By staff reporter LI XIA

Sun Chunfu carries on the family trade.

SUN Jinrong started baking tea leaves at the age of 16. Nowadays, however, even at peak tea season, he has time to take a leisurely stroll around his village while a group of casual women laborers from rural Anhui Province help him harvest his six mu (1 mu=1/15 hectare) tea garden, as his 48-year-old son bakes tea leaves in his stead.

Meijiawu Village, where Sun lives, is not big. The low hills surrounding the village are covered with luxuriant growths of tea plants, as tea planting is the main source of income for the village's 500 households. There is plentiful spring rain in March at Meijiawu, making this a good picking time, and large bamboo baskets full of withering tea leaves stand in the porch of every household. The firewood stove in the courtyard that heats the big wok in which tea leaves are baked burns from early morning until midnight, and the aroma of tea permeates the whole village.

Sun has built two two-storied houses for his son at a total cost of 700,000 yuan. Such houses in Western style can be seen everywhere in rural Zhejiang Province, a sign of the local rural population's prosperity since China's reform and opening up. The money for Sun's new houses came from his six-mu tea garden and his family's hard work. The best Longjing tea is made from tea leaves picked before the Pure Brightness Festival (April 5), from the tea plants that first sprouted during the previous October, and that have been nurtured by the temperate, insect-free winter days of southern China, to mature one or two weeks prior to the festival. To keep up with demands of the season, every year Sun Jinrong and his fellow villagers hire casual laborers from rural Anhui at a unitary payment standard worked out by the village.

Casual laborers from Anhui picking tea leaves.

Last spring the Sun family hired eight women. Picking tea leaves is not a simple job and requires patience and care. Only the leaf bud, which should be no longer than two centimeters, and the first two leaves, which must be the same length as the bud, are picked. Leaves fetch a high price, and as this work requires small, deft fingers, it is generally women, preferably experienced in this work, that are hired to do it.

The Suns are one of the oldest families in the village, and are known for their honesty. During the 20-day picking season, the women live and eat together with the family, on top of which they earn 15 yuan a day, plus their fare home. This level of compensation is handsome indeed for people from a poor province like Anhui. Outstanding workers can also earn a bonus, either in cash or in kind. The Sun family does not have the heart to fire any of the workers they hire, even the occasional green hand unversed in the complexities of tea leaf picking. In such cases, they ask the more experienced workers to teach them, or simply put them to work in the kitchen. At 6 am every morning the women go to the fields, work through to lunch, and carry on as soon as they have eaten. They wear raincoats provided by the Sun family and talk and laugh as their nimble figures swiftly pluck away. The time they finish depends on the quantity of new leaves ready to be picked on any particular day, and if the day's shoots are plentiful, it is often quite late before they leave for home.

The village has a high local reputation as a quality Longjing tea producer. Back in 1958, the late Chinese premier Zhou Enlai visited the village, an event Sun Jinrong still talks of excitedly, as it had a direct influence on his family. Back then, Sun's younger brother, as a senior high school graduate, had the best education of all the locals, and worked as the village accountant. On meeting the small number of educated youths in the village, Premier Zhou told them that as they were young and educated they should be more ambitious and make efforts to develop their skills away from home. Taking his advice, Sun's brother and four other young villagers went to Lanzhou, provincial capital of Gansu in western China. Lanzhou was a desolate place at that time, and four of the five people that went there could not stand the hard life, and soon returned home, leaving Sun's brother to stay on alone. He went on to work in a machinery factory and established his own family there. Since retiring, he has returned to his pretty and prosperous hometown.

Tea plants have helped the villagers to live a comfortable life. Before 1983 the village practiced a collective ownership system, whereby the villagers picked and baked tea leaves together. Life was hard and their income meager, so they had no incentive to work hard. "We got rich after the fields were parceled out to households in 1983," says Sun Jinrong. Since then, the villagers have tilled their own plots. Having learned to follow the laws of the market economy and competition, their living standards have greatly improved.

Sun Jinrong at Wuyishan, 2000.

In 1999 the village built an outbound road dividing it into new and old parts. The new village comprises mostly two-storied houses occupied mainly by the younger generation, the older generation preferring to remain in their dark, wooden houses in the older village. Sun Jinrong's wife looks much younger than her age and has a refined southern appearance. She helps her husband run the family grocery. Sun's mother-in-law is over 90 years old, and often sits in front of the family grocery. This content and carefree attitude born of advanced age merges harmoniously with the atmosphere of this old village. Sun has now freed himself from tea baking and concentrates on his grocery where, owing to his honesty and good will, business is brisk. Some villagers have switched from tea growing to trading, as it brings in a much higher income, but no one in Sun's family has turned their hand to the commercial side of tea-growing as they do not regard themselves as sufficiently hard-headed to be merchants.

Sun's son, Sun Chunfu, learned tea baking skills from his father. The Longjing tea baking technique consists of using bare hands to stir the tea leaves in a heated iron wok, in order to ensure that the process is conducted at the right temperature. The baked leaves should be flat and even, a result that can be achieved only with special skills, and a day's harvest must be baked within that day. Usually a baker can produce one kilo of dry leaves per eight-hour day, so extra help may be hired and trained at high season. For Sun Jinrong, tea baking skills are no longer the guarded family secret they used to be, and these days many of his fellow villagers are also adept at this art, as exchange of baking skills is to the benefit of all. According to Sun, it takes a green hand at least three years to learn the correct way to bake tea leaves.

The most lucrative tea is that picked before the Pure Brightness Festival, as it sells at around 3,200 yuan a kilo, the market price standing at around 5,600 yuan a kilo, making tea traders a substantial profit.

At slack season, Meijiawu transforms into a tourist village, as the area has beautiful scenery, fresh air, and pollution-free food from the villagers' plot. Urbanites often come to the village at weekends and on holidays, the daily number of visitors at this time averaging 170. On one occasion Sun Jinrong received an American man, his Chinese wife, and their three-year-old daughter as paying guests at one of the Sun family's two Western-style houses, at a charge of 150 yuan per day, for both food and lodging.

Now in his 70s, Sun is the head of his family, in matters big and small. He has married off his two daughters, and his son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren live in the new village. In his spare time, Sun enjoys traveling around the country. He is also a council member of the local association for the self-employed.

Currently Sun has two goals: to buy a minibus to pick up and bring holiday-makers to the village, and a good, easy-to-operate camera with which to record the beautiful views and scenery around the country and exhibit them at his house. Sun hopes that in future many more people will come to visit his beautiful mountain village.

About Chinese Tea

Chinese tea falls into four categories: green, oolong, black and scented tea. These four types are distinguishable by their place of origin and genus, but more importantly, by their method of baking. Green tea retains its green color after baking, and the tea made from it is of a fresh green shade, making it a suitably refreshing drink for the summer. Oolong tea leaves are dark brown at the edges, and the tea has a more pronounced flavor. Fujian Province is a major producer of this tea, and the local people are partial to it. Black tea is baked until it is dark all over, and its flavor is still more distinct. It is a winter beverage, preferred by older people. Scented tea is baked together with various aromatic flowers. The people in northern China, where tea is not produced, have a special liking for this type of tea.

Longjing is the best of all green teas, and is produced by four villages in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, and therefore comes in four types -- Mei (Jiawu), Shi (Feng), Yun (Qi), and Hu (Pao), named after the place of origin. These four kinds now have a total acreage of 3,200 mu (1 mu=1/15 hectare), of which, Meijiawu accounts for 1,200 mu.

The tea leaves picked before the Pure Brightness Festival make the best Longjing tea, and have particular requirements as to color, aroma, taste and shape, with flat, even leaves being preferred. When making Longjing tea, boiling water at a temperature of 80 degrees Centigrade should be added, and the amount of tea leaves used varies according to the drinker's individual taste.