Puer Tea

by Zhang, Jinghong. ,Project Muse.

  Staying with them throughout the day at both the factory and at home, I could feel the tension that the tea business brought upon the whole family. Even during lunch and dinner, Mr. He and Hongping reminded the new employees about procedures in the factory. After lunch and a short break, Mr. He urged He San and the other workers to go to the factory again. He San drove the workers back to the factory first. Mr. He then followed on foot after finishing other things at home. It was not until after dinner that he could sit down at home and enjoy smoking his bamboo pipe in his quadrangle courtyard, with its flagstone patio and wooden structures: pillars, windows, and stairways. This courtyard and another connected to it had been the area for processing tea. The kitchen, bathroom, living room, dining room, and bedrooms were all nearby on the ground floor. In Mr. He's words, “All things were arranged simply, handily, and traditionally.” The upper level of the house had been used for packing and storing tea. The upstairs windows provided a view of the tea fields on the opposite mountain. While smoking his pipe, Mr. He explained to me how he had realized the important value of this old space:

  There have been many times when travelers entered my house without invitation. And usually, in the end, we did tea business with them. I have been wondering why this could happen. As you know, there are many families selling tea in Yiwu, but in some people's eyes I am more successful. I think it is largely due to my traditional house. If I leave my door open, people passing by notice that there is something special inside. They are curious about my house and, of course, about how we make Puer tea in the handcrafted way. Yes, the new factory is excellent, but I know that few visitors will go there. Therefore, I insist that at least one of my family members stay behind to look after the old house.

  Mr. He's family house was more than seventy years old, and it had been used for processing Puer tea for three years before the new factory was built. It was on the government list of Yiwu's protected architecture. Realizing the value of his house, Mr. He decided that he would keep both spaces for tea processing. The new factory would acquire QS certification soon, and in Mr. He's logic, this certification could be extended to cover his house, at least for demonstrating the “traditional” way of processing tea. QS regulations strictly defined how to format the modern processing space in order to have clean production and safe consumption, but it didn't declare that the traditional space must be abandoned. By making use of this regulatory loophole, Mr. He sought to maintain the modern and the traditional at the same time. In his words, he did this to “walk on two legs.” However hard it was for him to go back and forth between the two places, he persisted in doing so every day. Later, he made his multiple journeys easier by learning how to drive a car, despite the fact that he was over sixty years old. Moving with modern transport rather than on foot, the distance between the modern and the traditional was seemingly shortened. And using a flexible logic, he successfully integrated his modern and traditional production spaces. As a result, the Puer tea processed by his family, whether in the modern factory or in the old family house, would be marked with both QS certification on the wrapping paper and the indispensable words “handmade traditionally by a family” (chuantong jiating shougong zhizuo).

  “WAIT AND SEE” AND THE “BLANK VERSION”

  Mr. He's new tea factory passed QS in October 2007. At that time, according to official data, around fifty Yiwu families had officially achieved QS for their fine processing. But there were actually far more than fifty families involved in fine processing, perhaps as many as eighty. Of the extra units, some were still struggling to construct a new production space in order to obtain QS certification, while others never planned to do so. According to those in the latter camp, QS was not a serious issue and they could still continue fine processing in their own way. Hu Ba, the tea producer who had a stable business contract with a Korean godmother, was one such case.

  Hu Ba didn't have an attractive old house like Mr. He, but clients still came to him because of his excellent and famous forest tea resources. He processed his own tea in his family house, for both rough and fine processing. He didn't need to worry about having an outlet for his tea, even after the problems in the market, because of his relationship with the Korean godmother. He said he had no ambition to run a large-scale tea business and would base his business on his present tea resources and sell them to stable clients. According to him and others in similar situations, QS meant making a large investment, which was not worth doing for small-scale production. The strategy Hu Ba adopted was simple and practical: he worked only when the officials were not coming for inspection. Such unregulated moments, according to his experience, were abundant. He felt more confident when autumn came, as QS officials seldom visited after the Puer tea recession. He congratulated himself when he witnessed the losses incurred by families who had been working hard on expanding their production facilities. Most importantly, he had stable clients who continued to buy his tea products even though he lacked a QS certificate. The Korean godmother was his biggest client. Rather than making changes in fine processing to achieve QS, which was only a provincial standard, Hu Ba's family made changes in rough processing as requested by this stable client from overseas. His wife, Zou, told me about the Korean godmother's requests:

  She said that QS doesn't matter to her, but she reiterated that we must avoid using any pesticides or fertilizer on the tea plant. She declared that she would have a chemical examination done on the tea that we sold to her. If any index was above the standard mark, she would reject our goods, because she would have trouble exporting them to Korea. And of course she asked us to harvest, process, and pack forest tea and terrace tea separately. She was a skilled tea taster, you know. She also asked us to dry the tea leaves in the sun rather than baking them with fire or a machine. So you see, during continuously rainy days, I would give up harvesting and just let the tea grow. Moreover, she asked us not to trim the tea trees in winter, lest the plants bloom too fast in the coming spring, which would reduce their quality.

  Hu Ba's family accepted all of these rules even though they were much stricter than the government's suggested standards for rough processing. Throughout 2007, most of their tea products were sold to the Korean trader at market price. Encouraged by this success, Hu Ba began increasing tea cultivation, as the Korean woman said that newly planted terrace tea would be acceptable as long as pesticides and fertilizer were not used. This meant that his production scale could be doubled in the near future. When the topic touched upon QS, Hu Ba's attitude was “wait and see.” He wasn't sure about his future production mode but he could proudly declare that he was producing authentic Yiwu tea.

  One day I visited one of Hu Ba's relatives, a woman who lived not far from his family. She also lacked QS certification, but Hu Ba's family brand was more famous. Nevertheless, the woman insisted that her tea was as good as Hu Ba's. She showed me one cake of her own tea wrapped with simple white paper, without any characters or images, which many locals called “blank version” (bai ban) (fig. 6.3). The woman explained that she didn't want to spend extra money printing colorful wrapping paper and stressed that this generic Puer tea without any QS mark was specifically requested by some special clients because it represented authentic tea produced by a small-scale family business. Tea products with QS, on the other hand, were seen by some people as ugly and inauthentic, representing larger-scale production that focused on quantity rather than quality. I also understood that some outside traders specifically ordered these blank versions so they could rewrap them with their own brand's paper.

  This woman's family was one of the twenty-three families in central Yiwu that I surveyed in October 2007. My original intent was to acquire quantitative data to measure the change in cultivation after the blossoming of Puer tea. After answering my survey questions, many of my interviewees raised interesting issues beyond my questions. Quite often they asked for my opinion on the future prospects of Puer tea and on what was happening in the urban market. And almost everyone acti
vely and sharply criticized the heavy intrusion of tea imported from outside Yiwu, which was taken to be the root cause of local worries. According to them, the collapse of the whole Puer tea market was a result of concern about inauthentic tea, and because of this blemished fame, fewer visitors would come to Yiwu or buy Puer tea. According to local analysis, the incursion of non-Yiwu tea leaves was related to the operation of QS. Their logic went like this: QS demanded a high investment to enlarge the fine processing area. Once families had made this investment, they had to collect enough maocha for their enlarged production scale and, of course, to recoup the QS expenses associated with higher-quantity production. However, as everyone knew, the limited tea resources in Yiwu could not support the increase in fine processing or in the number of tea traders. As a result, one solution was to import cheaper tea resources but to mark the finished product as “authentic Yiwu Puer tea,” along with a QS certificate on their paper wrapping.

  Caught between government regulations and specific market demands, the local producers had to make a careful choice. The QS standard required “addition”: adding facilities and enlarging the production scale. By contrast, some traders yearned for “subtraction”: reducing undesirable work on tea cultivation, keeping small rather than large processing units, and sometimes even leaving the wrapping “blank.” People like Hu Ba and his relative didn't follow government regulations, nor did they oppose them openly. They believed that “addition,” the larger-scale production with QS approval, actually produced inauthentic Puer tea. At the same time, in tacit agreement with their clients, they legitimized their work without QS—that is, “subtraction”—as the authentic way.

  The QS requirements could also be read as “tunnel vision” (Scott 1998: 13)—namely a radical simplification managed by the government to help impose taxation and to mold monoculture. In the case of Yiwu Puer tea it also stood for standardization and mechanization. This simplification, then, was deconstructed by locals like Hu Ba and his relatives with flexible strategies. The standardization came up against the attitude of “wait and see,” and the mechanization was counteracted by more complex hand work in tea refining, as requested by clients who sought specialty goods. So by blurring the boundary between regulation and practice, they readjusted the simplification and turned it back into complexity. It is not only that “what was simplifying to an official was mystifying to most cultivators” (Scott 1998: 48), but also that what was made complex by the locals was mystifying to the officials—or, at least, hard for the officials to judge or regulate.

  TU CHA: INDIGENOUS TEA

  Gao Fachang, a math teacher at the local Yiwu middle school, worried about something different. To him, the most important issue was the damaged ecosystem of the tea mountains.

  Before I visited Gao in person, I had seen copies of a map of the Six Great Tea Mountains that he had drawn hanging in many local houses. Local people loved it, and it was nearly indispensable for families running Puer tea businesses.

  But along with praise for Gao, people in Yiwu described him as a meddling odd man who was overly critical and behaved eccentrically.

  When I met him, I was more shocked by the price of his map than by his short stature, which contrasted with his name (in Chinese, gao means tall). The map cost ¥40, enough to buy almost four good-quality color maps in urban bookstores. In addition to mapping the location of major tea resources, Gao's map showed past and present transportation routes, the location of historical relics such as temples and stone tablets, and longitudes and latitudes. This was not just a schematic illustration, as appeared in other popular books about Puer tea, but an “integrative map,” as Gao called it. He had done all the surveying and mapping himself. Because he lacked advanced surveying instruments, he made measurements on foot and relied on local experience as well as conversion and calculation based on previous maps. The map took him four years to create, and he published it privately, because he could not meet the difficult conditions set down by professional publishing units. “That's why it is expensive,” Gao said, “and why you must buy it directly from me. You can't get it at any bookstores.”.

  While looking at the map, he gave a critical territorial scoping on the production places for authentic Yiwu Puer tea: “Not just any tea growing within this geographical boundary can be defined as authentic Yiwu tea. Tea trees planted mixed with rubber trees and below 1,000 meters altitude, I think, should be excluded.” He referred particularly to a place called Nametian, which was a twenty-minute drive from central Yiwu. In the early 1980s, when terrace tea was first cultivated, nine tea teams (chadui)—actually nine large terrace tea fields—were established in Yiwu, with eight located around Nametian and one in central Yiwu. The area in Nametian was later used for planting rubber trees, which were mixed in with the tea trees (fig. 6.4). Gao said,

  You know, certain insect pests are fond of rubber, and pesticide must be applied. You can imagine how the tea planted along with the rubber would suffer. How could this tea share the general glory of the good tea of the Six Great Tea Mountains? Good-quality tea should be on high mountains above 1,000 meters, but Nametian's tea and rubber fields are only at 700 or 800 meters. In my opinion, among the nine tea teams, only the terrace tea field in central Yiwu should be regarded as authentic.

  Gao then told me two stories about ecosystem damage, stories that may have contributed to the image of him as an “odd meddler.” One time, he witnessed someone cutting down two old tea trees. He reported the incident at once to the local Forestry Bureau but did not receive any response, so he called the higher level of the bureau. Still nothing was done. He was angry and warned the forestry official that he would take matters into his own hands, implying that he might kill the tree-feller. Finally, the officials were forced to come. Another time, he wrote a letter to the central government in Beijing informing them that rubber fields were being increasingly planted in Xishuangbanna and that several local government officials were illegally involved. His letter received a positive response, which made him famous, but the local situation did not change much.

  Gao's negative view of rubber was based upon his own experience. Once, he took back a small portion of soil from a rubber plantation. When the wet season came, all the soil in his field sprouted grass except that from the rubber plantation. He provided a comparison between rubber trees and tea trees:

  Tea can coexist with other plants peacefully. But rubber is like a pump. It's hard to find any other plants in the rubber forest. The earth used for rubber may become dry and eventually useless…The history of rubber planting in Xishuangbanna is less than one hundred years old. We still don't know what its impact will be, just as we still lack knowledge on aged Puer tea.

  Gao said the size of the tea area, especially that of forest tea, was hard to estimate. But since rubber was always planted in a large area, based upon his own measurements on foot, he estimated that the present area of rubber in the Six Great Tea Mountains was no less than 500,000 acres. “Worst of all,” he said, “many local people planted rubber trees after the Puer tea market went into recession. And they don't even care that rubber should be planted below 1,000 meters altitude. This will have a more negative impact on the tea trees.” To him, the downturn of the Puer tea trade was normal and perhaps temporary. Only if the tea trees were protected well would the Puer tea business bloom again. But once the ecosystem was destroyed, the prospects for Puer tea would be bleak. He did not think that people should refrain from planting rubber altogether, but he felt strongly that the rubber area was expanding too quickly.

  Some locals sneered at Gao's concern as a groundless worry. Others thought his behavior was too radical. But quite a few people acknowledged the validity of his argument and appreciated his stories. Some urban visitors also echoed his concern and helped him publish articles anonymously in newspapers and on websites. Gao also wrote a book about the history of Puer tea in the Six Great Tea Mountains. As with his map, however, he had difficulty publishing the book. The main problem,
according to the publisher in Kunming, was that Gao was too critical of other tea experts and celebrities who had written about Puer tea and whom the publisher did not want to offend. Gao said he didn't understand why he could not criticize these “experts,” and asked, “Shouldn't the authentic history of Puer tea come out through debates?” Gao was proud of his own writing and regarded his account as the most indigenous and therefore authentic, as most other accounts of the Six Great Tea Mountains had been written by outside traders, urban writers, and government officials. But a year after submitting his manuscript, Gao's publisher was still asking for revisions. He was being asked not only to limit his critiques but also to revise his writing style and adopt a structure more suitable to a formal publication. Gao could not help but feel that the more intrepidly he acted, the more his feet were bound.

  Despite his many concerns, Gao said he could still sleep well at night, as long as he drank good Puer tea (mostly his own) during the day. Gao ran a small-scale tea business in Yiwu, using the processing unit of a close friend for fine processing. He collected maocha by himself and chose the leaves he liked for his caked tea. He supervised the entire pressing process and designed the paper that was used to wrap the final tea product, the main color of which was earthy red. Characters and patterns were placed in concentric circles. Most remarkable were the two characters in the central circle: tu cha, which could be read as “earthy tea” if literally translated, or “indigenous tea” by extension. By using the word tu (earthy), he said he wanted to indicate that each piece of Puer tea was an indigenous product (tu te chan)—authentic but also common, not magic, as Puer tea was depicted by some. Text in the outer circle further clarified the meaning of tu: the origin of the tea leaves was from Xiangming, Yiwu's neighboring township, which included four of the Six Great Tea Mountains (Manzhuan, Mangzhi, Gedeng, Youle). Gao was born in Xiangming, and he emphasized to me that he identified his ethnicity as “indigenous” (ben ren), rather than Yi, which is how local minorities are identified by the government. He didn't collect maocha in Yiwu much, as in his eyes Yiwu's ecosystem had been destroyed. The front of the tea wrapping did not have space for the QS mark, although the production unit of Gao's friend actually had achieved this qualification. Like some other locals, Gao saw his small-scale production as authentic and disregarded QS. But unlike Hu Ba's relative, who ignored QS by presenting a “blank version,” Gao made a “full version” by filling all the corners of the packaging to describe his indigenous ideas. Despite confronting so much trouble and so many restrictions, his self-designed product became the item with which Gao could freely exercise his ideas about what constituted authentic Puer tea. He reminded his customers that the tea was “purely natural and organic” and would benefit from aging (fig. 6.5).