Fourth, the raw Puer tea processed by hand rather than by machine is considered to be imbued more deeply with cultural meanings and a unique ‘natural’ aura.
Fifth, in China, tea has long been considered more than a simple drink to quench one's thirst. It has been depicted in poems, paintings, and calligraphy, the so-called “elegant activities.” Yiwu and its Puer tea, surrounded with more historical records and relics than tea from other areas, such as Menghai, typify this concern. This point was understood even by locals with limited education. For example, Mr. He, a man more than sixty years old, often told his son: “Tea is better than alcohol. With alcohol, people often behave badly; with tea, everyone becomes elegant and refined in manner [wen zhi bin bin].”
Visiting Yiwu has become a pilgrimage for people who are eager to know about Puer tea. In the classic tour route, they first pay a visit to the aged tea trees in the forest (fig. 1.6). Although this places more emphasis on nature than culture, it is a necessary part of the tour because it shows visitors the “original environment,” where the “original taste” or “original flavor” comes from.
Next they walk around the old street of Yiwu, where the old family houses connected by the remnants of the Tea-Horse Road can be seen. In October 2006 a new museum opened at the site of the original temple, where various relics of Yiwu and the Six Great Tea Mountains have been gathered for display.
Finally, the travelers usually go into some family homes, especially those with attractive architecture. Being recognized as possible traders or clients, or journalists or researchers who have come to discover more about Yiwu, the visitors are usually warmly welcomed by the owner of the house, allowed to have a careful look at the house, and even invited for a Shiping-style meal with homemade soy sauce. Even if meals are not served, Puer tea always is. If they are lucky, the travelers may chance upon the family processing of caked Puer tea. Travelers are often allowed to stand on top of the stone press and personally experience the way of “tradition.” Seeing the family working and being allowed to participate makes the production procedures visible. The original unfamiliarity or “alienation” of travelers to the tea products is largely removed (Terrio 2005: 149), and the production process itself becomes consumable and “iconic of a kind of authenticity” (Dilley 2004: 805).
CONCLUSION: IMAGINED ORIGINALITY
Standards for the authenticity of Yiwu and its Puer tea are constructed by locals and nonlocals alike. On the one hand, in the age of mechanical reproduction, the concept of authenticity is closely tied to “originality,” as products regarded as authentic must contain an original “aura” (Benjamin [1936] 1999: 72–79). The standards for authentic Yiwu and authentic Yiwu Puer tea emphasize this original and unique “aura.” The traditional handcrafting of tea has inspired nostalgia and “missions” to discover historical “truth.” On the other hand, Puer tea goes beyond singularity, uniqueness, and irreplaceability. When copies of products proliferated as a result of mechanical reproduction—such as print, photography, and film—in the nineteenth century, people began to worry about originality (Benjamin [1936] 1999: 72–79). In the case of Yiwu Puer tea, the original (aged tea and traditional handcrafting) is respected, while reproduction of copies (raw tea) is encouraged and said to feature original handcrafting rather than a mechanical process.
Is raw or aged tea more original and authentic? When raw Puer tea was made in Yiwu fifty years ago, it was not destined to be consumed only after aging, and the value of aged tea wasn't widely advocated until connoisseurs, especially those from Taiwan, began visiting the production regions. Perhaps one could say that raw Puer tea is the original because it is actually the basis of the aged. However, the aged tea exported from Yiwu over fifty years ago and recently brought back by connoisseurs is becoming the standard model. So one could also say that the valuable aged kind is the original and represents the authenticity that connoisseurs seek. Nevertheless, the availability of aged tea is limited and decreasing. In order to procure more “authentic” and valuable products, connoisseurs, together with other actors, deliberately but inconspicuously replaced the object of authenticity, temporarily overlooking aged flavor and recreating a series of new standards based on the authentic raw taste in the production regions. Compared to industrially produced Menghai tea, the raw tea now represents a higher level of culture.
Rather than favoring either kind as uniquely authentic, these connoisseurs’ standards suggest that both the raw and the aged are authentic, as long as the raw is processed in the same way as the aged might have been. Time will bridge the gap, and the raw will one day become as valuable as the aged. In this regard the renaissance of the Puer tea industry relies largely on deduction and imagination, and the originality of Yiwu and its tea becomes “imagined originality.”14
CHAPTER 2
Tensions under the Bloom
Since he is in jianghu, he could do nothing but follow the law of jianghu.
—Paraphrased from a Chinese proverb:
Ren zai jianghu, shen bu you ji.
I arrived in Yiwu at dusk one day in early March 2007 to start my fieldwork. After four hours on the bus from Jinghong along winding mountain routes, I was tired and hungry. Accommodation was unexpectedly hard to find. Most of the local guesthouses were full, and when I finally found one with a room, even after tough bargaining, the monthly rent was twice that of a good apartment in Kunming.
While I ate dinner at a restaurant along the main street, I noticed that several houses nearby were under construction. Although it was evening, trucks and cars were still passing by, kicking up dust. As I watched the busy road, I wondered whether Yiwu's booming business was largely a result of the Quality Safety Standard, a regulation issued by the state government around 2006 to standardize the tea production process.
The next day I went to visit Mr. Zheng, an old man whom I had met one year earlier. I recalled that his house was pleasant and large, with several separate rooms, an open yard with a small table for eating and drinking tea, a lovely front door framed with orange flowers on a vine, and a long stairway leading down from the house to the street. His house, however, seemed to have disappeared. Fortunately, while looking for the house, I ran into Mr. Zheng, who recognized me and invited me in. The house still stood in its original place, but the stairs, front door, and orange flowers had all disappeared, replaced by a paved slope for the convenience of tea transport, according to Mr. Zheng. Five meters away, a pickup truck was parked under a tree. Mr. Zheng's family house was also greatly transformed. Two-thirds of the internal spaces, which used to comprise several bedrooms and one living room, were segmented into smaller units for tea processing on a production line. There were individual rooms for storing, sorting, pressing, and drying tea leaves and cakes, and a dressing and cleaning room for workers. The size of the rooms ranged from about 4 to 10 square meters. Only one-third of the original house was left for living spaces. Bedrooms were in short supply and could not accommodate guests, even immediate family members who came home to visit.
I lamented the narrowing of the Zheng family's living quarters, but Mr. Zheng said that only in this way could he meet the Quality Safety Standard without building another tea-processing house elsewhere. Another building would have cost more than ten times as much as he had invested in renovating his house.
Puer tea production in Yiwu is divided into two stages: rough processing and fine processing. Rough processing includes harvesting the tea, killing the green (stir-roasting tea leaves to suppress fermentation), and rolling and drying the leaves. The final product at this stage—loose dried tea leaves—is called maocha. In fine processing, maocha is steamed, shaped by hand in a cloth bag, pressed with a stone, dried, and packed. Before the Quality Safety Standard came into force, these procedures, except tea harvesting, were all done at local family houses. Processing areas were not routinely separated, and processing occurred under the same roof where people lived and chickens were kept.
Starting around 2004, the Na
tional Administration of Quality Supervision launched a series of standards to bring more food products into line with a stricter set of market standards. Accordingly, the Yunnan Provincial Supervision Bureau of Technology and Quality began to draft the Quality Safety Standard on tea in 2005.1 While it was rumored that this was just a new way of collecting additional taxes from the growing Puer tea industry, formal documents declared that all the requirements were significant in assuring that tea is processed in a clean and safe environment (Zhang Shungao and Su Fanghua 2007: 207). What the standard actually aims to regulate is fine processing. It has strict requirements for processing sites, scale, and facilities. For example, it requires that processing sites be at least fifty meters away from refuse dumps, farm animals, and hospitals, at least one hundred meters away from fields where pesticides are applied, and even farther from industrial areas; that processing areas be a certain minimum size; that there be separate rooms for raw materials, auxiliary materials, and semifinished and finished products, with no other goods stored with them; and that specific machines be used for different aspects of processing (Zhang Shungao and Su Fanghua 2007: 222).
Most of these standards challenged the “traditional” way of fine processing in Yiwu in terms of scale. Fine processing had taken place in family houses since the establishment of the old commercial brands in the Qing and Republican periods. After lying dormant for almost half a century, these fine processing techniques had been revived following the Taiwanese visit. The local producers followed the example set by their ancestors, who found nothing improper about making caked tea in small family units. The new standards, which those in the industry called QS in abbreviation, however, would transform small family spaces into large-scale units, more like tea factories, leaving little living space in family homes. Most importantly, the new standards required a high level of investment. Although the Puer tea renaissance had helped locals to improve their standard of living, it was still a major challenge for most families to spend money on enlarging their tea-processing facilities.
The Quality Safety Standard was formally announced in Yiwu in February 2006, with the message that if producers did not conform by the beginning of 2007, they would no longer be allowed to produce Puer tea and their products would be banned from the market. The announcement caused considerable panic. Many people were afraid that they would not be able to continue to produce Puer tea.
Under the double pressure of the modern standard and oppositional calls to protect “tradition,” a compromise emerged. It was proposed by some elites and officials of Yiwu and Yunnan and endorsed by the relevant governmental departments in Xishuangbanna. The result was the founding of the Yiwu Zheng Shan (Authentic Tea Mountain Yiwu) Limited Company in June 2006. Twenty-four family units (around one-third to one-half of the total tea-processing units in Yiwu)2 plus one general company in Kunming participated as the stockholders. All member units were expected to try their best to transform and improve their tea-processing environment based on their original family scale, but they did not need to build a new processing area. The transformation and improvements were implemented under the guidance of the company and the QS supervision bureau. After all the family units finished their transformation and passed the government checks, the company was granted a single certification of QS approval. That is, twenty-five tea-processing units shared the same QS certification. Mr. Zheng was one of the participants in this organized unit, and as a result he didn't build a new tea factory but just renovated his family house.
I visited other local tea production units that were members of this company as well. Like Mr. Zheng, all had tried their best to transform their living spaces in order to comply with the standard and be able to continue their business. But I still could not help being shocked when I entered the old house of Mr. Li, a retired public servant. The central town of Yiwu is divided into two parts. To the south of the main street is the comparatively new area near the vegetable market. To the north is the so-called old street, where traditional houses stand (map 2.1). Mr. Zheng's house was located in the new area and was built during the 1950s in a more modern style. The transformation of his house was “all right,” in Mr. Zheng's words, since the house was not old enough to warrant historic preservation. But Mr. Li's house, built in the early 1900s, was one of the most famous examples of Han architecture on the old street (fig. 2.1). It had been owned by a political leader during the 1930s and early 1940s and then used as the office of the local authorities in the late 1940s. Mr. Li, who was seventy years old and had once worked in the Yiwu government office, told me in 2006 about the history of his house. At that time, the two-level house looked old but was still well kept, with a courtyard surrounded by ventilated corridors. But by March 2007, part of the corridors were blocked, separated and marked as tea-processing rooms, and the new white cement applied to the renovated sections obviously contrasted with the worn color of the original house. From other locals, I learned that Mr. Li should not have been allowed to be make any big transformations on this house, since it was on the list of Yiwu's historic buildings. But the local government was unable to advise Mr. Li on how to maintain the house's original architectural features while complying with the new standard. Eventually Mr. Li joined the Yiwu Zheng Shan Company and renovated part of his house for tea processing. Since he had worked in the Yiwu government and was well respected, no one formally objected to his transformation of the house.
However, Mr. He, who shared the other half of the original ancient house, took an entirely different attitude and refused to join the company. The changes it had recommended, in his opinion, would neither protect the traditional architecture well nor comply with the new standard in a strict sense. Mr. He told me that several months earlier some provincial officials had come to assess the implementation of QS in Yiwu. After visiting processing units that looked more like factories and had passed QS, they came to Mr. He's house to observe traditional production of Puer tea in a well-preserved house. Their visit had made Mr. He proud, but his application to local authorities for assistance in acquiring QS without destroying his house's historic architecture was not accepted. This angered Mr. He but he still preferred not to take the same course of action as his neighbor. His daughter was opening a tea shop in Kunming, and he had built up stable relationships with outside clients. He wanted to continue his tea business, and he had to pass the QS. He seemed worried as well as confident. His confidence, I gradually learned, came from his collaboration with a large tea company in Kunming that had promised to sponsor him to build a completely new tea factory elsewhere in Yiwu.
According to the Yiwu government, in March 2007 there were fifty units devoted to fine processing of Puer tea in Yiwu, and thirty-six of these had passed the QS in various ways.
BLOOM AT HIGH PRICE
Tea harvested in spring is regarded as the best because the plant accumulates more nutrients after a winter rest. Around March 2007, various groups involved in the tea trade converged on Yiwu. Traders, travelers, journalists, photographers, and artists came from all over the world—from Jinghong, Kunming, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Henan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, France, and America—in a scene that seemed to echo the imagined historical glory of Yiwu, when “hundreds of thousands of people came to trade in the tea mountains” (Tan Cui [1799] 1981: 387). The guesthouse where I stayed was bustling. People came and went, but few interacted, and suspicion prevailed between visitors and local families, as well as among visitors themselves. A trader from Kunming told me after we had become friends that he suspected that I had been invited by the Zheng family to collaborate in their sales promotion. This atmosphere made me feel like the kind of traveler found in martial arts fiction at a roadside inn, where strangers of unknown origin meet, each anticipating a fight. Indeed, the Puer tea business is like the world of jianghu, with suspicion between people arising in a context of heightened competition. Trading authentic Puer tea in Yiwu was becoming a major challenge.
Most travele
rs stay in Yiwu for only a few days, but traders must stay longer. They must select the basic tea material, find a trustworthy local family to process it, negotiate a price, and finally sort out packaging and transport. Since 2007, traders must also verify that the local family they are working with has met the Quality Safety Standard or their final tea product will be hard to sell in the urban market. (In fact, a few traders still collaborate with locals without QS, but these traders must sort out their own ways of selling.)
By 2007, Wen, a trader from Kunming, had operated his Puer tea business for five years. Every year he came to Yiwu before the real business began. He spent time making inquiries, bought maocha from select mountains at carefully chosen times, and supervised the whole procedure of fine processing, from tea pressing to packaging. After the final products were dispatched, he left Yiwu, usually at the very end of the harvest season.
In 2007, what initially concerned Wen and the other traders was the abnormal climate: it was rather dry in Xishuangbanna that spring. As a result, the tea plants were sprouting slowly and maocha was selling for a higher price. The highest price the previous autumn had been around ¥130 per kilogram, and it would not be unusual for the price in the next main harvest season to increase by ¥30 or ¥50. However, in mid-March 2007 the starting price of maocha was more than ¥300 per kilogram, and one of the famous subvillages of Yiwu was selling it for ¥360.
Wen refrained from buying in March, hoping the tea price would decline later. He attributed the abnormally high price to two factors: the dry weather, which had resulted in a limited supply that could not match the high demand, and the “interference” of a few tourists, who had impatiently bought maocha before the real traders could start their work.
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