It sounds like your friend bought the original 30 lbs from a wholesale market. The price was in fact a wholesale/farm price for one of the domestic quality grades in the Mainland 2 years ago. Your friend would have to be somewhere in one of the three major wholesale markets in the south in order to get that price. I don’t believe you can buy at any price lower than that, more so today, when everything has just become more expensive. Not even for the lowest grade.
As for radiation from the nuclear incident in eastern Japan last year, it hardly affected any China soil at all. China is quite a sea away from Japan. The production bases of most tea are in the south, southeast and southwest so they are even further away from the unlucky location. In fact the Japanese has been importing more tea and other farm products from China since.
