An artwork on display in the Yaan Museum shows how dark tea was packed in bamboo holders.  

Most of us think Pu’er when thinking of dark tea, but a visit to Yaan in Southwest China’s Sichuan province will surely put a surprise on their faces.

Pu’er is actually a small sub-division of China’s dark tea, a category of tea that requires a secondary fermentation process, also called a post-production process. Dark tea is commonly known to have the function of aiding digestion and revitalizing energy, and it has been a daily drink of the Tibetans for more than a thousand years.

There is a saying that “Tibetans can live without food for three days, but cannot go without tea for a day.” In the Tibetan plateau where fresh fruit and vegetable are scare, meat, butter and barley are the staple food. Drinking fat-dissolving drink tea is not only a traditional custom but also a physical need.

Dark tea is the essential ingredient of Tibetan butter tea, the indispensable beverage of everyday life for the Tibetans. However, dark tea was not originally produced in Tibet, as its weather and geographical condition are not suitable for growing tea plants.

An artwork on display in the Yaan Museum shows the traditional way of making Tibetan dark tea, Aug 4, 2015.

The dark tea drunk be Tibetans, also known as Tibetan tea, is a unique dark tea that comes from Sichuan’s Yaan. The place was the first stop over the Ancient Tea-Horse Road, to carry Yaan’s tea to Lijiang in Yunnan, Kangding in Xikang, and even further to India.

Wrapped in cloth sack and kept in bamboo holders, the compressed tea bricks were once used as currency to trade horses and other things.

The tea was made by the government in the past as a material reserve to support the Tibetans. However, the trip to the plateau was never easy at a time when tea bricks had to be carried by men on their back and trudged slowly along the mountainous roads to the plateau.

The ancient technique of making Tibetan tea is still kept alive in a number of time-honored tea factories in Yaan as a national-level intangible cultural heritage. However, the tea made in Yaan is still made and enjoyed particularly among Tibetan people, although the local government and the technique inheritors are thinking on a bigger map.

Compared with Yunan’s Pu’er tea, Tibetan dark tea is much less known to the rest of China, let alone the international market. However, Gan Yuxiang, the national-level inheritor of the Tibetan tea’s traditional technique, believes their tea will have a bigger market at home and abroad.

An artwork on display in the Yaan Museum shows a process of making Tibetan dark tea in the traditional way.  

“In the past, both Yunnan and Yaan provided dark tea to Tibetan people, but Yunnan stated to promote their products beyond the specific group much earlier than us,” Gan told this journalist in Yaan on Tuesday. “Our marketing is still at the beginning status, and almost 100 percent of Yaan’s dark tea is still sold to the Tibetans. But I think other Chinese people and foreigners will love it as well, because it tastes good and have health benefits.”

While passing on the traditional skills, modern technologies and creative innovations are also introduced to give the ancient tea a new life, according to Gan.

“Now we have created more varieties of products for different needs, and introduced digital facilities to better control the temperature and hygiene conditions,” he said. “It also saves time.”

Like wine, aging is involved for dark tea after the fermentation. The longer the aging, the better the quality it is. Ordinary dark tea takes about two years to age, and those aged over 30 years can be more expensive than gold.

Next time you come across a compressed Tibetan tea brick, look for the year on the label.

An artwork on display in the Yaan Museum shows a process of making Tibetan dark tea in the traditional way.  

An artwork on display in the Yaan Museum shows how dark tea from Yaan was carried to Tibet by men on the back.  

Compressed dark tea can also be made into artworks, such as the decoration in a special curtain.