Putuoshan Focha (Buddha Green Tea)

I am always on the look out for tea whenever we travel to China. Since this trip to visit all the sacred mountains in China was going to be our last for quite some time, I wanted to be sure and take advantage of it to buy some interesting tea. We were visiting one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains (Putuoshan) when we got this tea.

I talked Sunee into buying a small can of the local (and very famous) Putuoshan Focha (普陀佛茶) or Buddha tea. It was super expensive but I wanted desperately to try it. We bought the tea at a local tourist place that was part of the package tour of Putuoshan so everything was expensive. I did not even see any tea on the island during our tour. So here it is over a month after arriving back home to Bangkok and I am just getting around to drinking it. Guess I was not so desperate after all.

The leaves are a bit curled and light green and gold with fuzzy hairs on most of the golden buds. They reminded me a little of Mengding Gan Lu but not as tightly wound.

I used my most expensive tea pot. (Hey, my pots are not really that expensive because I was told early on that tea pots made cheaply from the same clay that is artistically designed produces the same level of tea.)

I allowed the water to cool a bit from my boiling pot before pouring into the waiting small amount of tea leaves. I was only going to taste it so my desperation speech to Sunee would become truth.

This tea is as good as advertised or as good as the ads that I had read from some of the big suppliers on tea on the internet had promised . I liked it, very much.

To be perfectly honest, we sneaked a bit of this tea to try in our hotel in Ningbo after finishing the tour of Putuoshan. Neither of us were impressed. We simply put some in a tea cup, poured the boiling water on top and waited for it to turn color. As I recall, it seemed to be very grassy tasting. I got no grassy taste in this, the official tasting. It was sweet and refreshing and like the Longjing tea I had while we were in China, it reminded me of the sparkling water we used to get from the artisian well not far from where I grew up in Oklahoma. Refreshing, sparkling and sweet. I knew I should have bought more of it!