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tend to sink to the bottom of the containers, thus leading to a poorer quality of tea in the early spring, when the end of the previous year's harvest is being drunk, than in the summer. For this reason some good quality tea is usually reserved for the New Year festivities when good tea would otherwise be difficult to find.
The tea trees owned and used by the villagers are not given much attention apart from the annual stripping away of creepers. The trees are allowed to grow naturally for ten years or so until they are fifteen feet or more tall and no longer easy to strip the leaves off. By this stage, too, the regular stripping off of the leaves tends to make the tree spindly and unproductive. Old, tall trees of this sort are then cut down and replaced with newly planted trees. Usually the new trees are just branches cut off old trees and placed in the ground: careful families plant half-a-dozen such branches each year to ensure that at least one or two new trees are successfully established each season.
While most tea trees are owned by individual families or village trusts, a few stands are not privately owned, but available to anyone who wishes to use them. These clumps of “wild” trees are often of very tall old trees, with thick trunks and much larger, coarser leaves than the young trees in active use by the villagers. These stands of wild trees are used by the villagers as sources of branches for transplanting, as the wild trees are considered to be particularly strong and vigorous, and the leaves of young trees grown in this way from wild stocks are believed to give a particularly fine tea.
Tea prepared by New Territories villagers in the traditional way described above has a delicate, light taste and a slightly astringent quality, and is easy to drink and pleasing to the palate. It is locally known as “Hill Tea” (山茶), and tea of this type is still purchasable in the New Territories Market Towns, although most now available in Hong Kong is produced from villages just across the border.
At present the Mau Tso Ngam villagers, as also those other New Territories villagers still preparing their own tea, prepare only enough for their own family use. Four or five days' work by a