Bulang Farmer Livestream - Authentic Tea Farmer Experience

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This guy caught my eye during his livestream because he didn’t seem very commercial and pushy when he was doing his stream. I’m trying to watch livestreams that are less commercial or have actual farmers who know their stuff.

He mentioned that it takes him around 30 minutes to get access to the delivery company as his village was too small to have a delivery point so he take a motorbike to the nearest town to post the orders. He too his phone outside during the stream - and indeed he had a small road to his area that was built 2 years ago so they recently got good road access but the village was too small to have postal / delivery services.

Finding something like this is the exact reason why I’m interested in learning about Pu Erh and more about the tea culture. It’s pretty interesting that farmers can start streaming and talk about their own passions and takes on tea - usually an interaction like this would be reserved for a extensive in person tour of Yunnan - but nowadays we can just watch a livestream and ask questions.

Bulang farmer livestreaming from his village, showing the tea plants and discussing traditional farming methods

I did some research it takes around 3 hours to fly to yishangbanan from Hong Kong, and from there it takes around 2 hours by car to get up the mountain.

Some thoughts

• As a minority, mandarin is not his native dialect - I can detect some regional tones but he’s a lot clearer than other farmers I’ve seen on Yi Yao livestraems
• As a farmer he saw his friends modernize their farming process, such as cutting down tea trees differently to improve yield.
• Historically they have been making tea using traditional processes, but the temptation to modernize is there (ie use machines to process the tea so it’s faster / cheaper)
• He keeps his 黄金叶 for personal consumption
• Language is a barrier as there are different tribes that don’t speak mandarin.
• He belongs to 布朗族 minority groups
• He commented that tea pickers like him occasionally pick some leaves and place it in their mouths to wake themselves up during their work. I guess they don’t have access to a kettle in the mountains.
• The talked about 茶毫 - and how grows during aging? need to research this more.

Review Pending