An old tea master, six Dahongpao plants and half a century of tea affairs.
Mr. Wang Shunming is the inheritor of the production skills of Wuyi Rock Tea (Da Hong Pao), the first batch of intangible cultural heritage in China, and the main drafter of the international standard GB/18475 for Wuyi Rock Tea. He is well aware of the development of the tea industry in Wuyi Mountain and can be called a master among masters. He has made tea all his life and practiced it to be a comfortable and comfortable tea person for the land that nurtured him.
He has served as the guardian of six Dahongpao mother trees in Wuyi Mountain for more than 20 years and witnessed the cessation of harvesting of Dahongpao mother trees and the introduction of the national standard for Wuyi rock tea. His life's work is closely related to tea, from production, cultivation, review, and teaching. Even after retiring, he would still go to the workshop and stay up all night during the tea-picking season to teach his disciples how to making tea.
On the cliffs of Jiulongke in Wuyi Mountain, six mother trees of Dahongpao have experienced nearly 400 years of wind and frost. For Wang Shunming, who is now in his seventies, he spent more than 20 years of his youth guarding the mother trees of Dahongpao.
In 1963, 9-year-old Wang Shunming immigrated to Wuyishan Tea Farm with his parents. As a child, he saw the Dahongpao mother tree for the first time while playing in the mountains. In 1974, Wang Shunming studied under Mr. Yao Yueming, the master of Wuyi rock tea, and gradually became deeply involved in the industry. In 1986, he served as the director and party secretary of Wuyishan Comprehensive Farm, and since then he has personally managed and produced Dahongpao mother tree tea.
Wang Shunming and his research team also tested the chromosome genes and the four resistances (disease resistance, insect resistance, high-temperature resistance, and low-temperature resistance) of the Dahongpao mother tree. They used the second Dahongpao as the breeding mother tree and used asexual reproduction for cutting cultivation to breed tens of thousands of acres of tea trees. In 2002, the mandatory national standard for Dahongpao was promulgated. Wuyishan City followed the "national standard" to regulate operations and began mass production of Dahongpao, and its quality has reached the level of the mother tree Dahongpao.
Wang Shunming led the drafting of the "National Standard for Wuyi Rock Tea". He also organized and coordinated everyone to complete the protection of the origin of Wuyi Rock Tea and the certification trademark of Dahongpao. As a witness of Wuyi Rock Tea's transition from a planned economy to a market economy, Wang Shunming said that completing these tasks is also a task given to him by the times. "The wisdom of generations of tea workers has been perfected in my hands. It has become a relatively theoretical system of documented rules."
After spending a long time with the Dahongpao mother tree, Wang Shunming can feel the deepening of the relationship between people and the tree. In 2006, the Wuyishan Municipal Government stopped harvesting six Dahongpao mother trees and kept them for maintenance. At that time, Wang Shunming was also old, "I dedicated my youth to it." Dahongpao mother tree tea has since become extinct. Wang Shunming wrote a poem "Dahongpao Fu", comparing these tea trees to "fragrant and self-admiring" "beauties in the empty valley": "Their legend is also profound, their charm is also deep, and their metaphors are also profound." Now every time he goes to see them, Wang Shunming will observe them carefully and look at them affectionately before leaving, reluctant to leave.
At the 2020 First China Intangible Cultural Heritage Forum, Wang Shunming mentioned in his speech that "without today's new era platform, our masters are just craftsmen." With the platform, "our inheritors will have souls and the value of their later years will reappear."
