Jiao Jialiang's appeal reflected that Yunnan was, in fact, working hard to “print out” more Puer tea. The 2006 government definition included both raw and artificially fermented tea as Puer tea, despite the never-ending debate over which was more authentic. Once the newly produced raw Puer tea was included in the definition, output increased.17 China Newsweek (Tang Jianguang, Huan Li, and Wang Xun 2007b) cited Zou Jiaju, the vice head of the Yunnan Tea Association, as saying that—according to the 2003 definition, which included only artificially fermented tea—Yunnan's output of Puer tea since the 1970s had been only one to two thousand tons per year; but according to the 2006 definition, which included both raw and artificially fermented tea, the total output of Puer tea reached 80,000 tons per year.
While the fortunes of Puer tea rose, those of other kinds of Yunnan tea declined in terms of both consumption and production. Yunnan used to have several kinds of famous green tea, but I could find none of them at tea trade fairs in Simao, Jinghong, and Kunming in 2007. It seemed that every bit of tea material in Yunnan was being used to make Puer tea (fig. 3.7). I was told by sellers that green tea was less practical than Puer tea because it could not bear long-term storage.
According to a speech in July 2007 by the vice-governor of Yunnan, the output of Puer tea in Yunnan in 2006 reached 80,000 tons, 28,000 tons more than the previous year. Over the period from 2005 to 2006, Puer tea, as a proportion of all Yunnanese tea, increased from 45 percent to 58 percent (Kong Chuizhu 2007).
CONCLUSION: MULTIPLY IMAGINED HOME
Puer tea's home is transregionally authenticated and multiply imagined, embodying what I call its jianghu, in which contested desires meet, debate, and negotiate. The packaging of Puer tea has been deeply shaped by ongoing geopolitics.
Scholars in anthropology and political economy have provided similar cases in Europe about the state's participation in promoting profiles of commodities by linking them to locality. This is most clearly exemplified with wine (Guy 2003; Ulin 1996) and cheese (Grasseni 2003) in France, and in relation to “slow food” in countries such as Italy (Leitch 2003). In the early nineteenth century, the French invented the concept of terroir, which was supported by, and clarified within, government regulations. Terroir stressed that wine or cheese derives certain characteristics from a unique local feature, such as soil and temperature, and also unique local production techniques. This terroir cannot be replicated. Furthermore, this concept was also linked to the unique French cultures that shaped the characteristic of the product as well as the inhabitants in the production areas (Barham 2003; Grasseni 2003; Phillips 2006). This emphasis on locality again echoes the notion about authenticity: authentic commodities should contain an aura of originality (Benjamin [1936] 1999). In the case of Puer tea, the state—namely, the government of Yunnan—also participated in linking and emphasizing locality and originality. By updating the definition and production guidelines about Puer tea several times, it tried to identify Puer tea with Yunnan in defense against non-Yunnanese “fake” Puer tea.
In the postmodern era, time and space are compressed as a result of globalization, and the boundaries between spaces become vague (Harvey 1989). However, according to David Harvey, “the less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital” (Harvey 1989: 295–296). That is, while all places seemingly share a common global home, each one actively seeks to present a distinct intrinsic self in order to attract investment, commerce, and tourism. In the case of Puer tea, in the process of constructing such a distinction, historical, botanical, and other forms of knowledge were “flexibly accumulated” (Harvey 1989: 295) to authenticate one's unique identification with Puer tea. Compared with the European examples of wine and cheese, the uniqueness of Puer tea lies in the great complexity of forces and the high degree of flexibility in accumulating cultural and economic capital in the ongoing consumption revolution of Reform-era China.
The notion of “translocality” has been used to explain the ongoing mobility and interaction among different places in contemporary China, in which the role of each locality is not weakened and there is “a revitalization of place making and place differentiation,” with construction of place identity crossing various geographical levels and “multiple scales” (Oakes and Schein 2006: 2). In the case of Puer tea, the construction of place identity is displayed by the competition between different administrative units about the tea's authentic home. An important strategy of scale is used in these constructions and competitions: while Simao (or Xishuangbanna) declared itself to be the specific origin of Puer tea, it admitted that Yunnan was the general home. Similarly, while Yunnan used Puer tea as a provincial representation, it also stressed that Puer tea embodies the essence of Chinese tea culture. In this strategy, the lower scale becomes the representative of the higher scale. It echoes “ideologies of translocalism” (Oakes and Schein 2006: 7), in which the identification of the local is imaginatively consistent with that of the nation and also of the global, and the economy of the local is practically supported so that it can reach the global standard.
The more different voices try to define a clear boundary for Puer tea, the more complicated and vague its image has become. Such complexity and vagueness, in turn, arouse people's desire to further demystify, reauthenticate, and reimagine Puer tea and its home. In this jianghu of Puer tea, these multiple desires have bolstered Puer tea's extraordinary value, but they have also resulted in the impossibility of defining a singular home, a home that can only be multiply imagined.
CHAPTER 4
Heating Up and Cooling Down
Zigong asks, “Shi and Shang, who does better?” The Master says, “Shi has done too much; Shang has done too little.” Zigong asks, “Does that mean Shi does better?” The Master says, “Too much is as bad as too little.”
—The Analects, chapter 10 (Confucius 1981: 184)
When I stayed in Yiwu in 2007, I received many requests from friends in Kunming to bring back some good Puer tea for them. I was happy that more friends were developing an interest in Puer tea, but I also felt uneasy and found this task to be a challenge, since one person's food might be another's poison. My uneasiness grew when I received a call from a close relative who rarely drank tea. He asked me to buy some Puer tea in Yiwu that would increase in value in the future. There were over fifty family brands in Yiwu at that time, and it was hard for me to predict which would increase in value. Several days later he called again, saying that he needed me to buy only a few samples of tea from Yiwu. Another friend in Menghai had collected some famous and expensive teas for him, such as Dayi, the brand of the Menghai Tea Factory (fig. 4.1), and Zhongcha, the brand of the Chinese Tea Company in Yunnan (fig. 4.2).
After I returned to Kunming, my relative showed me the valuable teas that his friend had bought. They were Dayi 7542, which was said to be representative of raw Puer tea; Dayi 7572, said to be representative of artificially fermented Puer tea;1 and several pieces of Zhongcha, packaged with old paper and declared to be aged. Although these teas had cost him around ¥10,000 altogether, he was keen to obtain more if possible. My relative was busy with his work, and I wondered how he had time to think about tea. He told me that the tea was not for drinking but for investment.
Meanwhile, it became obvious to me that many people were developing a passion for Puer tea. I learned that several of my mother's former colleagues, who used to work in the engineering field, had opened tea shops in Kunming. Near my parents’ house, a grocery store on a crowded street was transformed overnight into a Puer tea shop. It seemed that Puer tea was breaking the old Chinese custom of locating tea shops in a quiet place. Even at the vegetable market near my house, I saw an old woman selling caked Puer tea from a portable stall. A local magazine said that the number of Puer tea shops in China had grown threefold from 2005 to 2006 (Puer Jianghu 2007a: 15). Even more tea shops opened in 20
07.
When the price of Puer tea spiked in the spring of 2007, local people in production areas such as Yiwu stir-roasted tea leaves diligently and often worked until late at night to meet the demand. In Simao and Jinghong I joined in occasional meetings in local tea shops, where regular customers from various occupations gathered, learning tasting techniques and acquiring the newest information on Puer tea. As a Jinghong journalist commented, at this moment, “the entire nation was engaged in tea” (quan min jie cha).2
People were speculating on Puer tea as they did on stocks in financial markets. In some Kunming teahouses, I saw people drinking and talking about Puer tea around a tea table while checking interest rates and share prices with a laptop. Among this group there was usually a tea expert, who directed members how to properly collect, infuse, and drink Puer tea. There was also often a stock expert, who showed them how to follow the ups and downs of the market. These tea shop groups were made up of people who speculate both on Puer tea (chao cha) and on the stock market (chao gu).
In Guangzhou, in March and April 2007, the price of Puer tea increased rapidly after it had changed hands in the Fangcun Tea Market. It was said that half the supply of Puer tea in China was in Guangdong, and Fangcun was the biggest national wholesale tea market. Most of the Puer tea there was traded by the jian. One jian contains twelve stacks (tong); one stack contains seven round cakes; and one cake usually weighs 375 grams. So one jian has eighty-four cakes of Puer tea, weighing a total of 31.5 kilograms. Before I went to Fangcun, I had heard the saying: “If you ask how much one cake of Puer tea is, no one will pay attention to you, but if you ask how much one jian is, the seller will put a chair in front of you and ask for a detailed consultation.” In other words, Puer tea was being sold as a bulk commodity and as a product for exchange or storage rather than for immediate consumption. A local trader described the skyrocketing of Puer tea prices in Fangcun at that time:
The price of some Puer tea varies radically in one day. For example, it is ¥5,000 in the morning, but becomes ¥5,200 in the afternoon. Sometimes it can increase ¥500 in several hours. Not all kinds of tea can be speculated on like this—only Puer tea, as it has the “long-lasting” characteristic.
Before 2007, people had said, “If you don't buy Puer tea when you are young, you will regret it when you become old.” During the speculation craze, however, the saying changed to “If you don't buy one jian of Puer tea today, you will regret it tomorrow.” When my friends learned that I was doing research on Puer tea, many commented that I was making a good choice, hinting that I could gain great advantage by joining in tea speculation (chao cha), like many other people in Kunming, Yunnan, Guangdong, and elsewhere in China.
Literally, chao cha means stir-roasting tea with fire, often in a very large wok; this is a standard step in rough processing. Stir-roasting tea leaves is seen as one method of killing the green (deactivating oxidation and fermentation in the tea leaves) and boosting the aroma of tea. This technique is said to have become popular in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
Different degrees of stir-roasting are applied to different kinds of tea according to different fermentation processes. Green tea is not fermented, and in stir-roasting it one must deactivate all the enzymes to ensure that fermentation will not take place. Oolong tea is partially fermented, and stir-roasting is used when fermentation reaches around 50 percent to stop further fermentation. For Puer tea, stir-roasting pauses the activities of enzymes temporarily but leaves the possibility for further fermentation. Therefore, Puer tea must be roasted at a temperature low enough that it does not kill all the enzymes, but high enough that fermentation is temporarily halted. In Yiwu, I observed that the temperature of stir-roasting is an important issue for both tea peasants and tea traders. The correct temperature is gauged by personal experience rather than actual measurement.
People also spoke of stir-roasting in an extended and metaphorical sense, meaning to deliberately heat and elevate the profile of something, such as speculation on Puer tea. Not all kinds of tea were subject to this sort of speculation, but because Puer tea is considered a “drinkable antique,” it could be purchased, exchanged, and stored in the hope that it would increase in value.
The conceptual distinction between “the raw” and “the cooked” may be applied to the transformation of Puer tea. According to that binary contrast, cooking transforms nature and defines culture (Lévi-Strauss 1970, 2008). This is similar to the ideas of maturation and socialization in Chinese and Confucian concepts that refer to processes of acculturation and education. In the classical “culinary triangle,” Lévi-Strauss (1970, 2008) compares three cooking methods—roasting, boiling, and smoking—any of which could be more natural or cultural than the others in terms of their cooking conditions and results (see also Leach 1970). In the case of Puer tea, the primary processing method is stir-roasting, which transforms Puer tea from natural leaves into a cultural drink.
So, on the one hand, Puer tea is stir-roasted technically and physically, reaching a balance that is good for drinking as well as for further fermentation. On the other hand, it is stir-roasted metaphorically, heated up toward the humanly endowed values of taste, health, culture, and wealth. Metaphorically, “stir-roasting tea leaves” refers to any symbolic behavior or propaganda, or even to the stock-like speculation that elevated the value of Puer tea.
Both senses of heating demonstrate the binary theory in a particular way: the more artificial interference there is, the great the degree to which the tea is transformed from its original natural features, even though nature has remained an essential component in shaping its superior culture. In the summer of 2007, when the price of Puer tea fell and its values came into question, some attributed its downfall to excessive artificial interference; using the metaphor again, they said that the temperature of stir-roasting had become too high and that Puer tea had become overcooked.
The interplay between multiple human actors, their divergence and interaction in authenticating Puer tea, and their concerns with moderating, criticizing, clarifying, and obscuring the facts about the tea predetermined the fate of Puer tea, from its rise to its fall. And in this regard, the downfall of Puer tea cannot simply be understood from an economic perspective—which mainly attributed the recession to speculation, greediness, and failure to obey basic economic rules—but has to be understood in terms of the public debate about cultural values.
TWO EARTHQUAKES
In June 2007, an earthquake of 6.4 on the Richter scale occurred in Simao (subdistrict). Its epicenter was in the town of Puer, which had been renamed Ninger just two months earlier. Three people were killed, more than five hundred were injured, and over a million suffered property damage in Puer. The direct economic loss was ¥25 billion (CCTV 2007a), and people were very concerned about the impact on Puer tea production. One economic analyst, Xia Tao, expressed this concern in a television discussion: “The price of Puer tea had increased throughout the spring. Theoretically it should have jumped higher due to the production loss caused by the earthquake. However, the price didn't rise after the earthquake. That's when I said to myself that something was going wrong” (CCTV 2008).
An economic report on Puer tea by China Central Television Station 2 was screened on June 15 (CCTV 2007c). This report was taken as the turning point after which Puer tea's profile suddenly diminished—though the reduction in price had actually begun earlier—and it became a specific target that Puer tea supporters later challenged. The report stated that two earthquakes were affecting Puer tea: the earthquake in Puer City (renamed from Simao), the production area of Puer tea; and the earthquake in the marketplace. Titled “The Bubble of Puer Tea Is Broken,” the thirty-minute program opened in the Fangcun Tea Market in Guangzhou, whose Puer tea price was acknowledged to be the barometer for all the tea markets in China. The report said that the price of Puer tea at Fangcun had fallen by half in the previous thirty days. A jian of 7572 Puer tea (31.5 kilograms) that had sold for ¥20,000 the month befo
re was now worth only ¥9,000, and according to the report, its factory price was only about ¥5,000. Drawing a comparison with speculation on the stock market, the report described the large tea factories and companies, along with their distributors, as an invisible hand “shuffling the tiles.” It gave an example to show how, in the previous few months, Puer tea's value had been deliberately elevated:
Let's take 30 kilograms of Puer tea as an example. Its factory price is ¥4,800; the first-level distributor, who acquires the dealership at a very high cost, sells only 20 percent of his stock, which causes misguided information that this product is scarce in the market. The dealer then repurchases the tea at a higher price to elevate its value and sells all of his stock at this higher price. After this speculation is repeated by the second- and third-level distributors, the price of this Puer tea reaches ¥23,000. The private investors, who buy it at this stage, have been deeply caught up in the market, and it is hard for them to get away.
According to the report, the rising price of basic tea material in the production area was also spurred by the deliberate elevation in urban markets. And when the most powerful “bankers”3 suddenly withdrew, the private investors and middlemen could do nothing but cry.
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