'Ghost market'
Farmers usually work during the daytime picking tea. They bring the harvest home for further processing at night.
The dried leaves are delivered to a night market in the town. As the market is open from 1 am to 7 am, villagers call it the "ghost market".
Traders include not only local people, but also businesspeople from other parts of the country. Villagers usually bargain for a good price at multiple stalls before concluding a transaction.
There are also villagers who have established their own brands and save the products for sale by themselves.
With a tea-growing history of centuries, communities in the mountainous region have largely relied on the traditional crop to get out of poverty. Many of the villagers use the money to build multiple-story houses.
When the tea harvest is nearly finished－generally in early May－villagers have more time to serve their homestay and restaurant guests. Natural attractions include a hiking trail through the forest that can take two or three hours to complete. Steep as the trail is, safety is not a problem. The route has been taken by local people since ancient times.
