Tai Ping Hou Kui

Description

Tai Ping Hou Kui is one of the Chinese Top Ten Famous Teas. It is one of the very few Chinese green tea which is made by grown tea leaves, instead of the very tender tea buds and leaves. It is produced in the Taiping County of Anhui. (In 1983, Taiping County was changed to the current name Huangshan District).

The Tai Ping Hou Kui was invented in around 1900. At that time the tea business in the nearby cities of Taiping County, eg. Shanghai, Nanjing and Yangzhou was very good. The customers demanded high quality green tea. The tea farmer Wang Kui Cheng 王魁成 (nicknamed Wang Lao Er) lived in Monkey Hill (Hou Gang 猴岗) of Taiping. He was very smart and experienced in the processing of tea. He decided to use high quality material and refined processing to produce a batch of premium green tea to meet the demand of his customers from big cities. The highest tea garden in Monkey Hill is called Phoenix Peak (Feng Huang Jian 凤凰尖) with an altitude of 750m, and he asked his men to pluck tender long shoots of newly opened one bud three leaves from there. He used all his talents to process the tea. The tea was made and the quality was fantastic. His customers called this tea Wang Lao Er Kui Jian, which means the champion tip of Wang Lao Er (In Chinese, Kui 魁 means No.1, Champion. And also it happend the name of the inventor the word Kui 魁). Later, because the main places in which this tea was produced were Monkey Hill (Hou Gang 猴岗) and Monkey Hole (Hou Keng 猴坑), and the inventor’s name had the character Kui, the tea was formally named Tai Ping Hou Kui. (It was not because that the tea was plucked by monkey as the fairy story tells).