CONCLUSION: MULTIPLE TRANSFORMATIONS
These case studies show how local people redefined the authenticity of Puer tea flexibly and pragmatically. Rather than directly resisting the government's rules, they deployed strategies focused on exploring the margins of regulation and finding spaces where local voices could be legitimized once again. Producers actively appropriated the authenticity of Yiwu's Puer tea no matter how government regulation or market values changed. Additionally, outside forces—such as the Taiwanese influence, which had a major impact on transforming Yiwu's nature and culture over the past ten years—were recontextualized and transformed into local pragmatic strategies. Although the difficulties couldn't be solved completely, these multiple transformations did address some local concerns. As in the Daoist saying “It's upon bad fortune that good fortune leans,” these Puer tea producers relied on self-sufficiency to gradually transform a difficult situation into a more pleasing one.
Moreover, as part of the dynamics of transformation, one transformed quality is always destined for further transformation. “The older the better,” the strategy that celebrated long storage of tea and partially rationalized slow turnover of inventory, was soon challenged. As a moldy smell arose from storage facilities, it was admitted that “the older the worse” might also be true if the aging process was not managed carefully. As a result, “retouching,” new transformation, and redefining began, stimulated by both external preferences and indigenous realization.
CHAPTER 7
Tea Tasting and Counter–Tea Tasting
The other world isn't so pure; the other law isn't so perfect, either. A real Chinese knight-errant needs to retreat not only from the court but also from the jianghu, like the characters in [Jin Yong's novel] Beyond the Rivers and Lakes: The Smiling, Proud Wanderer.
—Chen Pingyuan 1997: 176
More than fifty people attended a tea-tasting event at a Kunming teahouse in November 2007. The purpose of the event was to discuss whether older tea is better and what kind of storage produces good taste. Sanzui, one of the most influential tea websites in China,1 organized this meeting. At the time, the Puer tea market was in recession. Disputes about whether the quality of Puer tea depends on aging had emerged frequently on the Sanzui website, turning the virtual space into a battlefield. Mr. Yan, the moderator of the Sanzui web column on Puer tea, had announced, “Rather than disputing nonsense all day long, we should talk face to face by sharing and discerning real aged Puer tea.” So, gathering in a public tea-tasting space, people began to explore issues relevant to the time and space of tea storage.
Six kinds of Puer tea, aged from six to nineteen years, were served at the event. Three were aged raw and three were artificially fermented. They were selected from many samples contributed by friends of the website from places including Yunnan, Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Any member of Sanzui could attend the tea tasting, providing that they promised to write a comment of at least a hundred words on the website afterward. Being restricted by distance, most participants were from Yunnan, especially Kunming. Other members of Sanzui in places such as Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan could share in the event only via the web posts, which provided live coverage of the tea gathering. Among the participants, experience or knowledge regarding Puer tea drinking was uneven. Some were experts, while others were just beginners. Their social backgrounds were mostly unknown. From their taste preferences, exemplified by the tea comments they gave later, it was obvious that many sought to improve their economic and cultural status by investing in and appreciating Puer tea.
I had begun participating in this online forum after getting to know several key organizers of Sanzui, such as Mr. Yan, in Yiwu during the spring of 2007. At that time they were collecting information on Puer tea and searching for “authentic” tea from the tea mountains. In the Sanzui circle, those who had been to the tea mountains were acknowledged as having a greater right to speak. A tea-tasting meeting, to some ordinary enthusiasts of Puer tea, was a good chance to meet tea experts and taste the tea recommended by them.
The organizers of this tea meeting, like Chinese knights-errant wandering in jianghu, had attempted to solve all disputes on Puer tea through organizing a singular event, counting on personal tasting skills and trying to isolate tea tasting from other influences. This attempt failed, because one distinct interest met, contested, and interacted with another, and counterforces circulated between the different actors. Tasting judgment was inevitably affected by the atmosphere and social interaction with other actors.
Anthropologists and sociologists of food have argued that taste is influenced by many exterior factors beyond innate palate preference (see Messer 1984; Mintz 1985; Sutton 2001; Strasser 2003; Lien and Nerlich 2004). Case studies also show that taste judgment often results from the mixed standards of internal preferences and external symbolic values; when the taster's prior value standard conforms with the symbolic meanings attached to the food, it tastes good, and vice versa (Allen, Gupta, and Monnier 2008). Food becomes something not only to eat but also to think about. Generally, a person's distinct way of consuming food actually reflects his or her distinct self-representation (Ohnuki-Tierney 1990; Lupton 1996; Mintz 1996; Caplan 1997; Miller 1997; Gabaccia 1998; Counihan 1999; Counihan and Van Esterik 2008).
These different self-representations are often strongly influenced by different educational backgrounds and social origins; each group has its unique social space and “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984). This was strikingly true for the Puer tea event, in which tea taste appreciations differentiated one person from another and acted as signs of cultural status. For social distinction, previous studies have emphasized the gap and distance between different groups of people (Bourdieu 1984). The Puer tea-tasting event, however, provides an opportunity to look at distinction from the point of view of interaction rather than only distance. When all actors' distinct self-representations are juxtaposed, not only their difference, separation, and distance but also the way that they relate, interact, and deal with one another become apparent. That is, the way an individual constructs himself or herself is also the way that he or she joins in constructing social relations; and the standard that one uses for self-representation is based upon referring to others.2 In the tea-tasting event, each group tried to show a unique way of identifying Puer tea by avoiding others' influence. Some participants even opted to retreat rather than directly compete, making the jianghu battle relatively still and secretive rather than open and violent. Nevertheless, the attitudes participants took to separate themselves from others clearly expressed the ways that they countered, related to, and viewed one another.
In the jianghu of the tea mountains, the anxiety about finding authentic tea goes beyond technique and is transformed into anxiety about the struggles of human negotiations. Likewise, in the jianghu of the teahouse, the anxiety of identifying where a particular tea has been stored is transformed into anxiety about interactional social spaces.
AGAINST HUYOU
Throughout 2007, in Kunming, numerous tea-tasting events (chahui, literally “tea meeting,” or dou cha, “tea competition” or “tea game”) were organized by both government and nongovernment tea associations (fig. 7.1).
These events emerged within particular contexts. First, they became more common at a moment when Puer tea was experiencing extreme popularity. Traders used them to let more people know about their tea products and collections; mass media outlets that started columns on Puer tea were eager to collect material for publication; individual tea enthusiasts were keen to meet and test their knowledge and tasting ability. Puer tea became something not only good to taste but also important to know about. After recession struck in the summer of 2007, the passion for holding tea-tasting events was diminished, but they still continued through the winter. The uncertain prospect of Puer tea made people worry, and they were eager to discuss their concerns with others.3
Second, holding tea-tasting events was influenced by economic deve
lopment in China. Antique things were despised during the planned economy period (1949–1978) and especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). After the Reform and Opening Up (the late 1970s and the early 1980s), the trend gradually reversed. Spurred by the economic upsurge since 1992, China had been modernizing, and people were celebrating new lifestyles. But at the same time, the value of the ancient had been rediscovered. Tea, a national drink that had been ignored for fifty years, became a focus of attention once again. The popular tea-tasting event in Kunming was a kind of imitation and recovery of the ancient tea competitions and tea gatherings, popular tea events in the Song (967–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties.
Third, each organizer wanted to present a special way of tasting Puer tea, different from the others. Therefore, the rivalry existed not only between participants in one tea-tasting event but also between different tasting events. The organizers of the Sanzui tea tasting were potentially competing against several “others.” They were against those traders who didn't really love or know about Puer tea but were just good at advertising and cheating. They declared that they would provide the quintessential Puer tea at their event to prove their supreme connoisseurship. Though they didn't intend to oppose the government regulations on tea, many of them looked down on those regulations, such as the updated definition of Puer tea set down by the government of Yunnan. The organizers and participants said that they could easily find mistakes in official definitions, and some didn't care how Puer tea was defined at all. They also didn't trust academic tea experts, who, in their eyes, merely worked in the laboratory, seldom stayed long in the tea mountains, and didn't have enough experience tasting real aged Puer tea. The Sanzui event was particularly opposed to those who spread gossip that downplayed Puer tea's merits after the market crisis. By holding a large tea-tasting event, the organizers wanted to give participants a chance to experience the value of well-aged Puer tea.
In an attempt to counteract the above agents, the organizers of the Sanzui event emphasized one thing: each individual's own unique taste ability. A famous post on the Sanzui website in 2007 was titled “To immunize against huyou, be loyal to your own senses” (Shengse Chama 2007). Originally huyou was commonly used in China's northeastern dialect to refer to irrelevant, exaggerated, or nonsense words (baihua), which often reduce the judgment of the audience or create vagueness. Ever since the term was used by Zhao Benshan, a famous comedian from northeast China, in his performance at the 2001 CCTV's Spring Festival Gala, huyou has been popularly used to refer to cheating, swaying, hyping, wheedling, or agitating someone with fictitious content. Compared with the serious crime of fraud, huyou implies a milder sense of cheating, and it is often used in a joking or sarcastic context.4 Since Puer tea's rise in popularity, huyou has also been widely used to suggest strategically swaying, directing, cultivating, or infecting others in order to promote tea sales or personal fame. As a result of huyou the flavor of tea becomes an acquired taste, rather than one based on innate feeling and judgment. This Sanzui post revealed the fact that Puer tea had been largely shaped by many “packaged” values—namely, all sorts of exaggerated statements and mistaken information. The web post encouraged people to evaluate Puer tea based on their innate preferences rather than other external factors. That is, faced with the risky jianghu of Puer tea, one must depend upon one's own tasting skill in order to discover authentic tea. This tasting skill is simple, as it avoids exterior interference, though it is also complicated, because it relies on innate talents as well as diligent practice.
One month before the Sanzui event, I was at another tea-tasting event organized by a local newspaper. Mr. Yan, the organizer of the Sanzui event, was there too. Over the course of about two hours we were served eleven kinds of Puer tea, most of them quite young. Due to the volume of tea being served in a limited time, each tea could be tasted for only two or three “runs.”5 According to Mr. Yan, this abbreviated tasting did not show how long the tea could stand up to being infused. The tea serving was at times disorderly and confused. After tasting, the participants were asked to guess the age and production origin of each tea. Those with the highest scores received rewards, and those with the lowest were required to buy something. Mr. Yan was obviously unsatisfied with the tea, the serving, and the regulations. It was at this event that he told me about the forthcoming Sanzui event, which, he said, would allow people to fully enjoy drinking Puer tea. He later put his promise into practice. The Sanzui event lasted longer, with each tea being fully infused; it set different competitive regulations for the participants; it provided more types of aged Puer tea that had been infused using superior techniques; it created a distinguished atmosphere for the event; and, most importantly, it asked participants to be loyal to their own senses and to express their true opinions about the teas' flavors.
ANCIENT PLUS MODERN
The Sanzui event was held at the teahouse of Mrs. Fan, who was well known in the Sanzui community as an expert tea infuser. The teahouse was located beside a lake in a quiet residential district, in keeping with the old custom that a teahouse should be remote from noise and distraction. I went there after a full lunch, knowing that I would not be able to bear drinking so much tea on an empty stomach. When I arrived, the ground floor of the teahouse was crowded with guests, all watching Mr. Yan, the organizer, allocate six kinds of Puer tea. Chinese zither music was playing in the background, providing a melodious and relaxed tone to accompany the tea drinking, although the effect was negated by the large crowd.
Although it had modern elements and materials, such as Western-style sofas and lights, the teahouse largely imitated an ancient Chinese style of décor, with elements like a round latticework wooden screen, Ming-style chairs and tables, and calligraphy and traditional Chinese flower and bird paintings on the walls. In many corners stood ancient-style vases and jars, and delicate tea sets lined the shelves and tables. All of these features contributed to give the teahouse an “antique feel” (Clunas 1991: 81). The physical presence of Puer tea strengthened this point. It was used as the most remarkable antique decoration in the teahouse, both in the form of actual aged Puer tea in various shapes and as illustrations of past Puer tea brands.
The tea-tasting event aimed to create an ancient aura. This included the decoration and the atmosphere of the teahouse, the method by which tea was infused, and the way the event itself was carried out. Great attention was paid to the serving of the tea, displaying a practice that takes great effort, as summed up in the standard Chinese term gongfu. It is said that only through very careful and highly skilled infusing can the intrinsic quality of tea be fully presented, enabling participants to judge the storage feature properly. All the tea at the event was infused in Chinese purple clay teapots, as this type of pot is acknowledged as the best vessel in which to make tea. Each type of tea was infused separately, as clay pots easily absorb smell. Thus, the pot for oolong tea and red tea couldn't be the same, and raw Puer and artificially fermented Puer were kept apart. The tea brewed in each pot was poured into a serving pitcher and then into individual tea bowls. Pouring the tea from the pot into the serving pitcher first assured that every guest's cup of tea would be of the same strength and consistency, symbolizing that each person around the tea table was equal. Both the serving pitcher and the individual tea bowls at the Sanzui event were made of glass so that the color of the Puer tea brew could be better appreciated. This helped tasters to judge the age of the tea. Next came a stricter principle that had been ignored by other tea tastings, but was followed closely at the Sanzui event: different infusing techniques were applied to different teas. This included varying the temperature of the water, the height and direction from which water was poured into the pot, and the steeping time for each run. These infusing techniques could not rival the Japanese tea ceremony in their attention to detail, as their purpose was more taste sensation rather than spiritual inspiration. These careful techniques, which embodied the craft of tea infusing (gongfu cha fa), originated in
the Chaoshan area of southeast China, where they were developed mainly for oolong tea, and they had now been borrowed for many other types of tea, including Puer. The individual craftsmanship of the tea infuser ultimately decides how these details are carried out. At the Sanzui tea tasting, three expert tea brewers, all of whom had obtained the certificate of craftsmanship in tea infusing (cha yi shi), were present, including Mrs. Fan. Each attended to one of the three tea tables. Each kind of Puer tea was brewed for at least five runs, unlike at the previous events that Mr. Yan had attended and been dissatisfied with. Furthermore, after the five formal runs the tea was transferred into a bigger pot, which was then boiled for ten minutes and served, in imitation of the ancient way of boiling tea. According to the organizer, this final boiling released the remaining substances in the tea so that the value of the precious aged Puer tea could be fully appreciated.
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