Puer Tea Read online

  Whatever its specific kind, Puer tea—as profiled in popular books and in the market—was both attractive and perplexing. It was said to have had greater medicinal functions and cultural values than any other type of tea. It also had multiple definitions. It was repeatedly authenticated for ordinary consumers, who, nevertheless, were often left confused. The most serious problem was that there were too many counterfeits: Puer tea that had been aged for three years was said to have been aged for thirty; tea material originating in Sichuan was said to have come from Yunnan; terrace tea was labeled as forest tea; and the distinction between green tea and raw Puer tea was difficult to discern. The information on a package of Puer tea was often unclear, and interpreting it correctly depended upon the consumer's knowledge and careful negotiations with traders.

  Even though the criteria for authenticating Puer tea remained obscure, it was continually celebrated. A growing number of “tea experts” were writing about and trading Puer tea. The mass media took advantage of its popularity, and the government of Yunnan declared it a provincial symbol, supporting all sorts of tea propaganda. In Kunming teahouses, Puer tea was infused in delicate tea sets. Tea-tasting events, which had previously been seen only in ancient paintings and literature, flourished. People met over Puer tea, talked about Puer tea, and competed to be the most knowledgeable about Puer tea or to produce the highest-quality Puer tea. In order to find out the “truth” about Puer tea, urban dwellers launched journeys into rural production areas. These activities boosted the rural tea economy, changing the system of agricultural production deeply.

  As a result of all these efforts, the profile and price of Puer tea peaked in early 2007, only to drop unexpectedly in May of the same year. Before and after this, many people felt pleased or worried, gaining or losing, struggling or relaxing, all because of Puer tea.

  How was Puer tea transformed from something ordinary and familiar into something remarkable and exotic in Yunnan? Why have so many people been compelled to collect, drink, admire, and study it? How did multiple players cause the value of Puer tea to skyrocket and then plummet? Why have counterfeits flourished despite so many appeals for regulation? And how do ordinary tea peasants, traders, and consumers survive in this chaotic battle? This book reflects upon how Puer tea has been packaged by multiple actors into a fashionable drink with multiple authenticities, and, more importantly, how this packaging has been challenged and unpacked by multiple counterforces. Through looking at the packaging and unpackaging process, it explores the temporal interaction between China's Reform period (formally since the early 1980s) and the past; the spatial interaction between Yunnan and other tea production and consumption areas in China and overseas; and the social interaction between various Puer tea actors. These interactions are taking place at a particular moment when China is accelerating its economic and cultural development. New production and consumption trends have appeared. But rather than looking at them as completely new, this book suggests that some of them have involved transformation and repackaging of long-standing elements of Chinese culture. The so-called “antique fashion” for Puer tea mirrors the enduring characteristics of Chinese cultural consumption, though such characteristics are often presented with new forms and new meanings. In particular, this book explores the Chinese concept of jianghu (lit. “rivers and lakes,” a nonmainstream space popularly used for swordsman culture) to interpret the flourishing of counterfeits and the unavailable authenticity of consumer goods in China, as exemplified by the case of Puer tea.

  This book traces Puer tea's “cultural biography” (Appadurai 1986)—an examination of the politics linking a commodity's value and exchange to its detailed social biography—from Yunnan out, from multiple rural production sites to multiple urban consumption areas. One of my main research sites was Yiwu township in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, whose history of producing Puer tea exemplifies the packaging and unpackaging process of Puer tea throughout Yunnan. Sometimes the narrative shifts to Menghai and Simao, two other important production places in Yunnan, to describe special events, particularly when these multiple production sites competed over authenticity. My other main research site was Kunming, the locus of Puer tea's distribution and consumption in southwest China. I also made short visits to Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Taiwan, where the consumption of Puer tea has had a major impact on Yunnan. While following the trajectory of Puer tea, I also followed tea traders. Therefore, some actors who appear in rural tea fields collaborating and competing with the locals also appear in urban teahouses, where they drink tea and engage in debates about authenticity.

  Following these actors’ journeys from the rural to the urban, and following Puer tea's rise and fall in 2007, chapters feature a seasonal theme inspired by other writings on tea (Huang Anxi 2004) and Chinese consumption culture (Brook 1998). The framework emerges from the belief put forward by Chinese traditional literature, medical science, and Daoism (Taoism) that one needs to “nourish life” (yangsheng) in accord with the seasons: sprouting in spring (chun sheng), growing up in summer (xia zhang), harvesting as well as withdrawing in autumn (qiu shou), and storing and hiding in winter (dong cang). For example, a prominent theme in Chinese literature is “lament for autumn” (bei qiu), as voiced by the poet Song Yu in the third century B.C.E.: “Alas for the breath of autumn! Wan and drear! Flowers and leaf fluttering fall and turn to decay” (Hawkes 1957: 92). In the “Autumn” part of this book, this theme coincides with local worries about the recession in the Puer tea market.

  A set of short documentary films illustrates the landscapes of tea processing and people's sensory experiences in tea tasting (see appendix 2). Rather than simply paralleling the text's narratives, the films provide their own clues and themes. For instance, several films are based on the lives of family tea producers and traders who are not examined in detail in this book. The films thus provide alternative narratives, as do the voices and alternative resolutions adopted by Puer tea actors.

  ALL PUER TEA IS FROM YUNNAN

  The Chinese were the first people in the world to domesticate tea-producing Camellia sinensis plants and begin drinking tea (Zhu Zizhen 1996; Mair and Hoh 2009). According to folklore, tea was initially discovered by Shen Nong (lit., “Divine Farmer”), a legendary Chinese tribal head and pioneer of Chinese agriculture and medicine. Shen Nong was once poisoned by toxic herbs but saved himself by drinking a brew made from tea leaves (Zhu Zizhen 1996; Lu Yu 2003). Textual records indicate that a specialized tea market had arisen in Sichuan as early as the sixth century B.C.E. By the third century C.E., tea had become a popular drink in what is now southern China, and during the Tang dynasty (618–907), tea drinking became prevalent all over the empire. The first known book about tea, The Classic of Tea (Cha jing) by Lu Yu (2003), was produced in the eighth century (Goodwin 1993; Zhu Zizhen 1996; Guan Jianping 2001). Compressed tea was popular initially, but loose tea began to dominate after the fourteenth century, when it is said that the first emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–1398), outlawed compressed tea out of concern for the burden it placed on tea producers.3 The emperor's order, however, didn't reach remote Yunnan, which, at that time, was not under the complete control of the imperial court. As a result, Yunnan's Puer tea continued to be produced in compressed form, which is also more convenient for long-distance trade. Most recent popular writings on Puer tea, many of them composed by Yunnanese, stress that Chinese textual records on tea have long omitted Yunnan, a frontier region far away from central China, despite its significant role in tea production and consumption (see Lei Pingyang 2000; Zhou Hongjie 2004).

  Many scholars agree that Yunnan (map I.1), in southwest China, is one of the most important places in the history of tea.4 Along the Mekong River in southwest Yunnan, there are plentiful and excellent tea tree resources, mainly located in three subdistricts: Xishuangbanna, Simao, and Lincang.5 Ethnic minority groups such as the Bulang, Deang, Wa, Hani, and Jinuo are thought to have cultivated tea for at least one thousand years
(Zhang Shungao and Su Fanghua 2007; Li Quanmin 2008).6 Han immigrants didn't come to Yunnan in large numbers until the fourteenth century, and it was not until the early eighteenth century that Chinese merchants began entering the tea-growing areas (Giersch 2006: 24–25). The Chinese came to dominate the tea trade between Yunnan and inland China and the neighboring Southeast Asian regions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hill 1989). And as many Chinese scholars stress, Han immigrants also introduced new tea production techniques and consumption customs into Yunnan (see Lin Chaomin 2006).

  Most tea trees in Yunnan are Camellia sinensis assamica. This type of tea is referred to as large-leaf tea, in contrast to Camellia sinensis sinensis, or small-leaf tea.7 Current tea science suggests that tea plants in other parts of China—most of which are of the small-leaf variety—evolved from the large-leaf variety prevalent in Yunnan (Chen Xingtan 1994). The large-leaf variety is acknowledged to be the most suitable for making Puer tea. But Puer tea does not refer to a particular category or species of tea tree. Instead, it was named after the town called Puer, a center for goods distribution and taxation in southern Yunnan since the early seventeenth century (Fang Guoyu 2001: 427–428; Xie Zhaozhi 2005: 3; Ma Jianxiong 2007: 563).

  Like Puer tea, many kinds of Chinese tea were initially named after places, whereas contemporary tea science names and categorizes tea mainly on the basis of production techniques. There are six kinds of Chinese tea, distinguished by processing methods, especially fermentation (Chen Chuan 1984, [1979] 1999). Tea fermentation usually refers to the oxidation reaction (from contact with the air) or microbial enzymatic reaction (from stacking in a moist environment).8 One important procedure in tea processing is the activation or suppression of fermentation, and different degrees of fermentation produce different flavors (Cai Rongzhang 2006). The different categories reflect the color of the resulting tea brew: green tea, yellow tea, white tea, blue-green tea, red tea, and dark tea. Within each category are numerous subcategories, determined by trivial differences in the tea plant and processing. Green tea (lü cha), usually including jasmine tea (scented green tea), is nonfermented.9 Depending on the different techniques of fermentation suppression and the drying process, green tea can be subdivided into sun-dried green tea (shai qing), steamed green tea (zheng qing), stir-roasted green tea (chao qing), 10 and baked green tea (hong qing). Yellow tea (huang cha) is also nonfermented, and it is only slightly different from green tea. White tea (bai cha) is very lightly fermented. Blue-green tea (qing cha), such as oolong, is semifermented. Red tea (hong cha), which in English is referred to as black tea, is fully fermented. Finally, dark tea (hei cha) is also fully fermented, but its fermentation happens later than that of red tea. According to this six-fold system of classification, Puer tea is categorized as dark tea (Chen Chuan 1984). But when Puer tea became popular at the beginning of the twenty-first century, its proponents called for it to be treated as an independent category (table. I.1).

  As Puer tea's definition is debated, it is hard to tell what exactly Puer tea is, although some aspects are less controversial than others. Contrasting views are presented as necessary here.

  At present, Puer tea can be categorized into three types depending on their postfermentation. The first category is raw Puer tea (sheng cha or sheng pu), which is made using large-leaf tea leaves and can be very astringent when young. Some tea experts argue that postfermentation is a key characteristic in Puer tea's processing, but raw Puer tea hasn't undergone any postfermentation at all and is very similar to green tea (Zou Jiaju 2005). Raw Puer tea can be compressed into cake, bowl, brick, or melon form, or it can be left in its loose form, which is often called maocha.

  The second category is aged raw Puer tea (lao sheng cha), which should be at least five years old, although clear agreement hasn't yet been reached on how many years’ storage is required before the tea is considered aged. Generally, the older the tea, the higher its price. The staggering prices of aged Puer teas in Hong Kong and Taiwan—such as a seventy-year-old cake (357 grams) that sold for more than ¥1 million—has inspired the production and storage of more Puer tea. It is believed that “natural” fermentation (mostly oxidation, possibly also with some microbial enzymatic reaction) occurs during long-term storage, turning the tea from astringent to mild. But “natural” is a relative concept, because some people also create a humid storage environment to accelerate fermentation, which brings this second category close to the third category.

  The third category is artificially fermented or “ripe” Puer tea (shu cha or shu pu), which is the product of a different method used to mellow the astringency of raw Puer tea. By subjecting maocha to a specific temperature and humidity level, postfermentation (mainly microbial enzymatic reaction) can be completed within two or three months. This technique was formally invented in Kunming in 1973. In the tea market, it is said that artificially fermented Puer tea can also be further “naturally” stored for a long time, resulting in what would be called aged artificially fermented Puer tea.

  Usually tea—especially green tea, the dominant variety consumed by the Chinese—is appreciated for its freshness. Puer tea, by contrast, has come to be valued in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century for the flavor it develops as it ages. The origin of aging Puer tea is in contention, though it probably arose during long-distance trade and the interaction between Yunnan, the production region, and the various places where the tea is consumed.

  Before the emergence of modern transportation, Puer tea was carried by horse or mule caravan from Yunnan, a rugged mountainous region, to the outside world. This transport was dominated by Yunnanese Chinese (both Han and Muslim Chinese), but Tibetans also joined in some parts of the journey (Hill 1989). Puer tea had become famous in Tibet, Beijing, and Hong Kong, where people drank it to help them digest greasy food. What was carried initially was very young raw Puer tea, often made into a compressed form. Legend has it that the benefits of postfermenting Puer tea were accidentally discovered as a result of this caravan transport; the sunshine and rainfall affected the tea's flavor and tamed its astringency (Su Fanghua 2002: 50; Mu Jihong 2004: 92; Zhou Hongjie 2004: 8). Another group of tea commentators, mainly from the Pearl River Delta,11 however, argue that the Cantonese first discovered that Puer tea's flavor improved and turned mild after being stored for several years (He Jingcheng 2002: 118–125).12 It's impossible to know which story is accurate, but it is true that aged Puer tea is rarely found in present-day Yunnan and that many Yunnanese traders buy the tea from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

  Although who discovered the benefits of aging Puer tea remains unresolved, the Yunnanese are taking strategic action to associate Puer tea with Yunnan. In a sense, this echoes the recent academic examination of the formation of “Yunnan” and its unique status in a global context. Historically, several indigenous regimes existed in the area that now comprises Yunnan. These included the Dian Kingdom in the third century B.C.E., the powerful Nanzhao Kingdom in the mid-seventh century, and the Dali Kingdom in the early tenth century. Although the Yuan Mongols’ conquest in 1253 initiated Yunnan's incorporation into the Chinese empire, for a long time Yunnan was not fully incorporated but was made up of multiple independent or semi-independent local regimes that had closer relationships with neighboring Southeast Asian areas; nor were all the present parts of Yunnan called “Yunnan” (Giersch 2006; Hill 1998; Yang Bin 2006).

  Although eliding some of these “sensitive” political and ethnic issues, Yunnanese writers ask their audience to pay close attention to Yunnan's history in order to understand Puer tea. They highlight Yunnan's essential role in the development of Puer tea by borrowing insights from academic research, stressing that Yunnan has never been isolated by high mountains or tough roads. They argue instead that it has long been closer to Southeast Asia in terms of geography, economics, ethnicity, and religion, and that it has played an important role in communication and cultural exchange between India, Southeast Asia, inland China, and the wider world
(Mu Jihong 1992; Lei Pingyang 2000; Mu Jihong 2004; Ruan Dianrong 2005a; Zou Jiaju 2005). Puer tea is portrayed by these writers as a key product that embodied Yunnan's relative autonomy and its contribution to the world. The images of multiple ethnic groups in Yunnan, with their special costumes and customs, and the stories about past tea caravans become unique symbols representing Puer tea's value and the unique status of Yunnan (fig. I.5–6). This shows a mystifying and complicating trend, in which Yunnan is described as a pure and mysterious place and Puer tea is endowed with multiple values representing Yunnan's rich culture.

  Nevertheless, these writers also simplify history and reality, consistently with current administrative organization and government policy. In this regard, their voices become Sinocentric. They consider all the existing land in the province as incontrovertible parts of Yunnan, and hence of China. While they stress that Yunnan contains multiple ethnic groups and cultures, they also make it clear that Yunnan is a “united” province of China, ignoring its complex history.