Dark Tea Processing Craftsmanship
01 · Historical Records
After 1949, Yangloudong merged all its tea factories and established the Yangloudong Brick Tea Factory under the China National Tea Corporation, which was later renamed the Hubei Provincial Tea Corporation's Zhaoliqiao Tea Factory.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The Zhaoliqiao brick-tea making craft is a technique for producing green brick tea and rice brick tea, using fresh leaves as raw material and refining them through multiple steps including fixation (kill-green), rolling, pile-fermentation, pressing, and drying. Its area of distribution covers the entire city of Chibi in Hubei Province, together with Chongyang County and Tongcheng County, as well as Linxiang County in Hunan Province. Zhaoliqiao brick tea is divided into green brick tea and rice brick tea. Green brick tea uses intact fresh leaves as its raw material, while rice brick tea takes its name from the fact that all of its raw material consists of tea dust. The craft of making green brick tea begins with leaf selection, which requires choosing leaves that are large in surface and thick in texture, since such leaves are convenient for the multiple rounds of preliminary processing that follow. It then enters the preliminary-processing stage, in which fixation presses out the tea juices and prepares the leaves for the pile-fermentation that follows. Thereafter the leaves proceed in sequence through pile-fermentation, aging, refinement, pressing, and baking, before final packaging and dispatch. The craft of making Zhaoliqiao rice brick tea begins with material selection and refinement. Next comes screening and winnowing, which thoroughly remove sand, grit, and other impurities from the black-tea raw material. The material is then steamed in a fixed ratio of surface tea to inner tea, and it must be steamed through and evenly, a process that both kills harmful bacteria and lets off-odors escape, facilitating the subsequent compact pressing into shape. Finally the brick tea is baked to an appropriate moisture content, after which straw paper is placed between bricks and a low-temperature bake draws the oil off the brick surfaces; once these steps are complete the tea is packaged and dispatched. The use of the traditional manual pile-fermentation process is the defining characteristic of the Zhaoliqiao brick-tea making craft. The predecessor of Zhaoliqiao brick tea was Yangloudong brick tea, located within Zhaoliqiao in Chibi City and commonly known as 'Dong tea.' During the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty, Shanxi tea merchants opened factories such as 'Sanyuchuan' and 'Jushengchuan' in Yangloudong Town to produce Maohe tea, and later reformed Maohe tea into rectangular bricks, producing green brick tea and rice brick tea, with a manufacturing process similar to that of Maohe tea. During the Xianfeng and Tongzhi reigns of the Qing dynasty, foreign firms from Russia, Germany, and Japan, as well as merchants from Hankou, Zhenjiang, Tianjin, and Guangzhou, came one after another to open tea factories in Yangloudong Town, making brick tea and black tea and competing to export them. The Zhaoliqiao brick-tea making craft has a long history and exquisite workmanship, and is suited to people in cold highland regions and areas with high-fat diets; it is a daily necessity for the people of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Gansu Province, and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, as well as for the peoples of Russia, Mongolia, and other countries. The ten-thousand-mile Tea Horse Road running from Yangloudong and Zhaoliqiao to Kyakhta and on to St. Petersburg is a witness to the traditional friendship between China and Russia and to the history of Chinese brick-tea culture's dissemination, promoting cultural exchange and economic development between China and the West and contributing to the strengthening of ethnic unity and the preservation of border stability.
Documented Process Record
The leaves then proceed in sequence through pile-fermentation, aging, refinement, pressing, and baking, before final packaging and dispatch.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The Zhaoliqiao brick-tea craft centers on the two old market towns of Zhaoliqiao and Yangloudong in Chibi City, reaching north across Chongyang and Tongcheng counties and joining Linjiang in Hunan to the south. The Yangloudong area, with tea houses such as Sanyuchuan and Jushengchuan opened by Qing-dynasty Shanxi merchants, became an outlet port for brick tea; its green bricks have coarse, stout strips and its rice bricks are thickly coated with tea dust, unlike the fine, tight strips of Hunan dark tea. Zhaoliqiao, for its part, rests on manual pile-fermentation as its technical backbone.
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04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The Zhaoliqiao brick-tea making craft is transmitted through a master–apprentice model, and in recent years the establishment of training institutes has further promoted and carried forward the skill.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Gan Yuxiang 04-1906
- Li Shengfu 05-2851
- Liu Xingyi 05-2852
- Wei Jiequn 05-2853
- Chen Guofeng
- Jia Genshe
- He Jiangang
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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