Puer Tea

by Zhang, Jinghong. ,Project Muse.

  These teas were quite different from the raw Puer tea produced in Yiwu nowadays. The first batch of 7572 was artificially fermented, though lightly, in Menghai, which made it different from the naturally fermented tea. Red Mark, although naturally fermented, was about fifty years old, and therefore different from the raw Puer tea of Yiwu that Mr. Zheng and his son tasted every day in their tea business. The unique herbal medicinal smell that resulted from Hong Kong storage could be detected at once. The two teas also differed from the artificially fermented Puer tea stored in Yunnan that was much more “earthy.” According to some people I met, the smell of tea stored in Hong Kong was moldy because of its moist climate, but it was different from the moldy smell that resulted from storage in the moist weather of Yunnan, including that of Yiwu. When tasting Red Mark, I was reminded of soup boiled with rice (mi tang), an analogy often applied to good aged Puer tea. Both brews were strong and bright red (hong nong ming liang), which was how guidebooks described aged Puer tea (see, for example, Deng Shihai 2004; Zhang Yingpei 2007; Zhou Hongjie 2004), in contrast to the faint yellow raw Puer tea that Mr. Zheng's family and I regularly drank.

  There were four tasters: Mr. Lü, Mr. Zheng, Mr. Zheng's son Zheng Da, and me. Mr. Zheng and Zheng Da tasted slowly and carefully. They praised the beautiful color of the tea brew but they didn't give any clear comments on its taste. Mrs. Zheng sat beside us and watched. Like many women in Yiwu, she supported her family's tea business by doing the cooking and cleaning, but she didn't like drinking tea. She said this was in part because her digestion was not good. In addition, because Mr. Lü served the tea in the evening, she was afraid that drinking it would make it hard for her to sleep. But Mr. Lü encouraged her to have a few small bowls. He told her that good-quality aged Puer tea would benefit her digestion and would not disrupt her sleep. Mrs. Zheng tried some, without significant comment either, and after two small tea bowls she stopped.

  Mr. Lü told me that he came to Yiwu for tea almost every year because the most desirable aged Puer teas—such as Tongqing, Songpin, Tongxing, and Tongchang, the so-called first generation of Puer tea—all originated in Yiwu. He had tasted examples of almost all of these teas that were at least sixty or seventy years old, and he hoped the new ones he was collecting in Yiwu would turn out to be as good after several decades of aging. The first batch of 7572 and Red Mark, products of the second generation, also represent the aged appeal of Puer tea, although they are younger. Mr. Lü said that one piece of Red Mark could be sold for ¥85,000 at present, but before the Puer tea market boomed he had sold it to his customers for only several thousand yuan. He generously broke some pieces from his 7572 and Red Mark and left them with Mr. Zheng's family for further tasting.

  A few days later I went to Mr. Zheng's house again. The two samples of precious aged tea left by Mr. Lü were untouched. When I asked Mr. Zheng his thoughts on the earlier tasting, he shook his head. He had little interest in aged Puer tea, preferring the raw tea that he produced and tasted every day in Yiwu, which he found full of fresh aroma. He did not care that his clients were counting upon the transformation from the fresh to the aged.

  Whether being guided to prefer forest tea, being taught the proper way to prepare Puer tea, or being shown how to delicately drink tea, Yiwu people learned many new rules from the Taiwanese. But when it came to choosing between raw Puer and aged Puer, many Yiwu people still preferred the former, depending on their humble palate shaped by daily life and cultivated by the local water and soil (shuitu) of Yiwu.

  Zheng Da, Mr. Zheng's son, however, was more interested than his father in exotic things. He tasted the aged tea again several days later with his friends. Like his father, he was used to the fresh tea of Yiwu and didn't praise Mr. Lü's tea, but as time went by he became more appreciative of it. His father, although more loyal to his original palate, recognized that he had to respect the ongoing preference for aged tea if he wanted to make a profit. Though the market recession had brought many uncertainties, he had seen one certainty in the continuing demand of Mr. Lü and others for raw Puer that would one day become aged tea. In the product description he attached to his family-made Puer tea, he wrote clearly that the longer the tea was stored, the higher its value would be.

  In July 2009, on a short trip to Taiwan, I drank Puer tea with several young friends who had never been to Yunnan. When they heard that people in production regions like Yiwu previously didn't drink aged Puer tea, they burst out laughing. From their very first experience of Puer tea, they had been informed that Puer tea shouldn't be consumed until it was aged, and they had become accustomed to this law. Their laughter showed that they took aging as a natural and intrinsic feature of Puer tea. They didn't consider the diachronic sequence—that it was fresh tea rather than aged tea that was closer to the original nature of Puer tea, at least for people in the production regions.

  CONCLUSION: REFLECTIVE WORRIES

  In the jianghu world of Puer tea, there are no fixed rules, and all standards are open to the influence of history. Determinants of Puer tea's value have shifted in Yiwu over the past half-century. The stories of remorse and the constant changes in Yiwu echo other stories with similar themes lived by urban traders and consumers, especially those from Yunnan. According to the current standards, the ways Yunnanese treated Puer tea prior its resurgence in the mid-1990s were all “ignorant.” In popular books and magazines, and in my own fieldwork, I heard numerous people lament that they should have stored aged Puer tea, made from forest tea leaves, much earlier. This regret encouraged blind buying and storing, often resulting in bankruptcy when the market suddenly receded.

  Paralleling urban remorse, this chapter is filled with rural voices. For these people, tea has long been the mainstay of local livelihoods and hence is a source of both anxiety and happiness. Mr. Guan's question about the price of tea reflected the local uncertainty aroused by ongoing events as well as by the past. As in Chinese medicine, the present repletion can be diagnosed in terms of past depletion (Farquhar 2002). Driven by constant changes, there may never be a clear answer about the stable authentic features of Puer tea. Rather, these features are a response to context and history. The uncertainty of the locals shows their inability to control and adjust the value of tea, yet, while connected to the broader historical context, their worries are not endemic, but contain forces of transformation. External pressures and acquired standards have been used as a weapon by locals in response to the cooling down of the tea business in the autumn of 2007.

  CHAPTER 6

  Transformed Qualities

  The longer Puer tea is aged, the mellower and smoother its flavor will be. And finally it will attain hua [a full transformation]…. It will melt in your mouth when you drink it. This is the supreme praise for the best-quality Puer tea.

  —Deng Shihai 2004: 49

  After I finished my spring fieldwork in Yiwu at the end of May 2007, I stored a box of clothes and other goods at the local guesthouse, so when I came back in mid-September, my stored possessions had spent most of the wet season there.1 Although I had sealed the box well, a strong smell of mold emerged when I opened it. This gauge of Yiwu's wet season, with rain on most days, caused me to worry about tea that had been stored in Yiwu after processing in the spring.

  My worries were partly confirmed over the following days as I drank Puer tea with local families. Some of the tea had the same moldy smell as my stored possessions. The most obvious changes had occurred in the loose-leaf tea. This tea was often kept in a ventilated place, where it was more exposed to the moist air of the wet season and natural fermentation was accelerated. The result was more pleasing if the tea had been put in a mostly sealed room. When tea was stored for around two years under such conditions, the tea brew turned from light yellow to orange (fig. 6.1), with a special plum aroma. But if exposed to moist air for the same period of time, the tea brew turned dark red (fig. 6.2 and back cover of book), with an obvious moldy smell.

  The tea traders from urban areas usually a
ppreciated the “plum” rather than the “moldy” smell. But local people, focusing on the color change rather than the smell preference, were happy about the accelerated changes, from a commercial point of view. In their opinion, this transformation proved that Yiwu was a good place to store and age Puer tea, as the tea brew's change in coloration from light yellow to strong, bright red reflected the transformation of high-quality aged Puer teas as described in popular books.

  From the traders of Taiwan and the Pearl River Delta, Yiwu people were learning to appreciate aged Puer tea. Although this appreciation may not have been consistent with their original palates, aging had become a handy tool.

  As the Puer tea market went into recession, local people applied various strategies to keep their tea businesses afloat, and they looked at the main problems of Puer tea differently from their peers in urban areas. They transformed the newly developed criteria on the value of Puer tea into local practices, thus endowing the characteristics of Puer tea itself with new “qualities.”

  Practice theory stresses the role of human agency and the importance of interaction between multiple actors in “the dialectic of control” (Giddens 1979: 145)—namely, that control can never be implemented unilaterally. Those being controlled have the potential power to counteract their supervisors with “hidden transcripts” (Scott 1985), such as secret weapons. In this regard, the importance of everyday forms of indirect resistance, contrasted with an earlier focus on peasants’ uprisings and revolutions, is underlined and referred to as a “constant struggle” and “subtle sabotage” (Scott 1985: 29, 31). This everyday social action exists with no institutional visibility, no manifestos, and no banner, but the final impacts of the action can be significant:

  They require little or no coordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help; and they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms. To understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to understand what much of the peasantry does “between revolts” to defend its interests as best it can. (Scott 1985: 29)

  One aspect of understanding such subtle resistance is to look at how locals explore the margins, which are beyond the definition of existing regulations. That is, by blurring the boundary between their newly explored ground and the already established rules, they can successfully transform the established authenticity into a localized one. Although the attitudes and actions of the peasants in Yiwu could be looked at as a kind of subtle resistance, the word resistance is both too rigid, in terms of this particular cultural context, and too dualistic. In the case of Puer tea, there are multiple actors with multiple perspectives. Transformation would be a better description. The corresponding word in Chinese is hua, which encapsulates neither direct opposition nor absolute weakening but gradual change. The word suggests “melting” and aiming to reach a neutralized state.

  The concept of hua has long been utilized by Chinese traditional philosophy to refer to ubiquitous transformation, exemplified by the famous discourse of Daoism on the mutual transformation between bad and good fortune: “It is upon bad fortune that good fortune leans, upon good fortune that bad fortune rests” (Lao Tzu 1998: 122–123). In terms of Confucianism, other hua forms, such as wenhua (cultural transformation) or jiaohua (meaning to moralize, domesticate, or civilize), mean to transform something raw or rough, through gradual instruction, education, or domestication, into something civilized and superior.2

  In the case of Puer tea, hua is often used in the term chenhua to mean “aging” or “fermentation” in storage, the process by which the astringent feature of raw Puer tea is transformed into a mild, smooth quality. This can occur through long-term natural aging or short-term artificial fermentation.

  In the jianghu context, hua intrinsically indicates the strategies and settlements employed by multiple actors to transform an unsatisfying situation into a comparatively more satisfying one. For instance, some knights-errant depend upon their own martial arts rather than state regulation to help the poor and deal with unfair issues; others withdraw from jianghu and become hermits to avoid conflict with the state or other jianghu groups; and others find proper ways to resolve disputes between different disciplines and to reach a harmonious relationship. This last approach is called “turning hostility into friendship” (hua gange wei yubo).

  The above meanings of hua shed light on local people's active appropriation of the authenticity of Puer tea. One aspect of the meaning of hua is of particular interest—namely, the transformation from something hard and unacceptable to something applicable and digestible.

  This transformation and appropriation took place despite the lack of both detailed criteria by which Puer tea's quality could be judged and efficient government supervision. These deficiencies in the definition and regulation of Puer tea may be seen as “margins” that were explored by locals using their transforming agency and self-created solutions and strategies.

  Even though the Puer tea market was in recession, the Quality Safety (QS) certification system still applied pressure. The original purpose of QS was to make sure that the tea production process was hygienic, but in practice it resulted in the unavoidable expansion of production spaces and consequent high investment. Under these investment circumstances, locals redefined and transformed the authenticity of Puer tea not only as a form of symbolic representation but also as an important pragmatic tool. Yiwu's tea producers avoided direct resistance to external pressures, but their actions managed worries at a crucial moment, and they empowered locals to achieve a certain degree of freedom.

  “WALKING ON TWO LEGS”

  In chapter 2, we saw how Mr. He's family tea production was challenged by the new QS standard. During the spring of 2007 he decided to build a new tea factory in cooperation with a capable tea company in Kunming, instead of making changes to his old house.

  Mr. He had finished constructing his new tea factory by the autumn of 2007. Had events unfolded according to his original plan, he would have collected more maocha and processed it with the greater production capacity of his new factory. But the collapse of the Puer tea market happened just after Mr. He had spent almost ¥600,000 on building his new production space. Furthermore, like many other locals, he had invested in highly sought-after maocha during the spring season, when the price was booming.

  When I visited Mr. He in the autumn, he expressed his frustration to me and said that it had been an unfortunate year for him. Despite his complaints, he continued to work hard. One day in late September, he got up early in the morning and hurried his son and several workers out to the new factory. It was the day that his new factory would start testing. Only if the test went well could they pass the QS successfully. The new factory, two kilometers away from his house in central Yiwu, was made of reinforced concrete. Its area was more than five times that of the family house. Around an open rectangular courtyard were a number of separate rooms—for storing, sorting, pressing, drying, finishing, and tasting tea—as well as a laboratory, a room for dressing and cleaning, and a factory office.

  In one of the two tea-pressing rooms, which measured more than twenty square meters, He San, Mr. He's son, acted as the core link in the production chain. He San was shaping the tea cakes by hand, a difficult procedure that was the most directly determinant of how the final tea cake would look. To his left, He San's fiancée, Little Zhang, was teaching a new employee how to put the correct amount of maocha into a cylindrical container and weigh it. She had quit her job in a government office in Jinghong to concentrate on helping with the He family's tea business. I was told that the He family had asked her to help them; if she did not, she would not be accepted as a daughter-in-law. On the right side of He San, two young men were stepping upon the stone press. Here, the traditional way of handcrafting caked Puer tea was continuing.

  Next to this was the other processing room, which was not yet in service. A large new machine had been bought and carried in from outside several days earlier. It would
be used to press the caked tea mechanically, as an alternative to the stone press, but Mr. He and his family were still waiting to learn how to use it. This machine was a necessary part of the QS, and it would be used mainly when producing gift tea (lipin cha), tea intended to be used at special events for gift giving. Gift tea was assumed by some people, though not all, to be made of poorer-quality tea leaves, but demand for it could be high during special seasons such as the Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival, when Puer tea was given as a gift in urban regions. The He family's production choice hinted that better-quality tea material should be paired with the traditional method—the stone press—while poorer-quality material was left to the machine, which could increase the production output. But the machine modernized the new factory, in contrast to the stone press in the nearby room, and to all the other processing equipment in the family house in central Yiwu.

  Mr. He supervised all the work and dealt with matters both trivial and important. He had complex and ambivalent feelings about the modern space. He generally didn't like it, and he complained that it forced him to spend a large amount of money, but at the same time he was very proud of his new construction. He took a group of guests from Beijing on a tour of the factory and hinted to them that this was the best tea production unit in Yiwu. The guests were curious about the “tea laboratory,” where there were professional evaluation teacups, test tubes, and an accurate scale, which were usually found only in chemical laboratories or at special meetings for tea evaluation. Mr. He hinted that this equipment might not be used in practice but was required by QS.

  The new factory also included a kitchen and lodging for the employees, but due to some unfinished work, for the first few days of operation the workers had to go back and forth to the old family house in central Yiwu. At home, Mrs. He and her daughter, Hongping, cooked lunch and dinner for them. Mrs. He was worried because she needed to look after the family house, but in the future she might have to go to the new factory to cook, to avoid hiring another cook. Hongping ran a tea shop in Kunming and came back home temporarily to help with the housework as well as factory management. In her words, the initial test for the new factory was “a big thing” and these early operating days were “a crucial moment” for the He family. As I learned later, the family received some orders in the autumn, though general business was still slow. They worked hard to recover some losses and, of course, to learn to use the new factory. The actual inspection and evaluation would take place soon.