Steepedinculture
From a small Tibetan village to a faraway African island, Chinese tea knows no boundaries
On the sunny shores of Mauritius, against the island’s jade-like sea and blue sky, a unique scene is taking place. In a bright-red Chinese traditional silk dress, a young woman delights her guests by performing an elaborate and perfectly synchronized traditional tea ceremony.
The public is mesmerized by her passionate but always elegant movements. In fact, her routine is so fluid and natural that the long-mouth teapot gives the impression to be an integral extension of her body. Some Mauritian guests even wonder: Is it really blood flowing in her veins, or could it be hot fragrant Chinese tea?
In attendance was Jacques Li Chung, CEO of Chinafrica Stage Ltd. “She was beautiful in both her maturity and sincerity. I felt pulled in when I saw her performance. Her gracefulness goes well with the heavenly music. And all her movements had such precision and accuracy,” he told Chinafrica.
This young woman is Wang Fei, a 30-year-old tea ceremony expert, on a mission to spread China’s tea culture across the world, which took her from her hometown in rural China all the way to Africa. Wang has no idea if it is she who has chosen the tea or the tea that has chosen her. But one thing is for sure: Tea has always been connected with her life.
Wang was born to a family of tea-pickers in a village in Ya’an City, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, in a setting of rolling hills of lush tea leaves. Local life there is deeply intertwined with tea plants, as this is a renowned place of traditional Chinese tea culture. Today, the village has been developed into a tourism destination famous for making Tibetan tea, known as Zangcha Village, or Tibetan Tea Village.
“When I was a child, the conditions of my family were not so good. I grew up in my mother’s pack basket, and I followed my parents as they went on the mountain to pick tea. I forged a deep bond with tea from that time,” Wang told Chinafrica.
Wang went on to study the art of tea ceremony at university, and has been involved with tea ever since, eventually teaching tea arts at the Trade School of Sichuan Province, in Ya’an.
Now, Wang is taking her passion overseas. She was appointed in 2015 as the promotion envoy of Sichuan to promote local Tibetan tea abroad. Since then, she has visited a dozen countries, and carried out over 100 tea culture promotion activities as far as South Africa and Mauritius in Africa.