A corner of Trai Cai tea garden, Minh Lap Commune

On this return visit to Thai Nguyen, Director Ta Van Loc of the Provincial Information Center personally led our group straight down to the tea hills of the renowned tea-growing areas. Plump, vigorous tea buds thrust upward in lush green against the rain. For the first time I saw the origins of different tea varieties manifest before my eyes on the hillside. When you pick each single bud on its own, it becomes dinh tea (single-bud tea); pick a bud with one unfurling leaf and it becomes tom non tea (tender bud tea); add one more leaf and it becomes moc cau tea (hook-shaped green tea). So that was it! At last, I understood the origins of the famous sayings “Moc cau tea takes time to unfurl” and “Thai Nguyen tea, Tuyen Quang girls”.

I have deliberately used two different Vietnamese terms, che and tra, to refer to the same tender tea shoot. According to Mr. Nguyen Minh Hoan, Deputy Secretary of Minh Lap Commune Party Committee, the home of the renowned Trai Cai tea, when it is still growing fresh and green on the hillsides, it is called a tea bud (che). Once it has been processed and turned into a beverage, it becomes tea (tra). Also according to Mr. Hoan, Minh Lap currently has 362 hectares of tea, of which more than 100 hectares are VietGAP-certified, making it the first commune in Thai Nguyen Province to achieve the new rural area standard.

Residents of Minh Lap Commune harvesting tea

The land of Thai Nguyen, hailed as home of the nation's finest tea, has long been celebrated. Within this "kingdom" of premier teas lie four great regional varieties, like a traditional four-panel folk painting with four graceful maidens, each embodying a pure and fragrant character: Tan Cuong tea, La Bang tea, Trai Cai tea, and Khe Coc tea. The ancient proverb "Tứ nữ bất bần" (four maidens bring no poverty) has surely found its fulfillment here. In 2024, Thai Nguyen Province had 22,200 hectares of tea, producing 272.8 thousand metric tons of fresh tea buds and 54.6 thousand metric tons of processed tea, generating a total product value of over VND 13,800 billion.

These encouraging figures are available to anyone who searches "Thainguyen" online. Even those harvesting renowned tea in the era of Industry 4.0 now equip themselves with modern protective gear; I saw workers on Trai Cai hillside wearing jackets fitted with automatic cooling fans. Yet there remain a few processes where new technology cannot be applied; only hand-craftsmanship can achieve perfection: picking tea, rolling tea, and brewing tea.

Water first, tea second, brewing third, teapot fourth: this common saying identifies the four conditions, in order, for a fine tea experience. Under the graceful hands of tea hostesses from Thanh Hai, Tien Yen, Huong Van, and Hao Dat, the tea's fragrance slowly awoke from within a clay teapot and drifted through the slightly cool air of a rainy mountain afternoon. It seemed that even the great writer Nguyen Tuan, who penned "A Cup of Tea in the Morning Mist" and "The Clay Teapots”, had never experienced a moment quite so still, so wistfully adrift, and so fragrant in tea.

Tan Cuong tea, perennially ranked first and long renowned, needs no further introduction. It was the celebrated Tan Cuong tea, with its distinctive young-rice fragrance, harmonious mild astringency, and deep lingering sweetness, grown at Hong Thai 2 hamlet by Tien Yen tea house, that tea artisan Hoang Anh Suong selected to present to billionaire Bill Gates, former Chairman of Microsoft, atop Ban Co Mountain last year.

Trai Cai tea, which professional tea connoisseurs here simply call "Ca" tea, possesses a light rice-blossom fragrance, a brew color as amber as honey, moderate astringency, and a sweet aftertaste that lingers in the throat. The flavor profile of Trai Cai tea is remarkably similar to that of Tan Cuong tea, like the two sisters Thuy Van and Thuy Kieu in the classic Vietnamese poem The Tale of Kieu, each beautiful in their own right yet distinctly different. Each tea is perfect in its own way, a flawless ten out of ten, making it no easy task to distinguish between the two even for seasoned local tea connoisseurs.

Tea products of La Bang Tea Cooperative (La Bang Commune)

Another variety that has recently risen to fame is La Bang tea. In conversation with us, Nguyen Thi Hai, Chairwoman of the Board of Directors and Director of La Bang Tea Cooperative, shared her heartfelt devotion to the specialty of her homeland. Hai stated: "If we speak of the flavor of lowland tea, no place surpasses Tan Cuong. For Bat Tien tea, no one beats Quan Chu. Our Long Van tea grown right here in La Bang is crystallized in four words: green – rich - lustrous - golden, with the faint fragrance of the forest and hills that no other place can replicate”. Representatives from the various renowned tea-growing areas have sat together and acknowledged one another with complete fairness and mutual respect.

From a barefoot girl planting tea on hillsides burning from herbicides, surviving on one meal of rice and two of porridge in 1986, to becoming a tea artisan and director of a clean tea enterprise whose market now reaches Europe, Japan, China, and the United States: hers is a tale of a duckling transformed into a swan, accompanied by extraordinary determination. Her La Bang Tea Cooperative's raw material area currently spans 37 hectares, including 20 hectares of VietGAP-certified tea, 17 hectares of organically produced tea, and 7 hectares with QR traceability codes for growing areas.

With a warm and sincere voice, the female tea artisan walked us through her processing steps. Tea must be picked from early morning, especially on days when the mist lingers long. At that hour, the buds still hold the dew, retaining many precious active compounds. The leaves are then withered, enzyme-deactivated, and dried through five rounds of firing with moisture equalization in between; on the sixth round, when the buds have reached the right stage, they are gathered together to concentrate and capture the fragrance into finished tea. The fragrance of the tea rises from the clay pot, settles in the bottom of glazed cups, and seeps into one's voice. That tea fragrance is the flavor of a life, a life lived through hardship, through every bitter taste, yet still preserving a sweet, wholesome aftertaste.

Nguyen Thi Hai, Director of La Bang Tea Cooperative

Looking at others, I reflected on myself. I recalled with a heavy heart other bitter tastes from the struggle for survival. My life as a soldier in distant campaigns across the land of the Temples of Angkor in those days, year-round companions of "mễ trà”, a drink made from burnt roasted rice. During the dry-season pursuit marches, our parched throats drove us many times to drink "bạch cốt trà”, water contaminated by bones bleached from victims of the Pol Pot genocidal regime. Stagnant stretches of jungle stream choked with fallen leaves, their water turned black, with no animal footprints along the banks: that was "diệp độc trà”, the leaf-poison water we still had to filter and use.

The fragrance of tea drew my thoughts back to the present. The Dinh Tam Tra brand of La Bang tea was selected as a gift for heads of state and international guests at the APEC High-Level Week event held in Da Nang in 2017. From a few million dong at the cooperative's founding in 2006, La Bang tea revenue reached the VND 4 billion mark by 2024.

Though the tea now has fragrance, flavor, fame, and even financial reward, Hai still carries an unresolved longing: to find the origins of Thai Nguyen's specialty tea plant, as if searching for a cultural identity, a spiritual anchor. In 2024, she organized a group including representatives from enterprises, cooperatives, and journalists to trek up Bong Mountain to visit an ancient tea forest. There, at an absolute elevation of 740 meters, ancient tea trees stand with trunks measuring up to 1.6 meters in circumference.

While preparing the heritage tree documentation for the ancient teas of Bong Mountain, another joy arrived swiftly, as if in reward for a devoted, filial child. People wandering in the La Bang forest rested beneath a grove on Tam Dao Mountain and, noticing flowers falling, realized those were precious tea trees. On hearing their account back in the village, Hai quickly organized a survey expedition. After nine hours of climbing and crossing waterfalls, at an elevation of 1,300 meters, “I lit up when I saw the ancient tea trees”, she described her emotions in that moment. Heavens! La Bang too has ancient tea. La Bang too is a cradle of Thai Nguyen's celebrated teas.

We listened to her exclaim with joy as she recounted the story, and our hearts smiled with her. Happiness, like the fragrance of tea, always needs to be shared and spread. I gazed at her, then at the simple, unassuming clay teapot that holds within its quiet form so many deep layers of culture. The earth nurtured the tea plant; the earth now lifts the tea's fragrance in what feels like the most complete offering of the element Earth.

Here too flows the Kem stream, this clear, pure water rising from the eastern slope of the Tam Dao mountain range is the Water element, now singing as it boils over the fire of aged charcoal, the Fire element. Water and fire in harmony awaken the celestial fragrance from every refined, fragrant tea leaf. The tea leaves, the Wood element, quietly unfold in the embrace of water and earth, silently weaving the flavor of a lifetime.

Is the Metal element still missing? Why, we veteran soldiers gathered in a circle around her to enjoy the tea: we are the Metal element. Metal is those who once bore arms for the people in a time of war. One may live quickly, but one cannot drink tea in haste. Tea needs time to awaken, and people too need time to feel. In those moments, the flavor of tea becomes a pause, like the quiet, delicate rests between the movements of life's vibrant symphony.