Let's start with a chart of the Longjing family relationships.
The head of the family is Hang Jiahe, who has a daughter named Hang Pan with his former wife Fang Xiling. In the previous article, we mentioned the love at first sight between Hang Pan and Nationalist pilot Cao Jiayuan.
Hang Pan is in charge of overseeing hundreds of acres of tea garden, including the famous Lion Peak Hu Gong Temple area. By “overseeing,” it mainly means managing the garden rather than preventing others from stealing tea leaves. During the month or so when Longjing tea is picked and processed, there are many people bustling about on the mountain, making it difficult to steal tea. If it's not the picking and processing season, stealing tea would be pointless because the resulting tea would taste terrible and couldn't even be sold as vegetables. Hang Pan's oversight is essentially garden management.
The People's Liberation Army took over ten days to capture Hangzhou, officially announcing its liberation on May 3, 1949. The first third of “Looking South of the River” describes the winter and spring before the liberation of Hangzhou.
In her diary, Hang Pan wrote: “The fighting has started again, and everywhere there are refugees. Even in Longjing Village, people are coming to beg for food. The people of Longjing Village themselves are so poor that they have to go begging for food; what could they possibly give to others?”
During the Civil War period, life was tough for ordinary people under Nationalist rule, with rampant inflation and conscription.
“Looking South of the River” devotes considerable space to describing Chen Yi's activities in his later years, which I did not expect. In my series of articles interpreting “Tea Gold,” I mentioned Chen Yi.
After Japan's surrender, Chen Yi, as the highest-ranking official governing Taiwan, directly ordered the brutal suppression of Taiwanese civilians, known as the February 28 Incident, which remains a “original sin” in the history of the Nationalists in Taiwan.
The portrayal of Chen Yi in “Looking South of the River” is relatively positive. There were already Communist underground party members working on his thinking. As a Zhejiang native, he did not want the civil war to spread to Zhejiang. Feeling that the Nationalists' cause was lost, he relied on his status as a senior member of the Nationalists and sought out his adopted son Tang Enbo, who held military power, full of confidence that he could successfully persuade him to defect. He was arrested by Chiang Kai-shek and executed in Taipei in 1950.
“Looking South of the River” mentions Chen Yi's hometown green tea, Rizhu Green Tea from Shaoxing, as well as Tungting Oolong, which he drank while attempting to persuade Tang Enbo to defect.
Cao Jiayuan and Hang Pan had just started dating when he suddenly received orders from his superiors to fly Chen Yi, who was under detention, to Taiwan. They will meet again later.
“Looking South of the River” vividly describes the impoverished lives of local Hangzhou residents before the city's liberation. Unlike other families, Worry-Free Tea House served porridge and also added a large pot of tea-soaked rice. Everyone said it was delicious, and many people lined up early on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month to wait for this bowl of tea-soaked rice.
I haven't seen the tea-soaked rice described in the book, so here's an image that is close.
The specific method of preparing tea-soaked rice at Worry-Free Tea House was inspired by the tea from the ethnic minorities in Southwest China. This tea is made by stir-frying tea leaves that have been soaked in lard, then boiling them with Water, adding various condiments such as fried peanuts, dried tofu, shredded meat, green onions, sesame seeds, etc., and finally adding the main ingredient, noodles or rice, anything you like.
To make tea-soaked rice suitable for the Hangzhou palate, Worry-Free Tea House put some effort into perfecting it. First, they heated the wok, then added chopped lard residue and stir-fried it, followed by pouring boiling water to make a large pot. Once the water boiled, they added the high-grade tea dust of Longjing tea, simmered it briefly, strained out the tea oil broth, and brought the water back to a boil. Then they added cooked peanuts, a little salt and ginger, and finally the rice that had been cooked the night before, making porridge. It should not be overcooked; it is porridge, not congee, and when serving, sprinkle a handful of green onions on top.
“High-grade tea dust” nowadays generally refers to the broken pieces of Jasmine tea. For green tea, I've seen older men buy it from tea merchants for about twenty to thirty yuan per catty. These are the broken pieces at the bottom of large paper boxes after all the green tea has been sold. Tea farmers in the original production areas of famous teas do not sell but consume the high-grade tea dust themselves.
The West Lake Longjing tea garden in winter.
In “Looking South of the River,” it is described that during that era, the high-grade tea dust of Longjing was sold, but only Worry-Free Tea House used it to make tea-soaked rice to give to the needy. Worry-Free Tea House had the resources to continue doing so despite the turbulent times.
In her diary, Hang Pan wrote: “Not to mention the tea farmers, even Father is restless and hasn't visited Hu Gong Temple for a long time. Since the restoration, the situation with Longjing tea has not improved at all; instead, it has become more and more bleak. There were still people tending to the tea garden in the past year, but there have been none this year.”
The term “restoration” refers to Japan's surrender, but the people were still suffering, there was a shortage of labor, and the management and sales of Longjing tea, from the tea garden to the market, were in decline.
Weeding.
In her diary, Hang Pan wrote: “Father instructed me that in autumn and winter, we need to shallowly cultivate and weed, apply base fertilizer, mulch the tea garden, prune branches and leaves, and prevent diseases and pests. I'm most worried about the archworms. When archworms appear, the Longjing tea farmers will have nothing to eat. Tomorrow, I'll go down to the tea garden myself. At the very least, the eighteen imperial tea bushes in front of the house must be taken good care of.”
In a few short sentences, the key points of managing a Longjing tea garden are mentioned. In the era of “Looking South of the River,” the clonal Longjing 43 tea plants had not yet appeared; all were seed-grown varieties. However, since the Ming and Qing dynasties, the West Lake Longjing tea gardens required human management and were not left to grow wild. In the Jiangnan region, there is a focus on intensive cultivation. From the perspective of yield per mu, stability of tea flavor, and the cost of picking labor, the Longjing tea gardens needed to be managed.