rediscovering Gulao Tea and my ancestral Roots
My mother’s ancestral hometown is Kaiping, a small town in Guangdong, nestled close to Heshan—just a ten-minute motorcycle ride away. Back in 2004, just before Qingming Festival, my family returned to Kaiping to honor our ancestors. By then, I had already started my journey into the world of tea, learning under my master’s guidance. One day, in passing, He mentioned Guangdong’s historic Gulao Silver Needle tea, a variety once popular throughout Southeast Asia, even making its way into modern Chinese tea scriptures. As he spoke, it felt almost as though my mother’s ancestral DNA gently nudged me—this tea, with its deep historical roots, subtly imprinted itself in my mind.
On that Qingming day, I casually asked my cousin, “How far is Gulao Town from here?” Upon hearing that Seb and I were looking for Gulao Silver Needle, my cousin immediately jumped on his motorcycle, and in less than ten minutes, we found ourselves in Gulao Village. After asking around, we learned that no one in the area still grew tea. The once-bustling tea mountains were now silent, the tea trees scattered and abandoned.
But fate has a funny way of working. As we wandered deeper into the village, we came upon a man in his thirties, feeding chickens and ducks. On a whim, I asked him about Gulao Silver Needle. The man looked at me with an amused curiosity: “You, a young girl, and this foreigner, know about Gulao tea? Tea doesn’t make money anymore. Most people have pulled out their tea trees to plant something more profitable. Even fewer people still make Gulao Silver Needle.”
Then, after a thoughtful pause, he said, “I still have a patch of tea trees up in the mountains. Every year, I pick some leaves, fry them for myself, and give them to relatives and friends. It’s not Gulao Silver Needle, though. It’s just regular Gulao fried green tea. I picked some fresh leaves this year. I still have about 250 grams left—if you’d like it, I can give it to you.”
We were taken aback by his generosity. He led us to his simple tea-roasting corner, where a large iron pot sat over a firewood stove. That was his entire tea-making setup.
We eagerly accepted his offer and asked, “Will you be making more tea after Qingming? If you do, we’d love to buy some from you.” He smiled and replied, “I won’t have much—maybe three or five kilograms at most.” We exchanged contact information, and about two weeks later, after returning to Guangzhou, I received a call from him. He was visiting relatives in Guangzhou and offered to bring the tea to us. We met at a bus station, and he handed me a long plastic bag—originally meant for large rolls of toilet paper, tied with a red plastic string at one end. “Couldn’t find a better bag,” he said with a laugh.
And the price—well, it was nothing short of a surprise. Two kilograms for just 64 yuan (16 yuan per jin). No wonder he said the tea business wasn’t profitable anymore. We insisted on giving him more money, but he wouldn’t take it. With a smile and a wave, he was gone.
That tea, that humble offering, has remained with us ever since. Every year, we brew a few cups, savoring the memory of a tea that came from the very soil of my ancestral roots. Today, as I stumbled upon a report from the Heshan government, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they’ve been actively working to revive the Gulao tea culture. In Guangdong, when the government gets behind something, you can bet it will have ripple effects. I read a few articles, and it seems that Gulao’s tea culture is thriving once again. For someone like me, who loves tea, it’s a beautiful thing to witness the return of a tea that is so deeply tied to my heritage.
So, in tribute to that long-lost memory, I brewed some of that Gulao tea—aged for 20 years—while I gently tapped out this little story. A cup of tea, steeped in history, and memories from a time when I sought out a piece of my past, one leaf at a time.