA IS MORE a legacy they tend than a crop they plant. Dai Jinping, the village chief, tells me that the tea plants have descended down to the present through 45 generations. Dai Xiangying, a whip-thin, earnest, 35-year-old man with a house full of books and a sharp sense of the outside world, takes me up the mountain to see his tea plants. He points to a row of magnificent Formosa trees, which he calls "the five commanders that guard the village", and tells me that one of his distant ancestors had a bet that he could plant them upside-down and they would still grow. When they did so, he decided that this was the place to plant the tea trees. They thrived, and continue to do so.
The villagers see their tea trees both as a gift from the ancestors and as an emanation from the environment. "The tea is good," says Dai Jinping, "because the place is good. It is high up, which is best for tea. The air is clean and clear. The mist bathes the leaves all day long. The climate is right for growing tea: it is hot during the day, but because we are high up, it is cold at night. Everything has an excellent balance."
The growing methods are organic, even though no one here has heard the term. It is too much trouble, the locals say, to haul fertilisers up the mountain, and the high altitude means that there are few insects to eat the plants, so insecticides are unnecessary.
Tea is made in Chang Xi pretty much as it always was. They pick the leaves four times a year, with the small crop of tender spring shoots making the most delicately flavoured tea. These precious leaves are dried on racks over a small wood fire in the "factory" - a front room in one of the village houses - and each leaf is rolled by hand, a tedious and painful job. Each successive picking produces hardier and somewhat rougher leaves and the later ones are rolled on a small machine that is the only plugged-in part of the process. The summer teas are still very fine, the autumn crop less so. When I arrived at the village, I was given tea so fragrant and richly flavoured that I assumed it was made with the dainty leaves of springtime. But the villagers were amazed at the lack of refinement of the first westerner in their midst. This, they explained, was the tea from the last crop, the crude stuff that they wouldn't dare sell and have to keep for themselves.
Yet for all the quality of its product, it is obvious that Chang Xi is no longer a wealthy village. Some of the fine houses are falling down and most of those that remain are rather run-down. The villagers, like most Chinese peasants, live little above subsistence level. Unlike at some times within living memory (especially during the famines of the late 1950s and early 1960s) they have enough to eat. They have clothes (mostly, for the younger people, knock-off copies of western brands imported from the city) to wear. Their location has some advantages: wood from the forests heats their houses and fuels their ovens, and small fish from the river are a good source of protein. But it also has drawbacks. Staples such as rice and oil have to be brought in from a distance. The children have to live in the primary school 12km away during the week because the trip up and down the mountain would be too arduous, and this adds to the cost of education.
And the knack of making good money from tea was lost after western demand shifted to India and Ceylon in the 19th century. The landlords were expropriated after the revolution (their little ancestral temple still sits unused on the mountainside) and though nobody regrets this, it does seem likely that an old merchant know-how was lost. These days, buyers from Beijing and Shanghai buy up the village's tea in bulk, and its small output (only about 1,000kg a year) means that the growers are not in a strong position to bargain.
But this could change. The village is now connected to the phone network and the astute Dai Xiangying set up an internet connection on a clunky, ancient-looking computer in his book-lined bedroom, which enabled him to check out the retail prices of tea in the big Chinese cities and to discover that they bore little relation to what he and the other villagers were getting from the buyers. He has now struck out on his own, selling his tea online. Most families in the village earn €200-€300 a year selling tea, and the larger producers earn €500. He's making €1,000. But he's still the only one using the internet to do business.
"Sometimes," he says, "peasants have closed, fearful minds, but if you use your head you can make a good living. I'm better off here now than I would be if I went to work in the city." As he speaks, the glint of a merchant ancestor seems to flicker in his eyes.