"Pipa Xing" is recited for thousands of years "Fuliang Tea" incense overflows Shenzhou

Tea farmers pick tea in the Yangshi Formation Alpine Ecological Tea Garden in Taoshu Village, Xihu Township, Fuliang County. Photo by Cheng Wanhai

Reporters Shen Xiquan, Gao Haoliang, and Lai Xing

Spring to Gangnam.

In the mist, Fuliang, a small county in northern Ganbei, has ushered in the busyness of the annual tea market.

As the mother of Jingdezhen, the "thousand-year-old porcelain capital", Fuliang County, Jiangxi Province, is famous for porcelain tea and is known as "Porcelain Source Tea Town". However, the world often only knows Jingdezhen, but knows very little about the "Tang Tea Capital" Fuliang. I don't know when the floating beam seems to disappear from the spotlight of history.

Today, we walk into this water and soil, touch the precious memory of the fusion of porcelain and tea in the long river of history, and look for the ancient charm of this cultural pearl of South China.

"Pipa Line" has made "floating beams buy tea" famous for thousands of years

Fuliang, named in the first year of Tang Tianbao. Regarding the origin of the name of the county, according to the Ming Dynasty scholar Guo Zizhang, "when the stream is flooded, the people cut wood as a beam, and Guangya is called a floating beam." And Bai Juyi's poems of the "top stream" of the Tang Dynasty made Fuliang famous all over the world.

One autumn night in 816 AD, Sima Baijuyi of Jiangzhou, who had been degraded to the head of the Xunyang River for a year, had a heavy heart, and the encounter of the pipa girl wandering in the rivers and lakes made him feel empathy, "The same is the fallen man of the end of the world, why should they have known each other when they met"! With a stroke of his pen, he wrote the famous article "Pipa Line" for thousands of years, in which the famous sentence "Merchants are heavy on profits and light on separation, and the former moon floating beam buys tea to go", which makes the reputation of floating beam tea famous for more than a thousand years.

Bai Juyi was in Jiangzhou (present-day Jiujiang, Jiangxi), and the subordinate Wuning and Xiushui (known as Fenning in the Tang Dynasty) were also rich in tea, so why didn't the officials of Jiangzhou write Abouting and Fenning, but they had to pick up floating beams to enter the poems?

"In his youth, Bai Juyi had an indissoluble relationship with the floating beam, which occupied a very important position in his life." Li Xincai, president of the Fuliang County Historical and Cultural Research Institute, has long been committed to the research of local history and culture, and has cherished the historical celebrities, cultural allusions, and ancient buildings in Fuliang.

It turned out that Bai Juyi's eldest brother Bai Youwen had served as the master bookkeeper in Fuliang, and Bai Juyi often called him Fuliang's eldest brother in his family letters. After his father's death, Bai Juyi relied on the support of his eldest brother to study and live, so he often traveled back and forth between Luoyang and Fuliang. He wrote in the "Wounded And Distant Gifts": "My brother was in the floating beam, and he was raised in a small way, and returned to his hometown with his life and rice. ”

In 818, Bai Youwen died of illness, and Bai Juyi affectionately wrote the "Sacrifice to the Floating Liang Elder Brother", expressing his sorrow for the loss of his brother and praising the noble character of his brother.

"Wangxian" floating beam is prosperous because of tea

Passing through the ancient city wall of Fuliang County, you will be greeted by a huge square, which is extended by more than 300 meters by a piece of porcelain plate painting, telling the millennium of Fuliang from 326 to 1960 AD.

A red pagoda in the ancient city stands majestically and is the only relic of the ancient floating beam. We look up at it as if we are looking at the soul that has gone through thousands of years of vicissitudes, imagining it looking down on the lively city life in the streets and alleys, the flag display of the waterfront dock in the distance, and it has also witnessed the decay and decay of people going to the empty buildings and the barren grass...

A history of the rise and fall of the floating beam is also the history of the rise and fall of the floating beam tea.

Fuliang tea production has a long history, starting from the Han Dynasty and flourishing in the Tang Dynasty. Bai Juyi's "Pipa Line" reflects from the side that as early as the Tang Dynasty, Fuliang was the tea trade market in ancient China. At that time, merchants and rich people gathered on the floating beams and competed for tea to chase tea profits.

According to the "Atlas of Yuanhe Counties and Counties" written by Li Jifu, the tang chancellor, Fuliang "produced seven million teas per year, and the tax was more than 150,000 yuan", accounting for about three-eighths of the 400,000 yuan of the national tea tax at that time. Wang Shi, who is also a Tang Dynasty, wrote in the "Treatise on Tea and Wine": "Fuliang Shezhou, all nations come to seek", from which we can imagine the grand situation of Fuliang tea in that year.

Since then, through many dynasties, Fuliang tea has been unbroken for a long time. Tang Xianzu, in the article "Fuliang County's New Works Lecture Hall Endowment", once described Fuliang tea: "The tea of the Fuliang of the Present Husband, crowned in the world, the drapery is clear, and it is thin..."

Fuliang County is located in the northeast of Gan, and the surrounding southern Anhui, western Zhejiang, northern Fujian belong to the same subtropical monsoon climate, the soil and climate is particularly suitable for the growth of tea plants, and because of the benefits of the Changjiang River, water transportation and transportation are developed. Therefore, Fuliang is not only an important tea producing place in ancient China, but also a major tea distribution center.

"Fuliang contributed important taxes to the imperial court, and its economic status in that year was similar to that of the current top 100 counties, so the grade of Fuliang ZhiXian was highly matched with five products, which was much higher than that of the general seven products." Li Xincai said.

The cultural scholar Hu Ping also described the status of Fuliang County during the Tang and Song dynasties in his book "China on Porcelain". In the twenty-eighth year of Tang Kaiyuan (740), there were 1573 counties in the country, divided into seven counties, such as Chi, Qi, Wang, Tight, Upper, Middle, and Lower. Kyoto is ruled by Chi Prefecture, Kyoto's side is Ki Prefecture, and the rest are determined by the number of hukou and the degree of wealth. In the fourth year of Song Xuanhe (1122), there were 1234 counties in the country, which were divided into Chi, Qi, Wang, Tight, Upper, Middle, Middle, Lower, and Lower Eight, and the criteria for dividing them were roughly the same as those of Tang. Fuliang, which has no geographical advantages, was listed as a county in the Tang Dynasty and moved to WangXian next to Gyeonggi before the Song Dynasty.

Wupin County Ya is not the only floating beam, but like the floating beam, it is very rare to continue the five-product grade for more than a thousand years. According to the "Chronicle of Fuliang County", in the tenth year of Qing Tongzhi (1871), Li Jiarui of Fuliang County was "recorded ten times by the main hall of Fuliang County plus ten grades of the Four Pins of Chinga".

Nowadays, we see that fuliang ancient county was rebuilt in the light years of the Qing Dynasty, covering an area of more than 50,000 square meters, and walking through it, you can still feel the majesty of that year. An exhibition board on the wall of the ancient county ya introduces the regulations on the collection of tea taxes in different dynasties from the Tang to the Qing. A large part of the Tea Tax revenue of the Qing Dynasty came from exports. In 1886, tea exports accounted for 80% of the total foreign trade of the Qing government at that time. In foreign trade, the tea produced by Fuliang and the black tea produced in Qimen, Dongzhi and other counties in Anhui are collectively called Qihong because of their similar quality.

There is no time for prosperity and decline, and the ancestral inheritance has been passed down

Since the end of the Qing Dynasty, the brush strokes of the history of fuliang have changed from thick to light. Around 1911, there were about 200 tea merchants in Fuliang County, and in 1936, there were more than 60 tea numbers in Fuliang. After the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, the number of local tea trumpets fell into a trough.

In the 1950s, Fuliang Black Tea experienced a brief golden period. At that time, the state dispatched Huang Chongtao, a tea industry tycoon, Pan Guotai, a fermentation expert, and others, and the first-class kung fu black tea "Fu Nail" developed and exported to the Soviet Union was determined to be "Qi Hong Treasure", which is still praised by the tea industry.

Wang Yongfeng is the non-hereditary inheritor of Fuliang Gongfu black tea, and learned to make tea from Huang Chongtao. He told us about the tea as he made tea. Around 1870, the art of black tea making began to spread to Qimen in Anhui and Fuliang in Jiangxi, and Fuliang soon became one of the few major black tea production and marketing counties in the forefront of China. Among them, the Gongfu black tea produced by the Fuliang "Tianxiang" tea number won the gold medal of the Panama International Peace Expo.

Wang Yongfeng said that the "Fu Nail" was full of pride, in the era of material scarcity, a ton of "Fu Nail" black tea can be exchanged for dozens of tons of steel, creating an era of fuliang and Keemun juxtaposed with special grade black tea.

Regarding the origin of the name "Fu Ding", Wang Yongfeng said that in the past, in order to save time, the workers omitted the side of "floating" and wrote it as "Fu"; the "Jin" character of "Ding" originated from the use of five lines to display the grade of tea, "Jin" indicates the best grade, and "Ding" is the fourth batch, which is the batch number of tea sent to Shanghai Tea Import and Export Corporation after successful development that year.

Unfortunately, in the mid-1960s, the production process of "Fu Nail" was abandoned, many tea makers changed their professions, and "Fu Nail" gradually disappeared from people's vision after a boom. At the beginning of the 21st century, the economic benefits of some state-owned tea factories in Fuliang declined, and many workers were laid off.

At present, there are more than 90 tea enterprises in Fuliang County, and the county's tea output is about 9,000 tons, which is very small compared with the annual output of about 2.9 million tons of tea in the country, but tea is still related to the livelihood of thousands of families in Fuliang. According to statistics, the permanent population of Fuliang County is about 280,000 people, of which more than 50,000 people are employed in the tea industry, and nearly one-third of the county's labor force is engaged in the tea industry.

Wang Yongfeng, who has lived on tea for generations, left his hometown tea garden after graduating from high school to go out and drive a garment factory and an automobile transport team. More than ten years ago, when he returned to his hometown, where the once-famous tea factory was withering away, no one wanted the best tea leaves in the Qingming Dynasty, and could only rot in the tea farmer's home without anyone caring, and an indescribable acid gushed into his heart.

Wang Yongfeng remembered his father's last words of "don't lose your hometown, don't lose your family's home, and don't lose your ancestral home", what else can you do in this life in addition to making money? After more than half a year of ideological struggle, he came up with the idea of regaining his ancestral business and reviving the "Fu Nail" black tea, so he studied tea making technology with Huang Chongtao and transformed into a tea maker.

After several years of intensive research, the "Fu Nail" black tea was picked up and restored, and Wang Yongfeng was named the "Representative Inheritor of Fuliang Gongfu Black Tea Making Technique" in Jiangxi Province's Intangible Cultural Heritage Project. In recent years, Wang Yongfeng often went to various tea-producing townships in Fuliang to hold black tea making skills training courses, driving villagers to develop the black tea industry and increasing villagers' income.

Wang Yongfeng said that tea leaves are alive, and life is more than once: growing on the tree to absorb nutrients, free growth is once, picking, withering, kneading, stir-frying or fermentation, and then falling into the unique tea shape of the bud leaves is once, and finally being brewed, tasted and appreciated by people who understand tea is the third time. What he wants to do in the future is to let more people understand the connotation of Fuliang tea, promote tea culture, and protect the source of living water that fuliang tea culture has never stopped from the past to the future.

First there was Fuliang County, then there was Jingdezhen

Fuliang County was actually the mother of Jingdezhen, and it was not until 1004 AD that Emperor Zhenzong of Song gave his era name "Jingde" to Changnan under the jurisdiction of Fuliang County, which gave the origin of Jingde. Fuliang and Jingdezhen have undergone historical changes in administrative subordination and mutual change, and after the founding of New China, the administrative divisions have been adjusted several times to have what they are today.

Fuliang County is only a 20-minute drive from Jingdezhen, but the two have very different personalities. Fuliang is good at Confucianism, pays attention to indoctrination, and has a flourishing literary style, and ancient academies are spread throughout the townships. The Qing Dynasty poet Ling Rubian described the strong atmosphere of Fuliang Shangxue re-teaching with the phrase "basket public opinion quietly passes in front of the door, and ten households read nine books". Yan Zhenqing, Liu Zongyuan, Wang Anshi, Su Shi, Huang Tingjian and many other literati have all wandered among the grasses and trees of the Floating Mountains, leaving behind famous passages and sentences that are popular among the population.

Jingdezhen has accumulated almost all of its spirit on the porcelain industry, and few people are known for writing books or making meritorious achievements. During the Ming Jiajing period, only one person entered the army because of kejia. Hu Ping believes that unlike Jingdezhen, which was historically an immigrant city, Fuliang is a typical farming, agrarian and commercial society; in other words, the Fuliang people are the real indigenous people of Jingdezhen.

As a symbol of Chinese culture, the three characters of Jingdezhen moved the world because of the name of porcelain, but for a long time it was under the jurisdiction of Fuliang County. According to today's saying, jingdezhen used to be an industrial park in Fuliang, but this park only made one industry - ceramics, and once it was done, it was a thousand years.

Pottery, synonymous with the spirit of craftsmanship in history. "A billet of labor, over seventy-two hands, fang ke into a tool", the Ming Dynasty scientist Song Yingxing's description in "Tiangong Kaiwu", not only about the fine division of labor in Jingdezhen porcelain, but also witnesses the ingenuity of smelting: an ordinary cup has 72 processes, only the mud refining, the blank only pulls the billet, the painter paints without dyeing, the dyeer dyes without painting, and many craftsmen only do one process in their lives.

Producing 20,000 pieces of porcelain every year, more than 2,000 pieces are left after picking and eliminating, the elimination rate is more than 80%, and Xiang Yuanhua, the inheritor of the Royal Kiln craft who was approved to use the "Royal Kiln" trademark in 2007, believes that this kind of aesthetic taste that condenses traditional Chinese culture and pursues the ultimate craftsman spirit is the root and soul of Jingdezhen.

"Craftsmen come from all directions, and the instruments go all over the world." These two poems of Shen Jiazheng in Fuliang County of the Qing Dynasty were widely circulated. However, it is regrettable that in history, the sales of Jingdezhen porcelain to the rest of the world were mainly Hui merchants and Cantonese merchants, just as the Jingdezhen person Lan Pu recorded in the "Jingdezhen Pottery Record": "Foreignware (overseas orders) are sold exclusively to foreigners, and the merchants are more Cantonese and EasternErs." ”

Looking at the world, using porcelain as a medium, today's porcelain has established friendly relations with more than 180 cities in 72 countries around the world.

Tea, rising and falling in the boiling hot years; porcelain, shining in the fiery kiln fire. The marriage of tea and porcelain is full of the poetic life of ancient Chinese literati and scholars, giving people who work here the hope of life, and making the cultural pearl of Fuliang shine in the long river of history.

Strolling along the banks of the Changjiang River, looking out at this city that is still growing, we seem to see the thousand-year-old heritage of porcelain tea culture like a trickle of streams converging into a river, surging from the ancient to the future.

Source: Xinhua Daily Telegraph