Tongmu Guan 桐木關

Tongmu Guan 桐木關 takes its name from a border pass, a gap in the range at about 1,000 meters on the old road between Fujian and Jiangxi. The name now covers the tea lands of Tongmu village below it, an hour's drive northwest of the Wuyi Shan scenic area. The area lies high and thickly forested: cloud gathers in the valleys, rainfall is heavy, and the air stays noticeably cooler through the year. Chinese red tea, what the West calls black tea, begins here. Zheng shan xiao zhong 正山小種, the tea Europe met as Lapsang Souchong, was first made in these valleys in the seventeenth century, as the Ming gave way to the Qing dynasty, and every red tea made anywhere since descends from that method, apart from the smoke. For a category that now dominates world tea drinking, the ground it came from is remarkably small, and after decades as a niche it is winning back its name, helped by UNESCO recognition and government promotion.

Two UNESCO designations meet here and they are regularly confused. Wuyi Shan was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1999 as a mixed cultural and natural site, for the biodiversity of the reserve as much as for the river gorges below it. Separately, in 2022, China's traditional tea processing techniques entered the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the making of zheng shan xiao zhong is one of the crafts named inside that listing. One protects the place, the other protects the practice.

Tongmu was taken into the Wuyishan National Nature Reserve in 1979, and since then no new tea ground may be opened and access is controlled, so growers pick from what already stands. That single restriction shapes everything else: tea was planted inside the forest without clearing it, and yields are small. Many bushes are old, though not all. Replanting goes on along the better-known roads that visitors drive, and near the houses we have seen bushes crowded into every free patch of ground to make the most of the limits, planted so densely that they all but require pesticides and fertilizer, against the rules and the reputation. That is why everything we source here is wild forest tea from Masu, a small village off the main tourist road, about an hour from the core rock area, and the cleanest and wildest corner we have found in Tongmu or anywhere in Wuyi Shan. The local population there is qun ti zhong 群體種, a seed-grown population variety known locally as caicha 菜茶, reproducing from seed for generations, which keeps the genetic pool unusually wide.

Our producers are the Zhang family in Masu, two brothers, each with his own specialty. Master Zhang is our collaborator and mentor, and every year he hosts our travel group for a masterclass on how their yefang 野放 gardens are kept, with minimum human interference: no pesticides, no fertilizer, not even watering. His older brother is a farmer recognized by the government for protecting the forest land he holds. Every season we taste across both brothers' work and choose the batches that perform best. We have sold the family's tea for over four years now, and some of it we age ourselves in our Xiamen warehouse, taking a small batch of the oldest material at every harvest to track its development over the years. We have recently started selling our aged Tongmu Guan tea. Master Zhang is also one of the biggest contributors to our Blind Tasting Club, in knowledge, participation and experimental teas. That relationship changed how we think about the region. The family's shui xian gave us a clear reference for what a clean, wild-grown yancha can be well outside the zhengyan 正巖 (full-rock) core that is supposed to define the style, with a distinct character of its own.

Tongmu red teas range from commercial grades to some of the most sought-after teas in Fujian. The reserve rules keep the good ones scarce, and they are also why the name travels a great deal further than the tea does. The most expensive of them is jin jun mei 金駿眉, created in Tongmu in 2005 by a team led by Jiang Yuanxun, a 24th-generation heir of the zheng shan xiao zhong craft, at Zhengshantang 正山堂. It is made from buds alone and baked, and buds are few, which keeps volumes small. Demand did the rest. In our opinion the price is more hype than quality, and the market is flooded with fakes and lower grades from outside Tongmu Guan priced far too high. We taste it from time to time, and the Zhang family keeps a small stock to share with travelers on our Min Yue East China tour, but we barely source it.