Pingshui Gunpowder Tea
Well-known at home and abroad, it is a unique kind of tea in Zhejiang, and looks perfectly round, tight, moistly green and with a rich aroma. The tea is crowned as the "green pearl". There is quite an art in stir-frying gunpowder. The traditional technique consists of killing out, rubbing and twisting, and drying. The drying alone can be as complex as needing four-step stir-frying. In the old days, it usually took around ten hours of hard labor to complete a pot of tea, which is vividly described as "a kilogram of sweat trickling down onto the heels for a kilogram of tea, and the tea of one season is enough to make one thin and meager. To be true, gunpowder stir-fried this way tastes no common thing, and tea lovers praise it as the number one in Jiangnan.
Around Pingshui town in the mountainous Guiji area, tea markets for neighboring counties were set up as early asthe Tang Dynasty. As Pingshui is famed for large quantity cultivation of gunpowder tea, people call it "the hometown of gunpowder". Rizhu tea, a kind of Pingshui gunpowder, had long been a tribute to emperors in the past and the general gunpowder was a popular export item for China. According to historical files, between 1843 and 1894, its export reached a peak, hitting 200,000 dan (one dan being 50kg) and the gunpowder price on the London market was second only to Wu Yi Oolong tea, another kind of tea from China and a favorite in Europe by that time. After the establishment of new China, the cultivation of Pingshui gunpowder increases constantly and the quality has been greatly upgraded. In 1984, "Temple of Heaven" Brand special gunpowder won a national gold prize and in April of 1985, it won another gold award at a quality food contest held in Spain.
Source：绍兴市政府