White tea brews up bright future for once-impoverished villagers

Uneducated and poverty-stricken, 15-year-old Li Zhaotie left his home in Fangjiashan village, in Fuding city of Fujian province, 27 years ago.

In 2011, while he was cutting slates at a stone factory in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Li happened to drink a cup of tea that "tasted good and sweet".

"It's white tea," he was told.

"White tea? My hometown Fuding produces a lot of white tea," Li thought.

So he decided to go back and see what he could do with the small tea plantation owned by his parents but left uncultivated.

White tea, a minimally processed tea with low oxidation, was less known than green tea or oolong tea, which dominated the Chinese market.

Making white tea did not bring Li much money in the early years. He even had to chop bamboo in the mountains and use the money he earned to pay workers who picked tea leaves for him.

But things began to improve in 2016 as the white tea market gradually heated up.

Lin Youxi is one of the people who spearheaded the expansion of the domestic market for white tea, especially organic white tea produced in Fangjiashan.

In 1999, Lin, then a 37-year-old tea merchant in Beijing, returned to his hometown of Fuding with his wife and contracted for some tea plantations in Fangjiashan to start his white tea business.

Years of engagement with the tea industry told him that organic tea plantations would be the future.

According to Lin, Fangjiashan, located near the national-level geopark Mount Taimu, has the largest contiguous tea plantation in Fuding. Its soil and altitude are very suitable for making quality tea.

However, like Li Zhaotie, many villagers had fled their hometown due to poverty, leaving their tea plantations uncultivated with weeds springing up.

"I didn't see any road or new house in Fangjiashan at that time. The villagers were in rags and in low spirits due to poverty," Lin said.

With the implementation of the country's resettlement program starting in 2004, villagers of Fangjiashan were organized to bring the mountains under cultivation and grow tea trees and other cash crops such as rice.

"It turned out that tea leaves were sold at a much better price than others, so tea leaves have become the only cash crop Fangjiashan farmers plant now," said Zheng Yanfang, now Party secretary of Fangjiashan.

To improve Fangjiashan's infrastructure and environment, the local government also spent more than 1.2 million yuan ($173,000) to build cement roads and invested more than 200,000 yuan to renovate local toilets and the sewage pipe network, according to Zheng.