Puer Tea

by Zhang, Jinghong. ,Project Muse.

  The ancient atmosphere at the Sanzui event was documented by modern technology. Next to the registration desk in the teahouse was a computer with an Internet connection. Three or four people who were involved in organizing the tea tasting worked on the computer, writing posts on the Sanzui website that reported on what was happening in the teahouse (Sanzui 2007). Any participant who was a member of Sanzui could do this, too, though most were fully engaged in tea tasting. Other members of Sanzui who could not attend the party responded online to present their exclamations, jokes, and questions.

  Those doing the web coverage made sure to go back to the tea table to fill their teacups at the right moment and to collect more material for their posts. Taking photos was a key task. Many participants had digital cameras and took several photos of each tea sample: in its pressed shape, when it was infused with good color, and when it was tasted. Several photographers from the mass media were present, and they later reported on the event in publications such as Puer Jianghu (magazine), Pu-erh (magazine), and Kunming Daily (newspaper). At certain points, so many cameras flashed that it seemed that the photographers were recording a “historical moment.” After all, the six kinds of tea were precious and could not be obtained easily. I had brought a video camera with me, and at the event I met another person who also had one. He had been invited by the teahouse owner to record the entire event. The Puer tea served at the Sanzui event was recorded and digitized by both still and video cameras. It became modern.

  SILENT CONTEST

  The Sanzui tasting was a large event, with guests coming and going. The tea tasters were separated into three groups in the teahouse, one on the ground floor and the other two on the first floor. Each group sat around a tea table and had its own tea preparer, but the same kind of tea was prepared and tasted simultaneously at all three tables. The ages of the first five teas served were clearly marked at each tables. The sixth tea's age was unknown, even to its contributor, but there was no doubt that it was aged. The six types of tea were infused one by one, from the youngest to the oldest, with raw tea alternated with artificially fermented tea. Many previous tea-tasting events had asked participants to guess the age and the production origin of the teas, but the Sanzui event adopted a different procedure, asking the participants to judge the corresponding storage details after tasting. The Sanzui event avoided the examination-like style of other events, which asked participants to write down their answers; instead, the organizers opened the door for free discussion. By asking participants to discuss the storage environment, the organizers wanted to approach the subject of whether or not it is worth waiting for Puer tea to age.

  A caked Puer tea from 2001, known as China Tea Yellow Seal (Zhongcha Huang Yin; the character zhong was yellow on the package), was the first to be infused. Around the rectangular tea table on the ground floor, almost twenty people watched as the tea was infused. They observed its saffron color in the serving pitcher. Then tasting began. People silently sipped the tea from their tea bowls. No one talked. The participants' real identities were kept secret, since they all used their web names to sign in at the reception desk. Few introduced themselves or said much at the tea table. Perhaps the serious atmosphere was just what the tea appreciation called for, but it made the atmosphere cold and awkward. Mr. Wei, another key organizer of the event, tried to enliven the room by explaining what he knew about the general life history of the tea. But he stopped short, embarrassed by the lack of response. No one praised or criticized him, or stood up to disagree with his commentary, as people often did on the Sanzui website when the topic touched upon the mythical life history of Puer tea. Mr. Huang, who had been working hard at the computer desk, noticed the strange atmosphere when he returned to the tea table and called on people to speak up. Not receiving any response, he then urged Mr. Wei to continue with his commentary. Mr. Wei instead suggested that everyone should talk, but he was ignored.

  On the first floor, Mrs. Fan, the owner of the teahouse, infused tea at one of the tea tables. While busying herself with the tea sets in front of her, she announced to guests that the tea was carefully selected from many contributions, and that the selections had been tasted by the organizers and deemed excellent. Moreover, she added, all of the chosen tea had been kept in “dry storage,” proving that it had been stored in a clean environment. (This was in comparison with “wet storage,” in which the humidity could accelerate fermentation but also encourage the growth of bad bacteria, and hence was increasingly rejected by Puer tea collectors.) More information about the tea was disclosed, leaving room only for comments, agreement, or opposition from the guests.

  Mr. Yan strengthened Mrs. Fan's point by moving between the tea tables on the two floors. He was a well-known judge of Puer tea and had tasted all six samples several days before. As the main organizer, he expressed his personal feelings about each tea, hoping to elicit more comments from the attendees. He asked people's opinions after his own statements at each table but received only brief comments, such as “Good,” in return. At one point he tried to get opinions from several people who worked for a magazine. Journalists were usually considered good at asking questions and giving comments, but to Mr. Yan's disappointment, they didn't say much after he told them that the tea they were drinking came out of dry storage. Encountering reluctance and embarrassment, Mr. Yan's strategy was often to make an improvised joke, relevant to the tea or to the drinkers.

  Throughout the tea-tasting event, which lasted about four hours, I noticed that most people remained silent. Voices often arose from the organizers or from people who were good at joking. Many exchanged private opinions in low tones with their acquaintances or those sitting near them. Few people publicly declared their opinions about the tea. This reticence took away from the tea event's significance for competition or discussion, and it formed a striking contrast with the disputes that occurred in the active battlefield of the website. Most participants were instead preoccupied with taking pictures of the tea, collecting and preparing something for the future rather than experiencing the present moment.

  Based on my observations and conversations afterward with several participants, I concluded that the silence reflected people's concern with saving face (mianzi). As several people commented, tea can facilitate communication, but the pleasure of sharing tea is possible only when there are fewer participants. The Sanzui tea meeting, at which over fifty people were arranged in fixed seats, and which had a ritualistic atmosphere, contrasted with the old Chinese custom and was not conducive to communication. Many people felt too shy to express their personal feelings in front of such a large audience, and many were afraid to lose face confronting the sensitive and competitive issues around Puer tea. The experience of communicating on the website had taught people that they would be attacked fiercely if they dared to say something different from the general opinion or sneered at relentlessly for making a small mistake about certain facts.

  Some were also concerned about saving the “face” of the organizers. When the second Puer tea was served, one participant bravely observed that the tea was a bit wet and might have traveled via air, implying that it must have been kept in wet storage (in Guangdong or Hong Kong) and flown from there to Kunming. But he didn't continue with his comments, perhaps because there were no other responses, and perhaps because he understood that his comments were contrary to the organizer's description of the tea.

  These tea samples, though they were not actually produced by the organizers or contributors and had been passed from one collector to the other, had been endowed with something spiritual and become part of the organizer or contributor, like hau, the spiritual power of things in the Maori gift exchange (Mauss 1954). The tea symbolized the master's ability to identify the tea, his fortune in encountering it, his ability to possess it, and his courage to reveal it. In this sense, the place where the tea had been stored was identified with the social space of the person who contributed, selected, and spoke for it, so to criticize the tea was to criticize
its master. In this way, commenting on the tea meant exposing one's “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1989), which in this context became one's “tea capital,” which might be in conflict with the “tea capital” of another participant. Criticism endangered the relationship between people (guanxi), especially in a face-to-face context. Improper words could make both the speaker and the master lose “face” (Kipnis 1995).

  This concern with “face” also displayed an oppositional attitude. The famous post about huyou on the Sanzui website, which advocated remaining loyal to one's own innate senses rather than being swayed by external information, had been praised by the organizers. However, as the participants had witnessed, before and during the tea tasting, the organizers had given a great deal of guidance. That is, although the organizers didn't like being swayed by others, at their own tea-tasting events they were swaying their audience. In addition, although the organizers had originally set out the value of aging Puer tea as a subject for discussion and asked participants to freely discuss it, all the visual and oral information they provided actually indicated that the issue didn't need to be discussed further, for older Puer tea was surely better.

  So, participants battled in ways other than speaking, like the heroes in martial arts novels contesting with inner force (neigong) rather than an outer force (waigong).6 Their silence showed the attempts of the opponents to keep their distance from the organizers' interest. It also reflected their attitude toward the organizers and the difficulty they had in finding a proper social space at the event. Silence stood not only for people's distinct self-representations but, more importantly, for the way they related, interacted, and disagreed with one another.

  THE SPACE OF BELONGING

  As the Sanzui tea tasting continued, I gradually noticed that people became more likely to express themselves when a certain tea gave them a sense of belonging. This was most obvious when the tea tasting reached the fifth sample, Xiaguan Bowl Tea Grade B (Xiaguan Yi Tuo) of 1988.

  Because I was focusing on filming the event, my sense of taste was lost, but when the participants commenced tasting the nineteen-year-old Xiaguan Bowl Tea Grade B, I observed through the camera something different in several people's expressions as they drank the tea. I was sitting at Mrs. Fan's table at the time. Mr. Zhu, the editor-in-chief of one of the popular Puer tea magazines, came over from the other tea table to chat with two friends and join their tasting. The group used gestures to enhance their appreciation of the tea, indulging in personal experiences and not paying attention to the directions they received. They sipped the tea with a look of pleasant surprise in their eyes; they smelled the empty tea bowl over and over; and they chewed the tea leaves, trying to experience the flavor more deeply. Then, for the first time at the tea meeting, I heard someone express his own taste impression directly. Mr. Zhu and his friends praised this tea highly and concluded that it was “vigorous” tea (meng cha), like the kungfu of Shaolin, which is played with sticks, in contrast to the seemingly softer Taiji style.7

  According to the authoritative view of many tea experts, good Puer tea should be sun-dried; if it is machine or fire dried, it won't be suitable for long-term storage. Xiaguan Bowl Tea Grade B is well known for having been machine or fire dried by the Xiaguan tea factory; it was naturally fermented, though Mr. Zhu and his friends were unsure where. But they agreed that it had been kept in relatively dry storage, which they saw as a positive environment. Its excellent taste that day proved to Zhu that machine or fire drying isn't always bad and that good dry storage can play a significant role in directing the natural fermentation of Puer tea toward a pleasing result.

  Before this event I had learned that Mr. Zhu was a raw tea connoisseur, someone who preferred to drink naturally fermented raw Puer tea, either young or old. He despised artificially fermented tea. Among the three kinds of raw Puer tea served at the Sanzui event, the 1988 Xiaguan Bowl Tea Grade B was the one he liked most. At that moment Mr. Zhu shared a similar interest with his two friends as well as with the organizers, who recommended and brewed this tea. By challenging the authoritative position, Mr. Zhu found a sense of belonging at the event, a pleasant social space in which he felt valued.

  SEPARATE TEA-TASTING EVENTS

  However, not everyone reacted like Mr. Zhu, reaching a moment of excitement and finding a feeling of personal belonging. On the contrary, quite a few people were displaced by the tea meeting, and all the teas served that day tasted bad to them. The case of Mr. Yang was typical. I met him at a tea-training class, where he taught children how to properly infuse tea using the gongfu technique as well as supervising them in traditional arts, such as Chinese poetry and calligraphy. The tea classroom was also his teahouse, where he drank tea with close friends. In the classroom space, he was well respected by the children, their parents, and his friends. He was praised as a highly professional tea master.

  Mr. Yang showed up one hour late to the Sanzui event, where he signed in at the front desk and was directed to the first floor. Not more than an hour later he came downstairs and told me in a low tone, “I am leaving. It doesn't make sense to stay here. I'll hold a tea-tasting event at my tea classroom soon. Please come to enjoy it. It will be much better than this one.”

  About a week later, I joined in and heard more about Mr. Yang's complaints. He admitted that he should not have been late for the Sanzui event, but he thought the organizer should have assigned each participant a seat. He managed with difficulty to find a seat at the corner of one tea table, but no one noticed that he had just arrived and he was not promptly served a tea bowl. Even later, when he managed to get a bowl, he found it hard to reach the pitchers containing each brew and to communicate with others. Now, sitting in his own tea classroom, he acted as the infuser for ten people. He interpreted the Chinese tea law for me:

  What is interesting about tea is that it is a good medium for people's communication, as I am teaching children something via tea. If you have tea but lack good communication, the tea loses its significance, and I'd say that it has been infused unsuccessfully.

  Mr. Yang served us more than six kinds of Puer tea. Unlike at the Sanzui event, in which electric kettles were used to boil the water, he used high-quality charcoal and a silver pot. In my opinion, Mr. Yang's tea didn't rival those served at the Sanzui event. But to Mr. Yang, they were clearly much more enjoyable. Where he had been unable to find a seat at the Sanzui event, he now sat in the master's seat. The tea classroom was precisely the social space where he had a sense of belonging.

  Mr. Yang was not the only guest who felt uncomfortable at the Sanzui event. Mr. Ping was another. He went to the Sanzui event at the encouragement of his friend Mr. Zhu, the editor-in-chief of a Puer tea magazine. Unlike Mr. Yang, who had no acquaintances at the event, Mr. Ping sat with Mr. Zhu and some other friends from the media. He was greeted warmly by Mr. Yan, the organizer, because he was a well-known writer on Puer tea in Yunnan. He tasted all of the tea that day but left before the event formally ended. A month later, when I talked to him, he recalled the tea event as an unpleasant experience. He commented that it was just a kind of cultural pose (fu yong feng ya), and that all the tea there was worthless.

  Having read Ping's works on Puer tea several years ago, I knew that he was also a raw Puer connoisseur, like his friend Mr. Zhu. But talking with him, I learned that he was an even stricter purist. He rejected not only artificially fermented Puer tea but also raw tea produced by large-scale tea factories. He was fond only of handcrafted raw tea from small-scale producers. Furthermore, he demanded to know where the tea had come from. For example, some of his Puer tea came from a close friend who was a tea master in Xishuangbanna. This friend went to the nearby tea mountains to pick tea leaves, which he processed himself. Ping regarded that kind of Puer tea as precious. By contrast, he viewed most of the Puer tea circulating in the market, and especially the tea that was provided at many conferences or ceremonies, as trash.

  Ping also emphasized the contribution of the Yunnanese to Puer
tea, in contrast to the dominant tea literature from central China and the dominant consumption trends of Puer tea in Guangdong, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. This made me realize that, to him, the pursuit for raw Puer tea was not only rooted in traditional Chinese ideas about nature but also linked to his personal identification as a Yunnanese. He regarded raw Puer tea as being more indigenous to Yunnan, whereas artificially fermented Puer tea was invented to respond to the consumption demands of drinkers in Guangdong and Hong Kong.

  Even some who had not attended the Sanzui event made negative comments about the tea served there. Mr. Wen was an example. I met him when he came to Yiwu in the spring and autumn to trade tea. During the summer and winter, he sat in his own teahouse in Kunming, gathering with friends and sharing his achievements—the tea he traded and supervised for processing. He was a well-known member of Sanzui's online tea forum, but he didn't go to the event. When I asked him why, he said, “I think it's nonsense. I knew I would not like that tea even without going. I knew that some people would be there who are fond of directing others.” Wen's teahouse was not open to the public, but was a private space for tea enthusiasts. Wen jokingly called his frequent guests menke—retainers who originated in China in the eighth century B.C.E., who were accommodated by the master and served him. Some menke came to Wen's teahouse every week or even every couple of days to drink tea without paying for it (fig. 7.2). But once Wen was back from the production area they bought tea from him to drink back home. He was respected by his menke as a tea master with knowledge that extended from field to table, and he was happy and able to answer many questions about tea.