The Tea That Left and Came Back
六堡茶 — Liubao — takes its name from a township in Wuzhou, Guangxi, and for a long stretch of its history, most of it never stayed in China at all. It traveled the 茶船古道, the "Tea Boat Ancient Road," out to Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, France — a tea grown at home and consumed almost entirely abroad, the kind once called 侨销茶, "overseas Chinese export tea."
It only started coming back into domestic demand recently, riding in on puerh's collecting boom — drinkers who'd developed a taste for aged, fermented tea started noticing Liubao had been quietly doing the same thing all along, just somewhere else.
This 1998 batch was made from higher-grade old-tree spring leaf, double-steamed and double-pressed by hand in the traditional method, then stored in its original woven bamboo basket ever since. The cup moves in stages — woody at first, deepening into something more aged, finishing on a note tea drinkers here call 参香, "ginseng fragrance." Past the sixth infusion, the sweetness comes forward and the tea is patient enough to be simmered instead of just steeped.
It's an odd kind of homecoming: a tea that spent decades being someone else's daily drink before anyone here thought to ask what it tasted like.