Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily
Guangming Daily reporter Ren Weidong
In Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, there is a large mountain covered by the original forest sea - Mount Kino. The ancients called it "Youle Mountain" and listed it as the first of the six Pu'er tea mountains in Yunnan.
In order to explore the secret of the good tea produced here, the reporter has entered Mount Keno five times. To this day, I still vividly remember a chance encounter at Kino Tea Mountain.
It was a morning last fall, and the reporter was filming in an ancient tea garden in Longpazhai, Kino Township. Suddenly, a dark-faced and wrinkled old kino man in the tea bush breaks into the camera. We have never been born, and when we meet over tea, we are speechless for a while. He quickly turned around and quickly climbed up an ancient tea tree to pick tea. The reporter realized that this was a very meaningful moment, so he used his mobile phone to backlight his image.
The Kino people process freshly picked tea leaves into "cold mix tea". Guangming Daily reporter Ren Weidong photo /Guangming pictures
Later, the reporter found out that the grandfather was 75 years old and was named Ziburu. Obviously, most of his life time has been spent in this ancient tea garden, and he does not know how much he has witnessed the past of the ancient tea mountain.
Later, the reporter learned that the Kino people are a people who will grow and use tea very early, and gradually form their own tea culture. However, due to the lack of historical documents, no one today can say exactly when their ancestors began to grow and eat tea.
When exploring the history of the Kino cultivation and use of tea, there are two myths that came from ancient oral traditions that deserve to be mentioned. In the first legend, after the creation goddess of the Kino people, Ah Yan Yao Bai, opened up the world and created mankind, and handed over the heavens and the earth to the Han and Dai peoples to manage. Because the Kino people were unable to participate in the distribution for some reason, Ah Yan Yao Bai was worried that their lives were difficult, so he sprinkled a handful of tea seeds on Mount Kino and let them make a living from tea. Since then, Mount Kino has become a place rich in tea.
The second legend says that as early as the Three Kingdoms period, Zhuge Liang (Kong Ming), the chancellor of the Shu kingdom, led a large army to the south to Mount Kino, and a small number of soldiers slept due to fatigue during the march. When they woke up, they found that the large army had already gone far, so they hurried to catch up, but Kong Ming had always ruled the army strictly and refused to take them in. These people had to be "dropped" in mount Keno, and the descendants slowly formed the Kino tribe.
However, the kind-hearted Mr. Kong Ming, worried that it would be difficult for these fallen people to survive on such a deserted mountain, gave them a handful of tea seeds and taught them to grow tea for a living. So the Kino people planted tea on Mount Keno. To this day, they still worship Zhuge Liang as a tea ancestor.
Interestingly, this second legend was later adopted by local revision experts in the Qing Dynasty. The "Records of Pu'er Province" compiled during the Daoguang period recorded in volume 20, "Monuments": "The relics of the Six Tea Mountains are in the southern part of the city, and the old WuHou traversed the Six Mountains, leaving the bronze gong in Youle, placing the thallium in Mangzhi, burying the iron bricks in the barbarian bricks, the remains of the wood in yibang, the buried stirrups in The Leatheren, and the bag in the slow sprinkler, because of the name of its mountain." There is also a tea king tree in Mangzhi, which is larger than the Wushan tea tree, and it is said that it is the relics of Wuhou, and it is now worshiped by the people of Yi. ”
The earliest written records of tea produced in Mount Kino date back to the Tang and Song dynasties. Fan Qi of the Tang Dynasty recorded in the "Yunnan Zhi Vol. VII": "Tea comes out of the mountains of Yinsheng City, and there is no method of harvesting." Mengshe man drank it with pepper, ginger, cinnamon and cooking. The Song Dynasty literary scholar Li Shi also said in volume VII of his "Continued Natural History": "Tea, out of the silver and born in the mountains, when picked, mixed peppers and ginger cooked and drunk." ”
According to the late Yunnan local history expert and professor of Yunnan University, Fang Guoyu, in the "Gossip Pu'er Tea", "the so-called Yinsheng City, that is, the '(Kainan) Yinsheng Festival' area set up by Nanzhao, is in the land south of the present-day Jingdong and Jinggu Valley. The tea-producing 'YinshengChengJie Mountains' were within the jurisdiction of the Kainan Jiedu, that is, the tea-producing area of present-day Xishuangbanna, which was ruled by Nanzhao at that time. Also known as 'Mengshe Man', it is a resident of the Erhai area. It can be seen that as early as 1,200 years ago, the tea in Xishuangbanna had been marketed in the Erhai area. The "Nanzhao" here refers to the Local Government of nanzhao in the Dali area of Yunnan during the Tang Dynasty.
During the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty, Yunnan Pu'er tea was officially included in the imperial court tribute tea case book and designated as the special tea for the royal winter. Kino Camellia thus "made a splash". The "Yu Hengzhi of the DianHai" during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty records that "the name of Pucha is more important than the world, and the reason why this Dian is for the sake of production and the capital and the reliance is also out of the six tea mountains to which Pu'er belongs: one is Youle, the second is Gedeng, the third is Yibang, the fourth is Mangzhi, the fifth is Barbaric Song, the sixth is slowly sprinkled, and the Zhou is eight hundred miles." The "Yule" mentioned here is today's Mount Kino. In 1729, the Qing government set up a special "Youle Tongzhi" in Mount Kino to manage the trade in tea and related taxes. At that time, many tea merchants and horse gangs came to buy tea, and Longpa Zhai in Kino Mountain was once a tea farm set up by the Qing government and a tea making center at that time.
Why does Mount Kino produce good tea? One thing is clear today: the natural ecological conditions here are superior. The Kino Mountain System has no mountain remnants, the mountains are undulating, high temperature and rainy all year round, and the average annual temperature is above 20 °C. The soil of the ancient tea garden in the mountains is red soil, with high organic matter content, and the soil is fertile and pollution-free, which is very suitable for the growth of large-leaf tea plants.
Generations of tea with the tea, tea for the living of the Kino people "eat tea" in a variety of ways, each cottage still retains some quaint, primitive tea worship, tea drinking customs, such as bao roast tea, Layou, bamboo tube tea. Among them, "Layou" is also known as "cold mix tea". Kino people generally take local materials when they go up the mountain to work and rest, use a machete they carry with them to cut down a thick bamboo tube, cut it in half to make a container, and then pick a few fresh tea leaves from the tea tree next to them, crush them by hand and put them into bamboo utensils, take a little mountain spring water to pour in, add a little salt, pepper, garlic, etc., stir it evenly and eat it, which can not only refresh the thirst, but also eat rice. The method of storing tea leaves with locally grown natural bamboo tubes also fully reflects the wisdom of the Kino people in using nature.
Of course, the Kino people not only eat and drink tea themselves, but also have long learned to exchange goods with the Dai and Han people in the Pingba area under the mountain to obtain much-needed daily necessities. There is a Kino folk song "Han Brother Where Are You Coming From" that sings:
Tall Han Chinese Brother, where are you from?
Za Lei, Za Jiao, we walked over.
Did pickled walnuts and candy be brought?
Keno the best fresh tea with you to change...
Today, the tea leaves of Mount Kino are exported to all over the world, helping the people of Kino to get rid of the poverty of thousands of years, and also making the fragrance of Kino mountain tea float all over the world.
Guangming Daily (09/10/2021 09 edition)