The Battle of Điện Biên, the retreats, the ancient tea trees. A sip of historical consciousness with Viet Sun Tủa Chùa sheng pu’er 2024

More than 70 years have passed since the battle of Điện Biên, since the retreat, the rice fields dyed red, the pain everywhere. Our men arrived in that area on old Royal Air Cambodia “Caravelle” flown by Taiwanese pilots who shuttled between Bangkok and Phnom Penh. They jumped on with ever more heartpounding, more and more uncertain about the possibility of landing. They often did it at night where the quiet wasn’t interrupted by the clanking of clutches, the noise of the brakes of those metal carcasses or the dull bangs of the firing pins.

It must have been those dense nights, tinged with that frightening absence of chromatism, one of those in which probably a Kerouac character would have screamed at that dark eastern wall or howled at the moon interrupting the silence and the monologue of the wind even though the tension could be cut with a razor. There wasn’t much hope to project into the future, it seemed that things weren’t made to last but simply to survive another day, where folk didn’t have time to become aware of their identity as a people because the land they inhabited was already a foreign land from the very beginning.

Tủa Chùa is less than 100km from that war front, one of those mountain places where thunder strikes a sacred fear, where on humid days you can see nothing but misty trees and dark and wild slopes rising towards the sky. The tea in the photo comes from those peaks, from Xín Chải ancient trees, are leaves that recall that “suspended” of its land, capable of escaping every premonition; every other prefiguration and prediction, if there had been one, becomes irrelevant.

This is a visceral, deep, unexpected sheng. It’s a place where faint hints of white peach, orchid and leather lie contracted, tones of tobacco and forest notes of undergrowth indulge but this is different every time because it seems in continuous change, a plot open in time, like an eternal improvisation. In the mouth it’s soft sweet and with a qi that alone could give meaning to the sip. The huigan takes control of the throat in an instant and every attempt at description from this moment seems a vain attempt by language to exhaust what is worth experiencing.