Drones Now Carry Wuyi's Rock Tea Off the Cliffs It Grows On

Wuyi Mountain's Sankeng Liangjian, the "three gullies and two streams" core zone that grows the region's most prized zhengyan rock tea, is being worked this spring by more than 70 drones, flying upward of 600 trips a day between the cliff-face gardens and the processing houses below, China Daily reported.

The routes run through the same narrow ravines and rock crevices that give zhengyan tea its mineral character, terrain too steep and broken for a cart or even a motorbike. Growers have traditionally carried freshly picked leaf out by hand, a slow climb down before it reaches withering, the first step in turning green leaf into rock tea. Wuyishan Xiaomaque Technology leads the drone fleet; the lift, China Daily reported, cuts that trip sharply, preserving the leaf's freshness and lowering the labor risk and cost of the old hand carry.

Guangming Daily's coverage of the same harvest season showed Wuyi tea enterprises trialing other automation too: a temperature-controlled processing setup, and a spherical machine that automates yaoqing, the tumbling-and-resting cycle that starts rock tea's partial oxidation. Wuyi's terrain has long limited how much a single garden can produce, since a crew can only carry down what it can climb down with; a faster lift out of the gorge does not change how much tea a cliff can grow, but it changes how much of what grows there survives the trip down in good condition.

Sources: China Daily, "福建武夷山：无人机助力悬崖峭壁挑茶难题" (Fujian Wuyi Mountain: drones ease the challenge of picking tea on sheer cliffs); Guangming Daily, "福建武夷山迎来制茶繁忙季" (Fujian's Wuyi Mountain enters its busy tea-making season).