Purple Leaf Bamboo Shoot Tea

To Guzhu Mountain near Changxing, the home of Purple Lead Bamboo Shoot Tea (Zhishun Cha).

Cards on the table here. I don't think the look if the tea lives up to its name, and in that respect it was something of a disappointment.

A small number of the young buds are purple, but they are not picked separately and the final product is little different in colour from other green teas. Similarly, I'm not convinced that the tea shoots resemble bamboo shoots. The original plants grew in a bamboo forest, and the bamboo shoots themselves are purple, so maybe that's a factor. (That's me with a real bamboo shoot in the picture below).

Having said all that, the tea made from these leaves has a lovely flavour and is keenly sought after. I think it's partly a case of preserving and celebrating something important from local tea history, which I completely understand. It must make much more sense locally than it does to me as an ignorant outsider. This has been picked up on by specialist buyers in Japan and elsewhere, so maybe I am missing the point. It might appear in Fortnum & Mason yet. 

After trip reflection
I got this a bit wrong. I should have focused on the quality of the tea and its historical importance, and not got hung up on the name. I have tasted it again and recognise it as a fine tea. It will be on the Fortnum & Mason list.


As far as the local history is concerned, Purple Leaf Bamboo Shoot tea was a favourite of Emperor Daizong during the Tang Dynasty, and Guzhu is now something of a tea tourist centre. It has  an enormous new tea museum dedicated to Lu Yu (733-804), venerated as "The Tea Sage", and writer of The Tea Classic, the first monograph on tea in the world.
There is such a rich tea history in China, and it underpins the reverence which is still shown to tea, particularly in ancient tea areas such as Yunnan. This is one of the things that makes visiting China so special for me.