After the snow, it was sunny at the beginning of the day, and I walked leisurely on the winding stone street of the Ming and Qing dynasties in Yanglou Cave, Chibi City, Hubei Province.
The stone street is not large, and the construction area is only 07 square kilometers. The main street is 4 meters wide and 2,200 meters long, with several T-shaped alleys, all paved with bluestone.
On both sides of the street, there are more than 80 ancient shops and dozens of deep mansion compounds. The wheelbarrows that carried tea in the past generations crushed the stone slabs into troughs of more than an inch.
On the old house that condenses the years of time, the melting snow water flows down from the black tile trough, and the fragrance of tea that has flowed for thousands of years floats in wisps.
Perhaps because of the cold snow and snow, there are not many shops on both sides of the door, and there are not many tourists, which seems a little deserted, but it still can't hide the former elegance.
The past is long. During the Tang Taihe period, the emperor issued an edict to plant camellia. Tea was cultivated and processed here.
In order to facilitate storage and transportation, the tea leaves are pressed into bricks, which are called brick tea.
In the Song Dynasty, brick tea was used as a hard currency to trade tea and horses with Inner Mongolia.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the tea-making industry was already quite developed. At its peak, there were more than 200 tea estates, with a population of nearly 40,000 and more than 100 business travel shops. Merchants gathered, very prosperous.
Yanglou Cave is one of the sources of the Eurasian Tea Ceremony, which began in the Song Dynasty and prospered in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the green brick tea produced is exported to Europe and Asia, and is known as "China's big tea market" and "Hubei's Little Hankou".
Today, the prosperity of the past has not ended. The starting place of the Wanli Tea Ceremony, the Yanglou Cave in the thousand-year-old town is still fragrant.