The Gunpowder Gardens or, A Time for Tea: Travels Through India and China in Search of Tea by Jason Goodwin

Author:Jason Goodwin [Goodwin, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Argonaut Books
Published: 2013-12-06T23:00:00+00:00

The Nature of Bohea

Early one morning I arrived at Fuzhou railway station. I had a third-class ticket to Nanning a few hours up the line, where I could pick up the bus to the Wuyi Mountains. I sat on a hard green seat opposite a little girl with grey teeth who stared rudely and spat melon-seed like a machine-gun. Third-class air-conditioning was the open window, which I like best, even though I was covered in grit and clinker smuts by the end of the journey. I could see the smoke streaming from the engine whenever the line curved, which was often, because we followed the course of the Min river, which carried craft mottled and colourless as moths: fishermen’s sampans, poled Oxford-style from the stem, or houseboats, larger versions of the same pen-nib design, with the bamboo awning tight and round over the stern. I’d expected the river to be moribund — perhaps I was growing too used to abandonment and decay as I found it among the European remnants of the coast. This wasn’t an old house but a Chinese river which would be needed as long as it continued to flow.

For millennia, in lieu of decent roads, most goods in China were transported by water, either along the coast or through the web of canals and rivers inland. China shelves from the Tibetan ranges in the east and the Pamirs in the north towards the sea: the country is riddled with rivers and her civilisation grew up on them, fed by them, but fearing them, too. The great rivers do not tame easily. Flood and famine have so terrorised China that her heroes have been river tamers and irrigators. It has been said that the colossal, unprecedented unity of China reflects the need to match the scale of floods with an equivalent grandeur of effort and resource. Tea is mainly cultivated in rice-growing country to the south of the Yangtse River, where the paddy fields have to be deep in water, making seasons when the whole countryside is in flood, not only on the plain but uphill on terraces banked to retain water carried there by hand. The Chinese peasant must understand water to survive: the building of tiny dams, the control of miniature sluices, and the times of flood and shortage.

The Chinese had tried to regulate the timing of foreign trade, to confine trade to a single channel; they saw trade as a seasonal repeat to be understood by reference to ‘oula’ custom, old custom.

Like water beyond a dyke, the barbarian at a port or trading post could be watched and contained (so could his natural ally, the Chinese merchant, who sat near the bottom of the social pile because he neither governed people nor fed them). There were other reasons for confining the trade. When almost every official in government service was expected to have sticky fingers there was at least a limit to what a few pairs of hands could carry away; while constant dealings at a single port would create a pool of experience of dealing with the foreigner.

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