Long Coc Tea Hills

Land can be beautiful not because anyone arranged it for visitors, but because people have lived and farmed on it for a very long time. The tea hills of Long Cốc, in Phú Thọ, are a place like that.

Seen from a high point, the land looks strange next to ordinary forests and fields. Hundreds of round, even hills follow one another like giant upturned bowls, and every one is covered in a deep, glossy green. These are tea gardens. They are the typical landscape of the Phú Thọ midlands, and the province's tourism page describes the sight as one that only Long Cốc has. The bowl comparison is only a way of picturing the land, and not an official geographic name.

Long Cốc is a commune in Phú Thọ, in the midland region of northern Vietnam, about 100 kilometers from Hanoi. The land sits at an average height of 300 to 500 meters. According to the national rural tourism website, the air is cool and damp, and mist often hangs over the hills early in the morning. Those two conditions, the chill and the drifting mist, make the beauty that draws many photographers. The tea hills appear through the fog like an ink-wash painting.

Now look at the rows of tea nearest to you. The bushes here are not grown to decorate the land. They are grown to live on. Tea is the main livelihood of hundreds of households of the Mường and the Dao in Long Cốc. The Mường are an ethnic group of northern Vietnam whose language is closely related to Vietnamese. Sources give the planted area as anything from over 600 hectares to nearly a thousand, depending on the year and on what is counted. Whichever figure is right, it is clear that tea covers this whole country of hills.

The green season of tea runs from March to December. That is when the buds push out, when workers and villagers pick, and when the round hills wear their deepest green. After December, the provincial tourism page says, the bushes are cut back to rest through the winter, and the shape of every hill shows more clearly than at any other time. This is why Long Cốc looks different from season to season. Photographs often show it lush and green. But in the cutting season the land is all rounded lines of brown earth, a different beauty, and a calmer one.

The Phú Thọ farmers' association records that Long Cốc has a cooperative for safe tea, with part of its land certified to the VietGAP standard. The cooperative's teas are rated under OCOP. OCOP, short for One Commune One Product, is a national program that rates local products with stars. Three teas have been tied to this land for many years. One is the premium Bát Tiên tea of Long Cốc. Another is Đinh Bát Tiên. The third is Shan tuyết tea. A packet of Long Cốc tea is also part of a livelihood that a whole community has built up with great effort.

Visitors can also take part in picking tea and firing it in a pan by hand, together with the local people. For anyone who has never seen how a cup of tea is made, it is a chance to watch it happen. A hand rests lightly on the tip of a bush and chooses a young shoot, a bud with its first leaves. Then comes the sight of the tea maker rolling the leaves in a hot pan, with the scent rising. At the end there is a cup of tea made from leaves picked by one's own hand. Going from admiring the hills to understanding the tea plant from its roots up is how Long Cốc stays longer in the memory.