Does a Higher Fresh-Leaf Standard Mean Better Tea? What Xinyang Tea Farmers Have to Say

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Foodthink Says

Grain Rain has passed, and this year’s golden window for spring tea has briefly drawn to a close. During the Qingming holiday, Foodthink shared the climate-resilience story of a natural farming tea garden in Xinyang. Today we publish the second instalment, exploring the controversy swirling around “Small, Cloudy, Bland” in Xinyang Maojian—how lone bud tips becoming the highest fresh-leaf standard is squeezing local tea farmers, and the new generation’s explorations in sustainable production and management.

*The author has partially revised the first instalment, “Amid Extreme Weather, How Are Spring Teas Around the Country Doing?” You are welcome to click to read. Thanks to reader “Yu Jing” for flagging several factual errors in the original text.

From Deyi Tea Garden Back to the Tea Room. The hot water and the conversation both resumed. When hosting guests, Zhang Chao brewed tea not in the tall glass tumblers typically used for drinking Maojian, but following the gongfu method—using a gaiwan, a fairness pitcher, and small tasting cups, decanting brew by brew. This way, everyone seated shares the same liquor (hence the “fairness” in fairness pitcher), and one can experience the tea’s complete, layered sensory evolution from the first infusion to the last. Once an infusion of Xinyang Maojian was done, the infused leaves were poured out to reveal one by one pale, tender, evenly shaped leaves—on closer inspection, each was one bud and one leaf, just beginning to unfurl.

I had heard that locals in Xinyang divide Maojian into “Small, Cloudy, Bland” and “Large, Clear, Strong”. The term “Large, Clear, Strong” is variously explained—some say it means large-leaf tea, others machine-processed tea, summer–autumn tea, or county-level tea from the expanded growing area—but in any case, the grade is never very high. “Small, Cloudy, Bland” has a clearer referent: its fresh leaves are mostly pure bud tips, scarce and expensive, once highly sought after in the market.

Zhang Chao shot back: “If a cup of tea is both cloudy and bland, do you think it would taste good?”

The answer seems obvious. In my limited tea-drinking experience, the praise most often heard for a fine cup is that its liquor colour is clean and bright, and its flavour is rich.

The flavour profile of tea, compared to the long-established and widely adopted coffee flavour wheel, is no simpler. Add the dimensions of culture and aesthetics, and it becomes more intricate still. A combination of variables—cultivar, origin, mountain site, fresh-leaf grade, picking season, processing technique, and even brewing method—determines the flavour expression of a cup.

And the appreciation of tea is not merely an accumulation and sharpening of taste experience; behind it lies a complex construction of culture, capital, and power, entangled with myth. Among these, the picking grade of fresh leaves is relatively easy to identify, and is therefore often the point of contention.

I. From “one bud and one leaf” to “lone bud tips”

The picking standard at Deyi Tea Garden is “one bud and one leaf”—the traditional fresh-leaf standard for Xinyang Maojian. As a child, Zhang Chao remembered his father’s tinplate tea canister holding precisely this grade. Yet this is no longer the top-grade Xinyang Maojian that today’s market reveres.
● Pure bud-tip green tea, enjoyed at a tea room in downtown Xinyang.

Behind the birth of “Small, Cloudy, Bland”, one historically significant event was the drafting and publication in 2008 of the Geographical Indication Product: Xinyang Maojian Tea—a standard still in force in the Xinyang tea industry today.

Within its grade classification, a new top tier called “Premium” was introduced, air-dropped into the hierarchy for the first time. The plucking window is spring, and the bud-and-leaf requirement is “at least 85% pure bud tips, with the remainder being one bud and one leaf just beginning to unfurl”—far more demanding than the former highest grade, “Special Grade”, which only required one bud and one leaf just beginning to unfurl.

● Top: the 1985 Xinyang Maojian grading standard; middle and bottom: the 2008 edition of the Xinyang Maojian grading standard (GB/T 22737-2008). Source: Xinyang Historical and Cultural Series: Tea Volume

So-called “Small, Cloudy, Bland”—first, the “small” refers to the tea itself: a pursuit of tiny, single bud tips. Second, the “cloudy” refers to the liquor colour: bud tips are covered in fine down, and the drive for a “tight and straight” appearance leads to excessive rolling during processing that tears the leaves, producing a turbid liquor. Third, the “bland” refers to the taste: single buds are plucked very early, so their flavour compounds have yet to fully accumulate.

Today, in the appreciation of Xinyang Maojian, scarcity has become equated with high quality, and its sensory requirements lead with the visual. Beyond the dry tea’s required appearance of being “fine, round, tight and straight”, the brewed liquor must be “tender green and bright”.

“Small, Cloudy, Bland” yields a turbid liquor—”bright” is already compromised; “tender green” can still be engineered.

Chlorophyll converts to yellow under high heat, so the temperatures for fixation, rolling, and shaping are lowered to achieve a “green colour” effect. But if fixation is insufficient, it sacrifices aroma and mouthfeel, and preservation and storage become problematic. As for the possibility that tea made this way may irritate the stomach, Zhang Chao says Xinyang locals often joke among themselves that such tea “scrapes off the grease”.

There are also explanations that “‘cloudy’ simply means lots of white down”, and that “green tea is drunk for freshness, so it must be refrigerated and brewed with water below a boil”—endless attempts at self-justification. With the grade and the price tag set before them, one always needs to construct one’s own staircase down.

● In the aesthetics of Xinyang Maojian, both the 1985 and the 2008 standards emphasise “white down”—the layer of fine hairs covering the surface of young tea buds.

“Small, Cloudy, Bland” came first; “Large, Clear, Strong” emerged only as a comparison after it, and then yet more labels appeared—”Small, Fragrant, Clear”, “Large, Cloudy, Bland”, and so on. Around one naming, more namings were produced.

When “Small, Cloudy, Bland” is chased by the market, the market produces more of it. The “Small, Cloudy, Bland” that arises from raw-material and processing constraints, armed with the legitimacy of rarity and high price, moves from unintentionally making the liquor “cloudy” to actively seeking “cloudiness”, and so perpetuates its own reproduction.

The tea’s flavour, aroma, and other intrinsic qualities gradually cede to “appearance”—or, simply put: looking good matters more than tasting good. This pursuit of white down, early bud-break, and tender freshness is, in a sense, yet another iteration of the “pale-young-thin” aesthetic. Tea professionals at every stage, whether actively or passively, participate in shaping and interpreting this “gaze”.

● One bud and one leaf versus pure bud tips.

II. The Farmer-Harming “Small, Cloudy, Bland”

““Small, Cloudy, Bland” is a potential stomach irritant for the end consumer, but for the production end it is farmer-harming. Within the value chain of Xinyang Maojian, upstream tea farmers, as primary producers, are engaged chiefly in garden management and fresh-leaf supply.\n\nThe plucking of Xinyang’s premium spring teas is entirely manual. Against a structural shortfall in labour, tea pickers from other regions come chasing the harvest every year. Beyond their cash wages, there are ancillary costs—accommodation and meals on site, agency fees, travel, and insurance—and the outlay on hiring tea pickers has been climbing year on year.\n\n\n\n

●Top: tea pickers having lunch in the courtyard of the Min Family Highland Ecological Tea Garden on Cheyun Mountain; they also sleep in the farm buildings within the same courtyard. Most of these tea pickers hail from Nanyang, Henan, and have built long-standing, stable working relationships with the tea-farming couple. Nanyang is a wheat-eating country, whereas Xinyang straddles rice and wheat, so a dedicated woman from Nanyang handles all the cooking. Bottom: after a day’s work, tea pickers at another garden ride an oil-powered tricycle down the mountain to the village dormitory.

●Deyi’s tea pickers mostly come from nearby villages; many commute on electric scooters, and some even drive up the mountain together in a car. Hiring local tea pickers means no ancillary expenses—but it also means paying higher cash wages.

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Insisting on pure bud tips alone means plucking becomes harder and the picking window narrows—tea pickers must devote more effort in fewer days to gather less tea. Output per unit area falls, yet production costs climb: beyond labour, there is rising spend on agricultural inputs and the risk of crop losses from extreme weather. Even though the purchase price for pure bud tips is higher, tea farmers’ overall income is declining. Spring teas of one bud and one leaf or one bud and two leaves cannot command a price, and summer–autumn teas find almost no buyers, so once the twenty days of spring-bud plucking are over, gardens are swiftly pruned back, the farmers head off to take up migrant work, and they scrape by through side employment.\n\n
Facing shrinking returns, tea farmers are compelled to cut costs—slashing the labour budget for garden management—while at the same time pushing up sprouting rates and per-plant yields, which makes them ever more reliant on the convenience and \”efficiency\” of pesticides and chemical fertilisers. But this is a vicious cycle: bud tips fetch a high price, so farmers force the sprouts, the soil compacts, yields drop, they force again, and the soil compacts further… And with picking costs and input costs ever rising, compounded by recurring climate-driven crop failures, tea farmers are buckling under the strain. Through land transfer or outright abandonment, more and more farmers are leaving their own gardens.\n\n The buds push the people, the people push the buds, and in the end all that remains is compacted soil and withered, spent tea bushes—this is yet another kind of \”when the people leave, the tea goes cold\”.\n\n\n\n
●Top: a tea farmer met on the slopes near Deyi at the end of March; asked how his garden was faring, he said the buds simply would not sprout, then swore, \”What the * am I growing!\”; Bottom: tea bushes swallowed up by a tide of withered, yellowed weeds
\n\nIn the past, once the spring harvest ended and the fierce summer arrived, Xinyang tradition held deep ploughing and summer turning in high regard—\”summer turning is worth gold.\” While the garden was overrun with weeds, the ground was turned over once, weeds buried to become compost, soil compaction held at bay, roots given room to breathe, and the scorching midsummer sun baking out pests and pathogens.\n\nZhang Chao sighed: \”In the dead heat of summer, who is going to do that? Better to head into town for a day’s casual labour and pocket a couple of hundred yuan.\”\n\n
●Pure bud tips plucked by tea pickers in a conventional garden. In the days before Qingming, the price once surged to 300 yuan per jin.
\n\n\”But,\” Zhang Chao’s tone shifted, \”the government has begun to recognise the problem, and in recent years it has been steadily calling for change.\”\n\nAt the opening of the 2023 spring harvest, officials from the relevant departments and representatives of leading enterprises did indeed advocate \”optimising the industry structure\” and \”promoting one bud and one leaf, one bud and two leaves.\” It was, in part, a market-rescue measure in response to drought-hit output.\n\nOn this shift in sentiment, Zhang Chao seemed cautiously optimistic—or rather, as someone in the industry, one has little choice but to hope change will come. If standards can be reset at the policy level, the entire industry could turn a corner.\n\nYet years of accumulated gravity behind the pursuit of pure bud tips has become inertia. Rolling the standards back, embracing tradition, is not a matter of days. \”Small, Cloudy, Bland\” has muddied the market, and now Xinyang Maojian needs to \”set things right at the source.\”\n\n But who does the \”setting right,\” and who gets to define the \”source\”?\n\n\n\n
●The hands of a tea picker.
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Looking back over the standardisation history of Xinyang Maojian, it has been the agriculture departments, research institutions, and tea associations who have set the standards and steered the discourse. Tea farmers, tea pickers, and processing workers—the overwhelming majority of this industry—are as voiceless as the tea bushes themselves. When the guiding principle \”government-guided, market-led, tea farmers benefit\” is put forward, the farmers may indeed stand to gain, but the single character for \”benefit\” (受, \”receive\”) lays bare their passivity. Whether it is \”stomach-harming\” or \”farmer-harming,\” ordinary consumers and small-scale tea farmers at the ground level are mere NPCs, with no right to shape the rules of the game.\n\n
3
Multi-Purpose Use and Flexible Production
Zhang Chao is clearly no passive tea farmer—indeed, the label \”tea farmer\” may not fit him at all. He hopes Deyi Tea Garden will grow into something like a French boutique château: distinctive in its own style, handed down from generation to generation. Perhaps \”garden owner\” is the more apt designation. He has a philosophy, convictions, and—crucially—the material and social foundations to put his ideas into practice. But ten years of growing tea at Deyi and five years of processing it have hardly been a smooth sail.\n\nManaging the garden through natural farming methods meant limited yields in the early years, stubbornly high labour costs, and real difficulty connecting with the market. Once, cutting a corner, he borrowed someone else’s ready-made processing line; running organic and conventional tea through the same line led to heavy metal contamination showing up in testing. In the end, he built a complete, self-sufficient chain spanning cultivation, processing, and sales.\n\nDeyi had also tried hand-processing tea early on, hoping to revive traditional methods and chase the authentic taste of Xinyang Maojian. But traditional hand-roasting demands high labour, low output, and puts the master tea roaster’s skill and experience to the ultimate test.\n\nZhang Chao recalled: \”During the hand-processing phase, whether our tea tasted good depended on the roaster’s mood. Output was wildly inconsistent.\” He came to understand that the garden can be managed in a natural, even wayward spirit, but production must compromise and stay rational—and he gradually transitioned to mechanised processing.\n\nHe devoted more patience to the garden and its tea bushes, no longer fixated solely on one authentic expression of Xinyang Maojian. Grounded in the reality of a 300-mu estate, he set about understanding his mountain site and its raw material all over again.\n\n

● Traditional hand-processing of Xinyang Maojian roughly follows these stages: first wok (kill-green, initial rolling) → second wok (strip shaping, final shaping) → drying (charcoal roasting) → re-drying. Every step demands precision and tests the tea master’s skill and experience to the utmost. Because the outlay on equipment is modest and the output suits hand-made tea enthusiasts, the method has survived in some small mountain sites and rural households. In 2014 it was inscribed on the fourth national representative list of intangible cultural heritage. Photo taken at the Min Family Highland Ecological Tea Garden on Cheyun Mountain.
● A more common processing method is “semi-mechanised, semi-handmade”: machine sifting, a mechanical arm linked to bamboo stirring wands for the kill-green in the first wok, hand strip shaping in the second wok, charcoal roasting, then machine sorting. It saves on equipment costs while dramatically raising capacity, yet retains a “hand-made flavour”. Photo taken at the Min Family Highland Ecological Tea Garden on Cheyun Mountain.

Our second brew was black tea, and our third, white tea—both from the same tea bushes as the earlier green tea. I marvelled that in all my years of drinking tea I had rarely managed, in one place at one sitting, to taste green, black, and white tea made from the same cultivar in the same garden.

Zhang Chao said he could also pour me some “winter tea”, also called winter leaf, made after the oolong method. Before the garden is closed up for winter, the tea bushes must be pruned; the young leaves that sprout after the spring harvest but before full lignification are gathered as raw material—a kind of using up what would otherwise go to waste. He makes it just for himself, to enjoy.

Modern tea science divides tea into six major categories—green, white, yellow, oolong, black, and dark—according to the degree of oxidation, which does help producers and consumers orient themselves quickly. But the common misconception that “green tea comes from green tea bushes and black tea comes from black tea bushes” also reveals the mental inertia that scientific classification breeds. Whether in the tea-growing regions or in consumers’ understanding of tea, there is a drift toward homogeneity.

Perhaps we can return to a specific mountain site and make tea according to the specific raw material and the specific season—adapting to the moment and the place rather than simply selecting one from six.

Out of a reverence for the raw material and a search for sustainable garden management, Deyi Tea Garden gradually worked out its own scheme of multi-purpose use and flexible processing. Around Qingming, when the bushes hit their best sprouting stage, the garden picks one bud and one leaf to make Xinyang Maojian—its flagship and benchmark product. As temperatures climb, the leaves grow faster, the buds and leaves swell in size, and production shifts to alternating black and white tea.

At this stage, one bud and one leaf can yield Peony King-grade white tea; one bud and two leaves, Peony grade; three leaves, Gongmei grade. By May the bushes have all but stopped sprouting, and the leaves that emerge are what locals call kaifua ye (“bolting leaves”), used to make Shoumei. The processing techniques and standards for the white tea follow those of Fuding white tea.

● Sun-dried white tea. Photo source: Deyi Tea Garden

What triggers the alternation between white and black tea is the weather.

White tea is a pure sun-drying craft; it needs the right sunshine to work. If the fresh leaves have already been plucked but rain suddenly sets in, or the sky turns overcast day after day, that batch is switched straight to black tea—seamlessly—until the weather clears, at which point white tea production resumes. Zhang Chao calls this “flexible production”: adjusting the rhythm of work to the changes in the weather. Follow nature and it becomes easier. You do have to work with the sky, but you are not entirely at its mercy.

The 2024 spring harvest at Deyi Tea Garden again opened on 29 March. Unlike last year’s drought, this year brought excessive rainfall.

The garden does not pick on rainy days; after rain, the following clear day is left for moisture to evaporate, and the third day should have been the next picking day—but it rained again. So over the twenty-two days from the opening of harvest to Grain Rain—the golden window when spring tea is at its finest—only eleven days of picking were possible. Green tea output this year fell by half compared with last year.

The tea pickers were even more anxious than Zhang Chao, pressing him with four or five phone calls a day, urging their “boss” to send them out to pick—concerned for their own livelihoods, yet also mourning the garden’s reduced yield. But Zhang Chao harboured no regrets. Green tea output had fallen, yes, but black and white tea output had risen. When the tenderness of the fresh leaves had passed the stage suited to green tea, they were turned to black and white tea instead; even the heavens had taken a hand in planning the product mix. Faced with climate volatility, this system of “flexible production” demonstrated its resilience and elasticity all the more clearly.

●20 April 2024, Grain Rain: torrential rain across the garden.

If Deyi Tea Garden plucked only pure bud tips, the picking window would be a mere twenty days. This Multi-Purpose Use model extends it to sixty days—three times the span. From one bud and one leaf right through to the new shoots that put out before late May, the raw material can be fully utilised, enriching the garden’s product range.

Zhang Chao is candid: if he sold only green tea, the garden could not sustain itself; it would not even cover its basic annual outlay. If the “Multi-Purpose Use” model could be adopted more widely and gain acceptance, it might lift the livelihoods of ordinary tea farmers.

●Raw materials of every grade are put to full use. Photo: Deyi Tea Garden
Zhang Chao’s repeated emphasis on “making full use of everything, making the most of the right time and place” is grounded in confidence in his raw material and the ecology of his mountain site. Conventional gardens, driven by principles of standardisation and high output, burn through soil fertility and human labour in a short burst, fuelled by fossil energy. “Making full use” is not extraction; it means keeping in step with the growth rhythms of the tea bushes and the surrounding woodland.

Once the two months of the spring-harvest busy season are over, the garden enters its summer period of natural recovery and growth, free from any human intervention. Autumn is when the old landrace sets seed naturally: to maintain the garden’s density, tea seeds are gathered, pressed for oil, and stored for home use—a kind of full utilisation from leaf to seed. After the Start of Winter, most of the plants in the garden have completed their own life cycle; seeds and underground rootstocks have all ripened. It is then that workers are sent up to clear debris—pulling up ground-level weeds and scrub, cutting them down and laying them as mulch across the garden to help the tea bushes through winter and bank nutrients for next spring’s bud-break.

●Autumn: gathering tea seeds; winter: heavy snow seals the garden shut. Photo: Deyi Tea Garden

IV. Plain Tea and Plain People

With Zhang Chao’s vision of “sponge agriculture” in mind, let us take stock of this “sponge tea garden”. In its vertical arrangement: woodland on the ridge, tea gardens on the slopes, wetlands in the valley. Above the old landrace, tall trees cast shade and break the wind; the ground is blanketed in grass to carry it through winter; below, the taproot plunges deep. Horizontally, the tea bushes thrive in symbiosis with the local flora and fauna. Through the turn of the seasons, traditional green-tea picking gives way to alternating black- and white-tea production. Spring picking, summer rest, summer turning, winter sealing—the year’s tea business is done. Ten years in, the garden has only just found its shape.

Zhang Chao carries a long-termist’s optimism, exploring and planning the future of this garden with unflagging patience.

Deyi Tea Garden’s land-use right has a transfer period of seventy years, which provides a relatively stable and secure footing. I joked: “You’re fifty now, only ten years in—you still have until you’re a hundred and ten.” He replied: “I always feel that perhaps at eighty I could start a whole new venture.” I heard that and nearly felt envious.

And yet, however self-contained the mountain site may be, it exists within far larger forces—climate change, an ageing workforce, and market turbulence. Beyond even that: how does “Xinyang tea” compete in the national tea market, and how does “Chinese tea” locate itself and build its discourse within the ambiguous currents of globalisation?

●As a tea-industry professional rooted in Xinyang, Zhang Chao is regularly organised to visit southern tea regions for study trips—especially Fujian Province, where the industry is far more developed. Every so often, another learning resource from elsewhere in the tea world appears on his desk.

Zhang Chao says that when he stands on the ridge and looks out over the garden, he feels both fulfilment and desolation. Where does the desolation come from? The tea in the cup is finished, the conversation spent, only a faint lingering fragrance at the bottom.

Besides “old landrace”, the Xinyang population cultivar has yet another name; some villages call it “local plain tea”. As I read through the literature, I kept noticing that “traditional garden management” in practice almost always refers to “management dependent on pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and herbicides”. Pesticides and chemical fertilisers have become the new “tradition”.

The truth is, we have long since strayed far from that far older “tradition”—that body of experiential knowledge consigned to the premodern. The new tradition is scientism. And going with nature? That, it turns out, is the truest rebellion against tradition.

Come to think of it, local tea really is plain tea, and the people who grow it, plain people.

In an age where the accelerator and the brake flick back and forth without cease, they grow slowly and respond slowly. Plain people tend the soil; plain tea drives its roots ever deeper. Unable to keep pace with the shifting times, they stand firm against a shifting climate. Clumsily, slowly, withstanding both drought and cold—a miracle of survival.

References
[1] https://www.tianqi24.com/xinyang/history202303.html[2] Xinyang Historical and Cultural Series: Tea Volume

[3] Journal of Tea, 1994, 20(3): 8–11. Huang Daopei, Lü Lizhe, Wei Hui (Xinyang Regional Tea Research Farm, Henan Province, 464100). “Report on the Breeding and Selection of the New Tea Cultivar Xinyang No. 10.”

[4] “Analysis of Changes in Xinyang’s Climatic Resources and Their Impact on Xinyang Maojian Tea Yields”, Lu Yiyan, Xinyang Tea Meteorology Key Laboratory & Xinyang Meteorological Bureau, Xinyang, Henan 464000, China. China Tea, January 2024, Vol. 46, No. 1

[5] “Characteristics of Disastrous Climate Conditions for Tea Production in Shihe District, Xinyang, and Countermeasures”, Wang Qingzhi, Zhai Shumei, Kong Qian, China Agricultural Technology Extension, 2020, Vol. 36, No. 1

[6] “Research on Benefit Distribution in the Tea Industry Value Chain in Xinyang City under Sustainable Development—A Case Study of Village H, Shihegang Town”, Wang Junpeng

[7] “By One Bud and One Leaf, Let Xinyang Maojian Return to Its Essence”, Yang Changxi, Xinyang Daily, 10 April 2023, Page 001

Foodthink Author
Zhang Xiaoshu
A landless youth who creates on a whim and roams wherever the road leads. Graduated from Nanjing University of the Arts in 2016. Interested in art’s role in rural communities, ecofeminism, and sustainable food and farming.

 

 

 

 Acknowledgements

Deyi Tea Garden; Zhang Chao

Working group, the First TBB Community Architecture & Culture Season

Zhao Min, Wang Hao, Yan Fangfang

Unless otherwise noted, all other photographs are by the author

Editor: Ze’en

Published by Foodthink