The Jingmai tea growing area covers the Lancang County villages of Jingmai
and Mangjing. This stretch of 10,000mu cultivated ancient tea gardens has
upwards of a thousand years of history. Scholars believe the Jingmai teamountain was
first cultivated over 1200 years ago in 696 C.E. by the ancestors of the
Bulang people. The next
several dynasties saw a succession of tea planting, leading to the current
scale of cultivation. The Jingmai Old-Growth Tea Garden is one of the
largest conservatories for old
tea trees in the world. It is, furthermore, completely protected and
one-hundred percent
organic, living tea. In all of our travels in Yunnan, we have never visited
a place with a
greater concentration of tea trees. Unlike the tall trees in Ai Lao, which
are very unique
due to the altitude and deciduous nature of the forest, the trees in
Jingmai are the more
typical jungle/rainforest kind of tea tree, with twisted fairy-tale trunks
and branches
covered in mold, fungus, vines and other species like Crab's Claw, which we
had the fortune to add to a bowl or two. The forest here sings of tea - a
song that we hope you hear
through these pages!
Our second fifteen-hour bus ride, called "Letting Go of All Our Ego-Baggage."Our Jingmai cake, available now, called "Forest Bridge."The eldest in our host's family. He was eighty-eight this year.
