Anxi is the tea capital of China and the birthplace of Tieguanyin oolong. A county of a million people just north of Xiamen, it lives on tea: some 600,000 mu of tea gardens, around 800,000 people in the tea trade, and a market that handles on the order of a tenth of all the tea in China. Forty years ago it was one of Fujian's poorest places.
Anxi, a county in Quanzhou in southern Fujian just north of Xiamen, is the tea capital of China. Its great trading complex, named exactly that, the China Tea Capital, runs to more than 1,800 storefronts, and in the autumn tea season daily trade can reach around fifty tons. The county's tea gardens cover some 600,000 mu, by recent official accounts it grows and trades on the order of a tenth of all the tea in China, and roughly 800,000 of its million people live off tea or tea-related work. Tea does not just lead the local economy; it more or less is the local economy.
Tea has grown here since the late Tang, but Anxi's signature is Tieguanyin, “the Iron Boddhisattva of Mercy,” one of China's ten famous teas, a semi-fermented oolong discovered about three hundred years ago in the town of Xiping. Two origin legends survive, one of a devout farmer named Wei Yin guided by a dream of the goddess Guanyin, one of a scholar-official named Wang Shirang who found a strange tea tree among the rocks. Anxi's farmers invented the oolong-making craft and the tea-tree cutting-propagation method, and sent their tea out along the Maritime Silk Road from Quanzhou. The United Nations' FAO lists the Anxi tea system as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System.
It was not always rich. Into the mid-1990s Anxi was one of the most impoverished counties in Fujian; in 1985 the average farmer made about 270 yuan a year and a third of the population struggled for basics. Then the tea boom arrived, and within a decade the county turned around, on the strength of a saying that became almost literal, “famous Tieguanyin, its value exceeds gold.” It is the same plot as the atlas's guitar county, Zheng'an, a poor place lifted out of poverty by one improbable product, except that here the product is a leaf.
Anxi has since gone strikingly high-tech about its leaf. It launched “Anxi Tieguanyin No. 1,” the first Chinese remote-sensing satellite named after a tea, which watches the gardens, soil and weather from 535 kilometres up, and e-commerce and supply-chain firms have reshaped the trade over the past decade. And, improbably, the same county is also China's capital of rattan-and-wrought-iron handicrafts, home decor shipped to more than fifty countries, a second industry hiding behind the first.