I’ve been thinking about how to describe this place and I keep coming back to the same word: honest.
My father was born the same year as the Great Leap Forward. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution. He served in the military. He became a special police commander. He worked with international police organizations across Asia.
Then he retired — and went back to a mountain in Yixing to grow tea.
He’s been there for over a decade now.
What the farm holds:
The land was mostly wild when he started. Now it’s 480 acres of working farmland — tea, bamboo, vegetables, animals.
170 acres are planted with a rare small-leaf tea variety from the 1950s. Almost no one still grows this kind — too slow, too low-yield for the modern market. My father kept every single tree.
There’s also a room full of antique lighters he collected from around the world over the years. Hundreds of them. It started as a hobby. Now it’s something between a museum and a personal archive of everywhere he’s been.
The animals came gradually — rescued strays, farm animals, eventually ostriches and a pony.
The part that gets me:
When I watch him walk the land in the morning, I think about how much Chinese history is compressed into one person’s life.
He was shaped by every era he lived through — and somehow ended up back at the beginning, on a mountain, growing tea the way it was grown before most of it was industrialized.
I don’t know if that’s ironic or poetic. Maybe both.
Has anyone else noticed how much living history exists in the generation born in the 1950s-60s in China? Would love to hear other stories like this.
