Unjong Tea Reflecting the World of Affection for People

The great leader Comrade Kim Jong Il said.

"If the Unjong tea leaves are cultivated and the tea is served well, our people will become able to always drink the excellent tea as Comrade Kim Il Sung wished."

Tea is a drink good for health. Adding water and nutritious substances and promoting metabolism, it helps people relieve their mental and physical fatigue and heightens the activity of organic body, thus being very popular in the world.

Called the "elixir of life" from olden times and exchanged for gold among the rich, it is regarded as a painstaking work to grow tea plants, produce and process tea leaves enough to say that 1 kg of materials comes from 100 000 leaves. In addition, tea plant, evergreen short tree belonging to Thea sinensis, was conventionally supposed not to be grown at the north over 36° degrees North Latitude.

So, no officials and people in the country thought of growing tea plants before the 80s.

It was President Kim Il Sung who had an idea of producing tea on our own to make our people enjoy the best tea in the world.

Saying that tea plants could be grown in our country while visiting a foreign country in September, Juche 71(1982), he earnestly instructed that tea plants should be taken from other countries for cultivation examinations. After that, he personally planted tea plants given from a foreign country as present at home and had cultivation examinations. He sent hundreds of tea plants to the Academy of Agricultural Science and said that they should be acclimatized and spread across the country. The instructions given by him about growing tea plants were several times in Juche 72(1983) alone, such as fixing the best place for seedlings in the sunny spots of Kangryong County and making clear how the research should be done.

True to the great affection of the President for people, agricultural scientists planted the seedlings in Kangryong County, South Hwanghae Province and started studying. Afterwards, he was informed of the actual conditions about growing tea plants several times and said that the research should be intensified to expand the growing areas.

In hearty response to his instructions, agricultural scientists speculated and studied hard, thus succeeding in selecting a variety of tea plants acclimatized to pass the winter even in 19 degrees below zero in conformity with the climatic and soil conditions of our country.

In this way, the research on growing tea plants in our country, which were grown in the south of the world, was carried out creditably with the proposal, wise guidance and warm affection of the President, and the growing areas were gradually increased.

Chairman Kim Jong Il carried forward the new history of tea plant cultivation pioneered by President Kim Il Sung under the hardships and ordeals unprecedented in history.

The Chairman ensured that research on growing tea plants should be activated even when the country suffered from the economic difficulties and personally named it "Unjong tea", the home-made production, to hand down to posterity the benevolence of President Kim Il Sung.

Later, he acquainted himself with growing tea plants and producing tea leaves several times and took radical measures to provide the people with more green and black teas. Consequently, new farms came to be built to grow tea plants called Unjong tea in the region of Kangryong, the west of the country and Kosong, the east of the country and active efforts were made to mass-produce good-quality tea.

Seeing the tea produced at Unjong Tea Garden in May Juche 98(2009), the Chairman said that it was better than other countries' in terms of taste and packaging and paid deep attention to making conditions in which people could drink healthy Unjong tea every day.

He met senior officials in August and November, Juche 100(2011) and said that tea should be mass-produced to serve the people true to the instructions of President Kim Il Sung. He also told them about its effect and long history of people's drinking tea, the kind and features of our country's tea, the noble history of Unjong tea associated with the Party's affection for people, methods of making green and black teas tastefully and good-looking, increasing the production of tea leaves at Unjong Tea Garden on a maximum level, making various kinds of tea to serve the people and building teahouses in several places of Pyongyang, including the sector of public service in Changjon Street, and serving Unjong tea.

The earnest instructions in the last year of his life with the warm love for people served as the vital guiding principle that should be adhered to in creating and disseminating the new culture of tea in our own way.

The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un, who cherishes the great leaders' wish for Unjong tea as it is, visited Unjong Tea House in Changjon Street just ahead of completion in May, Juche 101(2012) and recollected the warm love of the great leaders for people, who made possible efforts to let people enjoy tea, with deep emotion. He clarified the problems arising in furnishing the house with modern facilities and improving service to the public.

Just as a drop of water reflects the whole universe, so the Unjong tea reflects the great world of affection of the great leaders for people, who regarded the idea of "People are my God" as motto of their lifetime and were concerned themselves with people's drink.