Friday, November 18, 2011

Songluo Mountain Tea Factory

Tea Basket for Songluo Mountain teas, at Ling Di's garden

Some facts about tea from Huang Shan:
  • Vladimir Putin received a gift of Monkey King tea from this region in 2008, during his visit to China.
  • Robert Fortune (the Brit who stole tea from China, on behalf of the British Empire, for propagation in India) came through the Anhui region during his epic tea adventure.  
Our tour group also had an epic adventure, tracing the path of tea from field to factory in Huang Shan.  Ling Di's fields are a lovely drive outside of town.  Back in the community, we visited the tea factory, a shared one to which several area farmers contribute. 

The factory proudly display its award-winning teas.

Tea Rolling Machine; Look closely to see the tea on the bottom metal basin.
Preparing tea to go into an oven.  You can't quite tell, but he shaped it into a beautiful swirl.

We saw many pieces of equipment in operation.  Here, finished tea flows out of a machine into storage bags.
Bags and bags of tea waiting to be packaged.

Some fun names of the various tea warehouses.  :-)
Packaging

Chests of tea waiting to be filled

Inking the chests - this was just way cool to watch!

The finished stamp

And ready to roll!

3 comments:

  1. It looks so tidy and clean compared to places we visited in Taiwan. What a treat for you visit here and see the full process, including their awards. I can imagine they would be very proud of these awards.

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  2. Oh wow, thank you so much for all the pictures. I almost feel like I've been there. Really, these are some of the very best pics I've seen of the factory process.

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  3. Must have been amazing to see this process in action! Love the interesting names of the places. And the chests are interesting to me because I have a vintage one and its style and size look to be just the same!

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