Ban Pun Puerh – A Hidden Classic

Gems within the world of tea often lie within the realms of classics, happily obscured except for those who truly ‘search’ out teas. Sitting within the green fertile hills, Ban Pun is the ‘victim’ of their more famed neighbor’s reputations, eliciting little interest because they simply aren’t known or searched for. These teas become something rare and special as their names aren’t splashed around. They remain upon the lips and tongues of those locals who don’t buy into the hype…they remain hidden classics that are produced in small quantities for those who ‘know’.

Southwest of Menghai, amidst the imposing empires of some of Puerh’s formidable teas, Lau Banzhang, Hsin Banzhang and Hou Kai, a tea of potent abilities has silently grown for long centuries keeping itself to itself, if only because of its ostentatious and almost flawless Puerh neighbor…the exulted Lau Banzhang. Banzhang teas have long commanded huge sums of money and respect among Asian Puerh tea buyers.

No airport dots Menghai’s increasingly busy lines; if one comes, one comes by four wheeled machine. My bus does as it always does in these areas: it winds and bends and chugs its way for the fifty or so minutes from Jinghong to Menghai. Lush fruit growing valleys of banana and sumptuous pineapple thin out to give way to forests and the masses of rubber tree plantations, which in turn give way to tea, as the altitudes rise to near a thousand meters. It is when my eyes come upon the increasing number of tea plants that a certain settled calm hits the body, as if the tastes are already on the palate.

As always with my tea adventures in Asia, it is the people aspect which make things happen and opens up previously unknown (but dreamt about) voids, where tea and its magic touch reside. ‘A friend who knows a friend who’s cousin lives in a village’ or sometimes ‘my cousin’s husband’s sister’s dog might know someone’. It matters not to me, as long as the source is trustworthy and the end result is a quality tea in the mouth. These wonderfully informal ways are all about what Asia hasn’t forgotten – the human element. In this case, I will be met at the Menghai bus station and hustled into the Pulang Mountains, still further southwest. A friend’s friend will pick me up…this is all of the information I have, which isn’t at all atypical. Things down here in the south are often this way – casual to the extreme, but with the often surprising bonus that things do progress, somehow.

My contact is waiting at the bus station with a 4×4 that has weathered a few brutal lives. Known simply as ‘La’, my contact, driver and tea guide is a small, thickset woman with hunched, powerful shoulders and a kind of haunted look to her. She is of the Hani people, is chestnut colored and has hands that look quite capable of bashing holes into steel. Our two hour drive is one of continuous bouncing, where my hostess reveals an ability to shift gears, talk on the phone in rapid bursts, and face me while talking – all simultaneously. She is a small, multitasking woman who can do it all.

The village of Ban Pun and its little green leaves of glory lie tucked into the Pulang Mountains southwest of Menghai and has remained slightly anonymous due to one single fact: that it resides within a few short kilometers of Lau Banzhang – one of the most famed Puerh growing regions on the planet. There is nothing else around, besides a few other key tea growing villages.  Ban Pun village has both Hani and Lahu people and its 1700 meter altitude puts it in the realm of a ‘perfect’ conflux of elements for tea growth – forest coverage, humidity and temperatures. Ancient tea forests – precious and ageless – surround the town, which like many other tea towns within the Pulang Mountains, sits in a slight bowl surrounded by red earth and rolling hills of rich green. All about the town are makeshift plastic covered ‘drying’ shelters for tea leaves. It is a town that lives and breathes tea. It is a town that already sings to me.

I am quickly introduced to a relative of a friend of La’s, a young and silent girl who, without any fuss whatsoever, beckons me to follow her up a path. The day’s heat is upon us, but the light in autumn begins to fade quickly and there is much to see…I hope.

The moment we enter the forest we are wrapped in the sounds and smells of rich sub-tropical delight. Cicadas drone on in ebbs and flows and the green envelope that is the tea forest takes in all of the senses. Young tea plants – younger tea plants – line the pathways, like the polite yet -to-form acolytes that they are. Pushing further in and up into the green fortress the tea plants give way to sporadic green giants – tea trees that defy everything around them. Bamboo, tea’s old companion, shoots up in groves, providing coverage, and working in a kind of complicit cooperation with the tea trees. Taking up different minerals from the red caked earth and sending its shallow roots in a splayed pattern, bamboo, one of nature’s fastest growers, never competes with tea’s deep and direct root lines.

Moving ever higher through the green, a massive tea tree is suddenly before us…I am in a mumbling kind of awe while my sure-footed hostess merely shrugs and smiles, continuing on her way. The very ancient of the ancient trees here range back to seven or eight hundred years and the one I stare at seems to just shoot beyond, up through the canopy, like a natural totem.

At one point, though we haven’t crossed any pickers, we come across a delicate homage to a picker’s life: a food sack, bottle of water and a neatly arranged pile of freshly picked leaves that lie in a shaded area. Even though summer harvests recently took place, not one of the tea trees looks to have been over-harvested. That is one of the golden rules of these areas, to never over-harvest for the sake of a few extra kilos of tea. Balance, so difficult to achieve upon much of the glutted globe, here finds itself simply because it has been left to its own reasonable devices.

The light breeze that shoots through the forests comes from the northwest, where Burma’s line of mountains funnels weather systems down. Here in these active green forests, little moves that isn’t natural and tea would be hard pressed to find a better home…and I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be content withering my days away, taking in teas and the scented winds in this sanctuary for the senses.

Hours later, I am stuffed into a favorite tea house, back in Menghai, along with some of the tea that needs tasting, Ban Pun. With all of my senses now activated (barring the one crucial sense of taste) I must sip some of the goodness I saw in the village and its forests. Gathered, as always, in the tea shop, is a collection of friends, family, and neighbors. Chatter is going strong and there are many ‘requests’ of what teas to serve, but the tea of the hour will be Ban Pun. The dried leaves look discreet, understated, and entirely anemic, but with the addition of boiling water they will explode into their full shape and release their scented water.

The tea hostesses (there is a rotating policy…whenever the seat is empty for more than two minutes another body occupies the vital pouring role) go on about how Ban Pun is as good as many of the classics at a fraction of the price. My excitement is internal and I keep it there for the time being. There are few calamities in my own life worse than the expectation of a great tea hitting the taste buds, only for it to fade away or simply limply die in the mouth.

A first look at the leaves as they are inundated with water shows a clear copper color and the smell fires up the nasal passages to impart a sharp tang. It is a newly picked tea (within three months) so the mouth – regardless of anything else – will be hit with a vegetal blast that new teas inevitably carry. The first cup confirms that the tea is bitter in that ‘new’ tea way. Its fresh, pungent elements are all there for the mouth to take in. There is no hiding the teas’ force, but this is where the maker of the tea and a great producer come into play. By preparing similar amounts of tea, and using an identical temperature and method, a tea master or server can judge a tea’s aroma and taste consistently. Besides the maker or server, a producer’s value cannot be overstated either, as it is the producer who controls the ‘preparation’ of tea that is the final stage before tea is consumed. It is here, at this dividing or production point, that a good tea can descend into becoming a bad tea, or inversely (and hopefully) can become a great tea.

Whatever the bitter blast that is conjured by the first sip of tea, the Ban Pun finishes with a lingering trail of sweetness in the throat and it continues this way for the next 7 infusions. Debates inevitably start about the tea’s qualities, with two of our tea group claiming, that while a great tea, they have never heard of it so it must not be ‘that good’. This is one of the x-factors with tea: that one doesn’t have to have heard of it at all for it to be a great tea. In fact, it kind of adds a mysterious gloss to the leaves in question. The Ban Pun is for my buds a classic that will age beautifully, with tannins smoothing out the vegetal blasts; even now, with the tea at its astringent pinnacle, it is a tea that grips the mouth and then gently lets it go. Its’ clean strength warrants a longer investigation…which in my own way of thinking equates to buying a couple of kilograms to sip in my own time in as ridiculously large quantities as I choose.