Puer Tea

by Zhang, Jinghong. ,Project Muse.

  Once a proposal attempting to more clearly define and distinguish Puer tea was put forward, oppositional voices emerged, arguing for a return to the original vague “raw” situation. Their concerns largely obstructed the implementation of all the proposed revolutionary ideas. Facing such endless debates, I wondered whether vagueness itself was a prerequisite for Puer tea in the cultural and social context of China.

  CONCLUSION: A CULTURAL DILEMMA

  Like Puer tea's rise and fall in Yiwu, the whole Puer tea industry in Yunnan suffered from a cooldown after heating up. Blame was extended in several directions, and past efforts that had successfully promoted the high value of Puer tea were considered to have led to indigestion in the entire market. Economic analysis coming out soon after the recession, as exemplified by the CCTV 2 report, attributed the market downfall to excessive speculation, improper investment, blind zeal, and greed. However, this economic analysis was regarded as false and even as one of the factors that accelerated Puer tea's downfall. Following this, additional voices emerged to reflect upon the situation.

  In the debate about Puer tea's downfall, there is a continuing concern with “moderation,” one of the doctrines in Daoism and Confucianism that is embodied in everyday life. Food should not be cooked too much, nor should it be too raw, and everything must find its proper place, a middle ground. This basic belief is applied to people's behavior, their relationships with others, and their understanding of objects. In diagnosing the cause of the Puer tea recession, there was a strong element of self-criticism in public opinion. That is, Yunnan's Puer tea came under attack because Yunnan itself, represented by the provincial government, had “overcooked” Puer tea and damaged the interests of others. Under the doctrine of moderation, there was also a concern with equality and compromise, exemplified by the updated definition that identified all production areas in Yunnan as the home of Puer tea.

  This belief about moderation was challenged by the new culture in Reform-era China of self-presentation and profit accumulation. Even after the recession, and faced with the “overcooking” criticism, the provincial government still attempted to celebrate and promote Puer tea. Any criticism of Puer tea was taken as negative, hostile, and contrary to the interests of Yunnan. Truth or nontruth was irrelevant. Only profit mattered.

  There were also revolutionary voices appealing for an immoderate and precise image for Puer tea. These voices asked for stronger, clearer, and more scientific regulations and supervision, saving the tea from being “too raw.” They hoped that through these methods Puer tea could become clearly identified. These appeals, however, encountered difficulties even before they could be put into practice. As a result, the “rawness” and vagueness continued, and attempts to define Puer tea diverged.

  These debates showed that the desire to package Puer tea and the alternative desire to unpack it had coexisted long before the actual recession. The contest between them had largely shaped the story of Puer tea from its heating up to its cooling off, and speculation became the fuse that hastened the transformation. The debate goes on endlessly, and so both in its rise and fall, Puer tea's authenticity remained complex, multifaceted, and vague. Even moderation, one of the strong themes in public opinion, is not measurable by any quantitative data, but it is more dependent on personal experience and interpersonal negotiation. The boundary between what is overcooked, what is still raw, and what is nearing moderation, is also contextually determined. Tradition encourages people to remain in the middle ground, but they are taught in the new era to present themselves effectively; they appeal for clarity, but in fact they enjoy vagueness. Thus it becomes a cultural dilemma for actors to decide to what extent Puer tea should be cooked.

  CHAPTER 5

  Puer Tea with Remorse

  One always fears the coming of the Moon Festival, For flowers and leaves are withering. Rivers flow east to the sea. When can they flow back again? If one does not work hard in his youth, He might mourn vainly in his old age.

  —Long Song (Chang ge xing), anonymous, Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) Translation by Ch'en Chao-ying, in Ho Chi-p'eng (1995: 354)

  I returned to Yiwu in September 2007. It was mid-autumn, the other important season for tea harvest. Taking the bus from Jinghong, I arrived in Yiwu in the late afternoon, just as I had in the spring. But something had changed. The main street was obviously quieter. The grocery stores and restaurants were open as usual, but with few customers the owners looked idle. Learning a lesson from my experience in the spring, I had booked a room with the guesthouse. But when I arrived, I found that there were no other guests.

  Since the beginning of autumn, some locals who had business alliances with outside traders had been to Jinghong, Kunming, or Guangdong to find out what was happening in the urban market. They had brought back the important information that a recession was evident in the Puer tea market everywhere. During the spring, the price of maocha in Yiwu had been high, around ¥400 per kilogram for forest tea, and many traders were coming to compete in the trade. But by autumn, the price had fallen to around ¥100 for the same kind of tea, and few traders came to buy.

  Having enjoyed the rising price in spring, people in Yiwu were frustrated by the big contrast in autumn. Suspicions arose about the change in the tea price and its future development. Mr. Guan, a seventy-year-old man, asked me to tell him more about the situation of Puer tea in different urban areas, as he could not visit them personally. He asked me a serious question: “Do you think the price of our tea will go back to the low level it was before?” He was referring to the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, when tea material in Yiwu was worth less than ¥5 per kilogram. The question initially sounded absurd because there was such a big gap between the ¥5 of old and the more than ¥100 or even ¥400 that just one kilogram of tea had recently commanded. When the price was only ¥5, tea was insubstantial and even despised as “negative capitalism,” especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (see also Zeng Zhixian 2001: 93). If the tea price went back to ¥5 per kilogram, it would imply that Puer tea was again valueless and negative. How could this happen?

  When Mr. Guan asked me this question, we were sitting in the courtyard of his house. The house had been built recently and had cost almost ¥250,000. It was a two-story modern brick and concrete house with an antique-style finish on the railings. From the 1950s to the 1970s, his family had lived in a thatched shed; in 1987 he built a tile-roofed house; in 1992 he built a simple brick house for ¥50,000, which was later used as a guesthouse; and in 2005 he built a new brick house for ¥180,000, which he sold later in order to build the present one in a new location. In the center of the courtyard was a car, which was said to have cost ¥130,000. That Yiwu families were able to afford to build such houses and to buy such cars was mostly attributable to the soaring tea business of recent years. The development of Puer tea had catalyzed change in almost every corner of Yiwu. During my fieldwork I often heard tea drinkers say that tea couldn't be equated with rice, implying that eating basic foodstuffs is more important than drinking tea, no matter how valuable the tea. But for people in Yiwu, tea had become equal in value to rice, and they were eating fully and living better because of it. Observing the anxious expression in Mr. Guan's eyes, I began to think about the reasons for his concerns.

  The ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius famously said, “Appetite for food and sex is nature” (Shi se xing ye). After the Reform era, when Chinese people became wealthier, this statement was taken for granted as true. But during the Maoist period (1949 to the late 1970s), when China experienced hunger and when class struggle was deemed more important than eating, “the existence and indulgence of non-collective appetites were almost an embarrassment” (Farquhar 2002: 3).1

  The contrasting attitudes toward eating in the Maoist period and since the early 1980s show that indulgent consumption in contemporary China may be attributed to the unforgettable shortage of food in the past. The present repletion, whether for the individual or for the nation
, can be diagnosed in terms of past depletion.2 In this regard, Mencius's saying is not always true but “timely” (Farquhar 2002: 2).

  Linking past experiences to present orientations is useful for understanding the situation of Puer tea. Local attitudes toward Puer tea have long been shaped by domestic policy and wider external impacts. Just as Mencius's saying should be looked at in context, the present value of Puer tea in Yiwu should not be taken as natural; rather, it should be reread flexibly as “responding to the specific character of place, time and person” (Farquhar 2002: 108). Nor are local production and consumption of Puer tea shaped by a fixed custom. In fact, they have changed back and forth as a result of many unexpected factors. As a result, the root causes of the present worries are not only found in the recent rise and fall of the market. They also need to be looked at through the shadow of the past. And “worries” not only refers to worrying but also contains more reflective thinking about the vicissitudes of Puer tea. As Sherry B. Ortner (2006: 11) argues, “History is not just about the past, nor is it always about change. It may be about duration, about patterns persisting over long periods of time.”

  A BRIEF HISTORY FROM NATIONALIZED TO PRIVATE TEA BUSINESS IN YIWU

  In popular books on Puer tea and in local stories about Yiwu, the historical period from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century is described as a time when private tea companies prospered (Zhang Yingpei 2006; Zhang Yi 2006a; Ruan Dianrong 2005a; Deng Shihai 2004). People enjoyed recalling stories about how the tea business was extended to other Southeast Asian areas and how tea became the dominant element in local livelihoods. At that time, little rice was produced in Yiwu; instead, it was obtained via exchange for tea (Jiang Quan [1980] 2006: 46).

  After the late 1930s, Yiwu's private tea business suffered from war and other turmoil, and even after the situation stabilized, it still struggled to revive. Soon after the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, privately owned tea companies became nationalized in the early 1950s. Tea was brought under a state monopoly on buying and selling. After rough processing, maocha produced in Yiwu was carried to the national tea factories outside for fine processing.3 This arrangement lasted almost half a century, until the private tea business was revived in the late 1990s.

  Contemporary popular books on Puer tea rarely mention the period when the tea business was nationalized, and few people in Yiwu actively talk about it, despite their talent for telling stories about the prosperous period that preceded it. For many locals, this was simply the period when Yiwu became a mere supplier of basic tea leaves for national tea factories, and telling such an inglorious story would do nothing positive for today's tea development. Mr. Guan's anxious question and the low prices paid in the past, however, made me realize that this period was never actually forgotten. Together with the previous period of historical glory, it was rooted in local people's memory as an important reference point when they considered their current and future livelihood. During this period four notable aspects of Puer tea changed in Yiwu: the relationship between tea and rice; the planting methods; the definition of Puer tea; and the price. All of them had changed according to the government's variable tea policy.

  First, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the development of tea production took place within the context of the high priority placed on food production. Yiwu is located in a mountainous area with an average altitude of 1,300 meters. In the past many highland areas had long been used for growing tea, while the flatter lowlands were used for planting rice, corn, or legumes. However, during the food shortage from the 1950s to the 1980s, many highland areas were converted to food production. “Planting food as a guiding principle” (yi liang wei gang) was the slogan for most of this period, when the area was deficient in basic consumer goods. In local people's memory, the time from the 1950s to the 1970s was the “hungry period,” when at least one-third of local families were grain-deficient households (que liang hu) that had to survive by relying on minor cereals and relief food. The early 1960s was the most difficult time, as China was suffering from a disastrous famine and an economic crisis. As Mr. Guan told me, in those years half of the local food grain had to be handed to the state, and with little remaining food many people had to survive by going to the mountains and collecting taro or wild vegetables. Locals attributed the slow development of rice production to the inefficient collective working system and the lack of technology at the time.

  Tea production developed slowly, too. When food was in very short supply, tea trees in some areas were cut down and the fields were converted to rice production (see also YTIEC 1993: 20). Tea farmers worked less actively due to the low value of the tea, and at times the money they earned from tea was so bad that it could “only provide income to buy salt and pepper,” as one Yiwu resident told me. Despite this situation, tea was still the main source of income in Yiwu. The paradox was that the development of tea had to defer to food production, but food was still in short supply, even with some income from tea.

  Second, although food production had been kept as the focus, during several periods tea production was emphasized and boosted for specific political reasons. In 1958 the Great Leap Forward stressed quantity rather than quality of production. Encouraged by blind enthusiasm, people worked too hard, and many tea trees were overpicked (see also YTIEC 1993: 20).

  The next upsurge was in 1974, responding to the request to improve tea areas by the national conference on tea held that year (YTIEC 1993: 22). But because this was during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), political movements were prioritized over tea production, and tea production did not develop much (see also Etherington and Forster 1993).

  After the Cultural Revolution ended and when China began the policy of Reform and Opening Up (the late 1970s and early 1980s), a new system of cultivation had a greater impact on Yiwu's tea production. The food deficiency problem was relieved, and the government began to encourage people to work harder on tea. In the 1970s, tea fields were reallocated from the collectives to private ownership. In the early 1980s, tea seedlings were brought in from other tea-producing regions of Yunnan, such as Lincang and Jiangcheng. Local peasants were encouraged to plant them without pay (see also EBMCA 1994: 227). In 1982, the inhabitants of a subvillage in Yiwu became full-time tea peasants (Mengla Archive 1982). As for the method of planting, a new mode of arranging tea in regular and dense terraces was advocated in order to boost output.4 This new method of cultivation was considered scientific and advanced because it made it easier for farmers to manage the tea fields and increase tea output. Zhang Yi, who worked in the Yiwu government at that time (he later became the pioneer of the revived private tea business in Yiwu in the mid-1990s) took a team to study the scientific way of planting from neighboring tea regions in Menghai and then popularized it in Yiwu. The new terrace teas were trimmed regularly to maintain their bush form and to prevent them from growing as tall as the older tea trees, which were the actual botanical form of tea (figs. 5.1–2). Tender tea buds rather than rough tea leaves or tea stems were appreciated. Meanwhile, old tea trees that were over two meters tall were pollarded (figs. 5.3–4).5 They had been grown for generations, scattered in the forest, and become tall and low yielding. Cutting them short encouraged rapid regrowth and made picking more convenient. At that time, these new forms and operations were taken as scientific methods, whereas the old ways of forest planting were regarded as primitive and backward. The differences between terrace tea and forest tea, and between pollarded and nonpollarded forest tea, did not become important until the resurgence of Puer tea in Yiwu at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  The third important feature of this period of tea nationalization was that the definition of “Puer tea” was vague, unimportant, or even lost for Yiwu people. Talking with many locals, I found out that they seldom regarded the tea produced during the nationalized period as Puer tea; instead they called it “sun-dried basic tea leaves” (shai qing maocha). This maocha was sent to national tea factori
es for fine processing, a process that Yiwu people no longer had to undertake themselves. This maocha, in people's earlier conception, was not Puer tea because it was loose rather than pressed, and people drank it as fresh as possible, rather than after years of aging. Once the maocha turned bad, they threw it away, unlike today, when people store tea as a proud investment. I was told by locals that the practice of long-term storage didn't come to Yiwu until after it was “rediscovered” by the Taiwanese in the mid-1990s. What was ironic and confusing was that people prepared maocha for the national factories the same way that they prepare maocha for their own private businesses today. But they regarded the former as being more like green tea, while the latter was declared to be Puer tea, or at least it was called the basic tea leaves of Puer tea.

  Fourth, the tea price increased very slowly from the 1950s to the early 1990s. As figure 5.5 shows, it took almost ten years for the tea price to increase from ¥0.20 (1950) to ¥1.00 (1959) per kilogram, and an additional thirty years to reach ¥10.00 (1992). Xu Kun, the head of the Xishuangbanna Supervision Bureau of Technology and Quality, recalled that in 1992, when the tea price in Xishuangbanna was only ¥10 per kilogram, he was visited by a special guest from Hong Kong. This guest suggested that the local tea production should be placed under better supervision because he had witnessed how “lazy” the local peasants were when they worked in the tea fields, and he felt it was a pity that the good tea material was not being well managed. Since the early 1990s, people from Puer tea consumption areas, such as Hong Kong (and, later, Taiwan), had been attracted by the value of Puer tea and started paying attention to the situation in the production area. Though the Hong Kong guest's impression about laziness might well be a prejudiced view of local production techniques, local people hadn't started actively working on tea because tea prices were still low. At present, however, outside traders were worried that some locals were working too hard, overpicking the trees and curbing the tea's natural growth.