Tongmu Pass

Tongmu Pass sits at about 1,000 metres, a small basin at the core of the Wuyi Mountain national nature reserve. The climate inside the pass and outside it are entirely different: cross one ridge and the temperature drops several degrees. The strict reserve is closed to visitors, but the villages around it still keep a withering craft four hundred years old — the "green house", a three-storey timber building where pine fires burn on the ground floor and fresh leaf is spread on the second, smoke drifting up through the floorboards. That smoke is what made the world's first black tea, Lapsang Souchong. In 2005 Jin Jun Mei was created here, carrying black tea away from "strong and heavy" towards "fine and delicate", and pushing Tongmu Pass to the top of every tea lover's list.

With forest covering 96 per cent of the land, the water and the air here are almost implausibly clean. We sit with a tea master through the night, watching a single batch of Jin Jun Mei — seventy thousand buds picked one by one — move through the fire. Nobody usually says much that night.

Tongmu Pass requires advance registration, and self-drive visitors must check in at the gate, so it is not advisable to turn up on your own. The best months are May and October: May for the spring tea, October for the finest colour in the hills. The road into the village is narrow and winding, so prepare for motion sickness, and mobile signal is unreliable — settle anything you need to settle before you cross the pass.