By Helen Xu Fei
Anji county nestles at the northern foot of the Tianmu Mountain in northwest Zhejiang, four hours drive away from Shanghai. The mountainous county is a heaven of greenery, and is famous for its bamboo, white tea and eco-tourism.
Anji harbors the largest commercial bamboo forest and bamboo nursery in the country. The aesthetic bamboo scenery captured in the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was shot here. It is also the motherland of the unique Anji white tea, a temperature-sensitive albescence species yielding off-white leaves in early Spring. Tea produced from this bush tastes superbly refreshing with an underlying sweetness.
White-leaf tea is a rare natural mutant. It was once appraised as the best tea of the country by 12th century Song Dynasty emperor Zhaoji, who was a doomed ruler but a great artist and a passionate lover of tea. He concluded in his book The Treatise on Tea that "white-leaf tea is exceptional, and is unlike any other teas. Its branches are intricately winding, and its leaves are delicately translucent. It is rare and grows only by nature in foliage mountains…just one or two bushes are found…" However, as time passed, the rare white-leaf tea was reduced to a legendary tea and nowhere to found.