FOOD OR TEA
Every morning between seven and eight o'clock, there was a busy open-air market on central Yiwu's main street, with vendors selling all kinds of foodstuffs. At the market I often met Mr. Zheng, who came to shop there daily. Like most locals, his family didn't own a refrigerator, and he had to buy basic foodstuffs for cooking every day. Before starting his Puer tea business in 2005, Mr. Zheng didn't come to the morning market every day, or at least he didn't need to buy as much as he does now. Like most people in Yiwu, he used to raise pigs and chickens, cultivate rice fields, and plant vegetables for household use. But in recent years the Puer tea business had taken more and more of the family's time and energy, and all other activities had to cede their position to Puer tea. The Quality Safety Standard had also set strict rules for tea processing, leaving less space for livestock. Although some people running tea businesses tried to keep several pigs, they butchered them only on special occasions and went to the market for daily needs. At Mr. Zheng's house, there was now not a single hen or pig. Even the family production of soy sauce, a custom that Yiwu people had inherited from their ancestors in Shiping in southeast Yunnan, had stopped, as Mr. Zheng worried that the strong smell of soy sauce would affect his tea. Therefore, for Mr. Zheng's family, most provisions for eating had to be obtained from the market, leaving Puer tea as the only notable product made at home.
Tea, more than anything else, was helping local families live better lives. Over four months in the spring of 2007, I witnessed or participated in numerous rural family banquets (sha zhu fan) that involve slaughtering a pig and inviting relatives or close friends to share in the feast. The pig, for many people engaged in the Puer tea industry, was usually bought from the market rather than raised by the family. In the past, when rice was insufficient, banquets like this were rare even during festivals; ten years ago, such banquets would have been possible in Yiwu only during the Chinese New Year or at a wedding ceremony. But now, many families held more than one banquet each year. The obvious reason for this was the rising income from tea (fig. 5.6).
After becoming engaged in the Puer tea business in recent years, many families had abandoned their rice fields. In October 2007, I conducted a survey of twenty-three families living on the old street of central Yiwu. All were involved in tea production, but only two families were still growing rice. The desolate rice fields were unused, converted to tea cultivation, or rented to immigrants from other ethnic groups. Tea had supplanted rice as the mainstay of local livelihoods. As in the time of their successful ancestors, present-day Yiwu people ate rice imported from other regions, such as Menghai, purchased with their income from tea. They drank tea when their stomachs were full. Like many urban tea drinkers, or even like the royal families more than a century ago, they drank tea to counteract greasiness.
These lifestyle changes would have been accepted by Yiwu people as a normal phenomenon if the Puer tea trade had continued to expand. However, the recession in the Puer tea market cast a negative shadow over their prosperity. Many local people compared the downturn of Puer tea with the continuously rising price of other food. The price of rice was stable because it was controlled by the state. But, as Mr. Zheng told me, the price of vegetables and pork had risen once or twice from 2006 to 2007. When the tea price came down in autumn 2007, other prices didn't. The increasing price of pork made people regret that they had not raised more pigs, but they soon realized that this was impossible: pigs eat corn, but the mountain fields for planting corn had been converted to tea fields. Moreover, they did not have any extra time to work on crops apart from tea.
Some locals began to consider other alternatives. Some quit tea and turned to mining, as Yiwu has lead and zinc resources. Some began planting rubber, even though it was known that rubber should be planted at altitudes lower than 1,000 meters, while Yiwu's average altitude is 1,300 meters. One person who had started planting rubber explained: “In the past five years, Puer tea was of course more profitable. We would stick to it if it didn't meet trouble. After all, it is something we inherited from our ancestors. But you see, rubber has a more stable situation, and it is necessary even during wartime.”
Whatever alternatives there were for the locals, rice and other basic subsistence crops like corn and legumes were never forgotten. Many people whom I talked to during my survey wondered whether they should reestablish rice fields, given the uncertain prospects of Puer tea. Several families took such action immediately. The famous saying by Chairman Mao, which many had learned by heart, came into people's minds again: “You will not feel panic if you have rice in your hands” (Shou zhong you liang, xin li bu huang).
FOREST TEA OR TERRACE TEA
After the Reform and Opening Up of China, the main impact on Yiwu's tea business turned from the pressure of state policy to the demands of the external market. Since the mid-1990s, Yiwu's Puer tea has been in great demand by outside traders, initially from Taiwan and Hong Kong and later from other areas of urban mainland China. Compared with the slow rise in the tea price from the 1950s to the early 1990s, there has been a rapid upsurge since the mid-1990s, especially after 2003 (fig. 5.5). And as Figure 5.7 shows, since 2004 a price difference has developed between terrace tea and the more expensive forest tea. In the competition between local and outside traders to distinguish “authentic” tea, the tea considered most authentic was forest tea, picked from trees that had not been pollarded, from tea regions with a good, natural forest ecosystem. The most expensive forest tea, which sold for ¥460 per kilogram in the spring of 2007, exemplified this standard. Outside traders and local producers agreed about the basis for this: forest tea is older than terrace tea and has accumulated greater nutritional substance; nonpollarded forest tea is even better, although it grows more slowly than pollarded tea; and forest tea is dispersed in a healthy ecosystem, with sufficient space between trees and good shade from other plants. For all these reasons many people came to believe that drinking forest tea is healthier and has a longer-lasting aftertaste. Terrace tea, by contrast, is younger, planted more densely, and treated regularly with pesticides and chemical fertilizer (although some local people declared that they fertilized their terrace tea only with manure). Of course, picking forest tea from tall and scattered trees requires much more effort than picking terrace tea. Moreover, forest tea's output is far less than that of terrace tea, and its scarcity results in increased price.
But hadn't the locals in Yiwu previously celebrated planting terrace tea, pollarding forest tea, and adopting “scientific” methods of tea cultivation? Yes, but as Mr. Guan said, “Who could predict today's situation? If we had known earlier, we would not have done that.” Many locals answered like this, full of remorse. People complained that Zhang Yi should not have helped to popularize terrace tea and the pollarding of forest tea, even though they admitted that he had contributed to the more recent boom in private tea business in Yiwu. The following two cases illustrate how the contrast between past and present standards of tea cultivation generated complex feelings of remorse among many local people.
Of the Six Great Tea Mountains, Yiwu was the one that most enthusiastically adopted terrace tea and pollarding during the early 1980s. And within Yiwu, the subvillages around the center adopted the most modern techniques. This geographical distribution was explained by locals in terms of ethnic difference. Among the Six Great Tea Mountains, Yiwu had the largest population of Han, with central Yiwu as the typical case. Other tea mountains and areas were more ethnically mixed, with Yi, Dai, Yao, Hani, Jinuo, and Bulang. Han people explained that they had always worked harder on tea cultivation than other ethnic groups, and they felt that planting terrace tea and pollarding forest tea was a “scientific” way of improving production. Mr. Zhao, who was still working in the Yiwu government office, once explained to me that Han people were more inclined to obey the rules set by the government. Other ethnic groups were considered backward, lazy, and disobedient.
I wondered whether such “laziness” was rooted
in taboos of certain ethnic groups. Some of the original tea planters, such as the Hani and Bulang, traditionally regarded tea trees as sacred plants that should not be cut or damaged (Maule 1991; Shi Junchao 1999; Xu Jianchu 2007). However, my idea was overturned when I visited Gaoshan, a subvillage of Yiwu inhabited by Yi (but whose inhabitants recognized themselves as Xiangtang). People there didn't relate tea trees to any religious worship or taboo, and many attributed their past nonpollarding to their earlier indifference to tea. Gaoshan, 13 kilometers away from central Yiwu, is now famous for its valuable forest teas, which have never been pollarded. While the price of forest tea in central Yiwu was around ¥400 during the spring of 2007, it was ¥460 in Gaoshan. Staying in Gaoshan I saw the locals greet potential clients passionately. And in central Yiwu, I met Gaoshan people carrying baskets of maocha for door-to-door retailing. In the opinion of some tea traders in central Yiwu, these Gaoshan people were crafty, often carrying terrace teas from other areas to simulate the forest teas of Gaoshan. Rather than being lazy or backward, they worked as hard as Han people once Puer tea became valuable. In fact, their past “laziness” and “backwardness” had become a great advantage. The people of Gaoshan were not remorseful. Instead, it was the Han people who regretted their once-diligent work.
In the above case, the decision to pollard or not was initially attributed to ethnic difference, but as the situation changed, nonpollarding brought glory to the non-Han ethnic group while pollarding generated remorse for the Han. In the next case, the feeling of remorse was more complex and emotionally aroused.
In central Yiwu, Mr. Hu took me to see his large areas of forest tea, which had been pollarded less seriously. After walking half an hour from his home we came to a grove of tea trees over two meters high. Mr. Hu could not tell the exact age of these tea trees, but he said they had been growing here since he was a child and his mother had come to pick tea from them regularly. He claimed that the tallest and thickest tree was at least five hundred years old, according to a tea expert from Korea. It was the champion among all the tea trees on this mountain, almost four meters high and stretching out on a steep slope beside a valley. I wondered how hard it would be for pickers to work on these old trees.
Mr. Hu said that all these tea trees had been inherited from his ancestor, who had owned most of this small mountain. During the nationalized period, from the 1950s to the late 1970s, the area had belonged to the collective, but Mr. Hu's family had continued working on it. Since the late 1970s, it had been reallocated to his family once again. Many of the trees, even the “champion” tree, had been pollarded following the state's promotion of this technique. But the pollarding was done at a relatively high position on the trunk. Mr. Hu told me that he hesitated to do so at that time, as he thought it was not easy for these tea trees to grow to that height. And the pollarding was not applied to all of the tea trees in the small mountain.
I followed Mr. Hu farther into the forest, where there were more forest tea trees. Although not as tall and thick as the champion, many of these trees were well shaped, with straight trunks and dense leaves. Mr. Hu told me that most of these forest tea trees belonged to his youngest child, Hu Ba. Mr. Hu had eight children, four sons and four daughters. Apart from one son who had died and one daughter who was in Simao, the children lived in central Yiwu and worked on tea fields allocated by Mr. Hu. The three sons used to work in Mengla, but they had all come back to Yiwu to pursue more promising work on tea.
After passing by Hu Ba's forest tea trees, we came to a field of terrace tea, planted in the early 1980s, which belonged to Mr. Hu's third son, Hu San. Although some of the terraces had been transformed from dense into more dispersed plantings, there was no doubt that they would still be called terrace tea. I wondered whether the allocation of tea fields would cause family conflict, since forest tea was much more valuable than terrace tea. And I wondered if this was proof of the Han custom that the youngest child is favored by the parents. The six children all lived in central Yiwu, as neighbors. Mr. Hu lived with Hu Ba, the youngest one.
I heard more stories when I met the children of Mr. Hu. One story answered my question about family allocation of fields. I was told by Hu Ba that it was an accident that he was allocated forest tea. When Mr. Hu allocated his tea fields to the children, Hu Ba was still working in Mengla. His older brother Hu San was given first choice. At that time, terrace tea was regarded as more “scientific” and easier to manage than forest tea. Hu San therefore chose terrace tea first. When Hu Ba came back, only the forest tea was left for him.
Now Hu Ba, the youngest son of Mr. Hu, was benefiting from working on forest teas. He told me that all of his forest tea was now exclusively sold to a Korean woman under contract. Hu Ba and his wife, Zou, called this woman “Godmother” (ganma). She continued her business with the Hu family even after Puer tea encountered difficulties in the domestic market during the summer of 2007. With such a stable client, Hu Ba's family didn't need to worry about finding an outlet for his tea.
Hu Ba's wife told me another story, which was perhaps too sad for Mr. Hu or Hu Ba to recall. Hu Ba's mother used to pick tea from their forest trees. One day she fell from the tallest one, the champion tree that I had seen. It was such a big fall that she died soon after, when Hu Ba was only seven or eight years old. The accident happened around two years before the pollarding movement formally began.
According to the contemporary point of view, it was lucky that some of the forest tea belonging to Mr. Hu's family had escaped pollarding. And these two stories, one about Hu Ba's “fortune” and the other about his mother's misfortune, were interlaced with ambivalent feelings. The death of Hu Ba's mother gave the whole family a good reason to hate forest tea. In Yiwu I had heard other stories of death or injury as a result of picking forest tea. Before the 1990s forest tea was of no value, and people did not work on it as they do today. Some unpredictable and unfortunate events gave them reason to celebrate the pollarding and the new planting of terrace tea. However, that logic was overturned by the Puer tea renaissance in Yiwu in the late 1990s. No one today would doubt that Hu Ba should celebrate his fortunate choice of forest tea. His mother's death, in many Yiwu people's words, was simply a result of carelessness.
ACQUIRED TASTE FOR THE AGED
Paralleling the change in value of forest and terrace tea material was the transformation in value of fresh and aged Puer tea. In the past, local people threw tea away after a few years. Now, everyone placed value on aged Puer tea rather than raw tea, in the same way that they now appreciated forest tea rather than terrace tea. Both transitions aroused a feeling of remorse, and some locals declared in self-mockery that “people producing Puer tea don't store Puer tea,” though paradoxically they kept drinking raw Puer tea due to the limited availability of aged tea as well as the customized palate that had been passed on from the older to the younger generation. Many Yiwu locals told me that these changes could all be attributed to the Taiwanese, who preferred aged tea made from forest tea resources.6
Since Yiwu's “discovery” by a group of tea explorers from Taiwan, its private tea business had gradually increased. According to Zhang Yi, from 1995 to 1999 he was the only one making Puer tea in Yiwu, and his clients were predominantly Taiwanese. After 2002, more families emulated him and set up business connections with traders from Taiwan and Hong Kong. By 2004 there were twenty families running private tea businesses (Zhao Rubi 2006: 33), and by 2007 there were fifty families running private tea businesses, whose clients now came from areas in China such as Guangdong, Beijing, and Kunming.
Mr. Zhao, who worked in the government office of Yiwu Township and participated in the reception for the Taiwanese in 1994, said that he had learned tea tasting (pin cha) initially from the Taiwanese people: “They taught me to use small tea bowls instead of big ones. They said that tea should be tasted slowly [man man pin], rather than simply imbibed for quenching thirst.” As he recalled this, Zhao was serving Puer tea in his tea shop using small tea bowls made of
glass.
Xu Kun, the head of the Xishuangbanna Supervision Bureau of Technology and Quality, said that many of the recovered techniques for making caked Puer tea were also transmitted by people from Taiwan and Hong Kong, who gave feedback and brought antique Puer tea as a model.
The Yiwu people were mostly full of gratitude for the Taiwanese. They knew that the Taiwanese liked Yiwu's tea, and they had seen that it was the Taiwanese who had initially boosted the tea economy in Yiwu.
During the autumn of 2007 I met Mr. Lü, who led the Taiwanese team to Yiwu in 1994 and had maintained business connections with the locals. He confirmed many of the influences of Taiwanese traders on Yiwu's Puer tea, but he said that the price difference between forest and terrace tea had gone far beyond his expectation. When explaining these issues, Mr. Lü was sitting in the family home of Mr. Zheng. Mr. Lü decided to brew two precious kinds of aged Puer tea to show us what really good Puer tea is. He took out a purple clay ceramic pot (zishahu) and small tea bowls from soft cloth bags, which he always carried with him. One of the teas was from the first batch of 7572, made in 1975 at the Menghai Tea Factory, with light artificial fermentation; the other tea was Red Mark (Hong Yin, see fig. 1.3), made in the 1950s also at the Menghai Tea Factory and naturally fermented. When these two kinds of Puer tea were first produced, Yiwu served as the supplier of maocha for Menghai. It was acknowledged popularly that the dominant tea leaves in Red Mark were from Yiwu, and the first batch of 7572 was made of leaves of mixed origins. Both teas had been stored in Hong Kong for most of their life and later on traded to Taiwan.
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