By keeping silent or even not attending the Sanzui event, these critics displayed an interest distinct from the organizers of Sanzui. In order to declare their opposition, they held separate events.
Another case that is distinct from those discussed above involves Puzi (web name), one of the Sanzui organizers who attended the big event. Unlike Yan or the other organizers, he seldom spoke, though it was well known in the web circle that he had considerable tea knowledge. I met him in Xishuangbanna when he organized a small team to perform a field investigation of Puer tea. Back in Kunming I visited him many times. Unlike the organizers of the separate tea-tasting events discussed above that often had many people and were held at independent teahouses, he preferred not to call his tea tasting a formal event. He sectioned off part of the living room in his house, simply but elegantly decorated, to serve as a tea room. Usually he invited only a few guests at a time, in accordance with Chinese tea custom: “Drinking tea alone makes a person focus on the spirit of the tea, but sharing with another is superior; three to four people together can share more pleasure in drinking tea, five or six is too many, and seven or eight is charity” (Chen Zugui and Zhu Zizhen 1981: 142). I knew that Puzi had certain principles: not to be directed by others, and also not to direct others. Puzi commented when he made tea in his own tea room that the supreme pursuit for Chinese to drink tea should be harmony (he), a concept in Chinese philosophy that includes tolerance of diversity or heterogeneity. The Sanzui tasting event looked peaceful because no debate happened there. But according to Puzi, it didn't really achieve harmony. His comments indicated that there actually had been many disputes about Puer tea that were played out secretly, fostering intolerance. For Puzi, the debates were often meaningless, and the most enjoyable way of tasting tea was just to share it with several good friends in his small tea room.
In martial arts novels, the Chinese knights-errant are generally those who live in the world of jianghu, subtly declaring their opposition to the court. Puzi's case made me think of some special knights who retreat from jianghu itself after learning enough and tiring of all the jianghu disputes. That is, not only do they go beyond the court but they also go beyond the jianghu. To them, neither the world ruled by the court nor the jianghu is a perfect society (Chen Pingyuan 1997: 176; Hamm 2005: 137–167). By keeping distance from both the court and the jianghu, they declare a singular interest different from that of all the other actors. But importantly, when they construct their unique social space, they also reconstruct the way that they relate to and interact with others.
CONCLUSION: MULTIPLE SPACES
The Sanzui tea-tasting event ended after about four hours. The guests left and the organizers stayed for an informal summary. Mrs. Fan opened the discussion by scolding Mr. Yan for failing to organize the event well. In her opinion, Mr. Yan should have asked each participant to give an introduction at the beginning. This would have facilitated communication during the tasting. However, she said, Mr. Yan enjoyed chatting only with particular people, and, as a result, most guests remained unknown to one another and to the organizers. Few comments on the tea were collected. Mr. Yan didn't deny this. He was tired, and he hoped that there would be feedback on the website to make up for the lack of comments in the actual tea-drinking space.
As anticipated by Mr. Yan, the discussion of taste and feelings about the aging of Puer tea took place mostly in cyberspace. The night of the tea tasting, he wrote a new post, attaching his own comments and reminding participants to add their own hundred-word comments. Some people responded at once. Several wrote comments very carefully, tea type by tea type, drawing on their memory and illustrating their comments with photos. Behind their anonymous web names, they began to comment more bravely. Generally, they confirmed the value of the six types of tea, but some people doubted the age of certain teas and voiced suspicion that some had been put in undesirable “wet storage.” These alleged shortcomings generated immediate debate. One person didn't give detailed comments but just said that most of the teas were terrible. This comment met with a strong rebuttal, and its author was asked to set out his criteria for good tea. The website became a battlefield once again, in contrast to the seemingly peaceful world of the teahouse.
Multiple layers of space were touched upon through the Sanzui event. First, there was the tea storage space that was the topic of discussion for the event. Second, there was the teahouse where the tea tasting was held. It should have been here that participants had a full discussion about storage space, although in fact that discussion went on mostly silently and unsuccessfully. Third, there was cyberspace, originally envisioned only as a supplement to the real teahouse for collecting comments. In fact, this became the space where more “real” debate about tea storage went on, illustrating how the Internet is being used in China as an important site for debate. Fourth, there were other teahouses or tea rooms where separate tea-tasting events were held. Although representing a stance of separation or retreat rather than direct contest, they showed a much stronger counterattitude than did the virtual space toward the large event. Finally, there were the symbolic social spaces of different groups and individuals. These social spaces were distinct but also interacted.
Participants in the tea-tasting event should have paid attention to the question of tea storage space, but they in fact neglected it almost entirely; they instead cared more about human interaction. As the attention of these participants shifted from tea space to human space, their tea-tasting skill became less important than their interpersonal communication.
CHAPTER 8
Interactive Authenticities
The enchantment of Puer tea lies in its unsolved mystery, its vagueness, and its changeable meanings. It's like a sea, vast and mighty, filled with submerged reefs and strong rapids, and no one can reach its far end. What we can do best is just sip our own tea!
—Yang Kai, Liu Yan, and Li Xiaomei 2008: preface
Zongming, a friend from Hong Kong, visited Kunming in December 2007, seven months after the price of tea plummeted. Making use of his holiday, he met in Kunming with friends he had communicated with on the tea website Sanzui. The participants on Sanzui lived in almost every province of mainland China, especially in urban areas. After the Puer tea recession, many participants traveled between Yunnan, the production region, and the Pearl River Delta, the so-called consumption area, to visit one another. Each side was eager to know what was happening in the other location, and both wondered about the future prospects of the Puer tea market. The Sanzui participants in Kunming gave Zongming a warm reception, as they were excited to meet someone who was known as a good commentator and who might bring some new information from Hong Kong. Because Zongming was not a trader but just someone with a keen interest in tea, his Kunming tea friends, many of whom were tea traders, talked openly with him without worrying too much about commercial competition.
I got to know Zongming in Hong Kong one year before his visit to Kunming, when he took me to several yum cha restaurants to show me how Hong Kong people drank Puer tea in their daily lives. In Kunming, I joined him on some of his trips to teahouses. When issues about consumption are raised that refer not only to Puer tea's production but also its storage, the social biography of Puer tea becomes more complicated and contested. The various features of aged Puer tea reflect the changeable social landscapes in consumption, exemplified by the temporal contrast before and after China's Reform and the spatial differentiation between Yunnan (the production area) and Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (the consumption areas).
Understanding a commodity's circulation may be approached by examining its detailed social biography in exchange, rather than focusing only on its exchange forms. Thus what links a commodity's value and exchange is politics—namely, “the constant tension between the existing frameworks (of price, bargaining, and so forth) and the tendency of commodities to breach these frameworks” (Appadurai 1986: 57). The value of a certain commodity, its path of circulation, the knowledge it contains,
and the desire and demand for it are all determined by social definitions and redefinitions, and hence the authenticity of things cannot be static but shifts contextually. The tension around Puer tea, too, may be seen as the contest between multiple self-presentations across time and space. On the one hand, the “habitus” (Bourdieu 1984, 1989) of consuming a certain type of Puer tea is shaped by a certain nature and culture, which shows a strong identification with localization. On the other hand there is a global intent to control, to provoke, and to import capital to the local. In order to cater to the outside demand, the localized “habitus” is forced to adjust and reach a certain compromise with globalization. While compromising, the local forces are also redomesticating the outside forces to serve in the local's new self-presentation. Thus it becomes neolocalization, in which the global and the local elements are mixed and become hard to differentiate, and one's self-presentation is never self-determined, but actually involves the borrowed, adapted, and reauthenticated elements from others, as has been mentioned by previous studies on consumption.1 But such neolocalization is never finished, because there are always new forces, whether from the global or the local, to further challenge the existing authenticity of Puer tea, like the jianghu battle in which new risks and disciplines always emerge to break the old format. So, situated in the transformation of China, when old concepts meet new desires, and located in a jianghu contest, Puer tea acquires multiple versions of authenticity.
This “multiple” perspective not only recognizes the power of localization to cope with globalization but also displays an interplay between localization and globalization that often goes on with endless counterforces, shaping a changeable and varying authenticity for things as well as for people's social lives.
COLD AND WARM
The first friend Zongming met in Kunming was Hongtu (web name), who Zongming understood through web communications to be a defender of Yunnanese culture. For instance, on the Sanzui website there was a post by a participant from Guangdong titled “Puer tea doesn't need the Yunnanese.” This post said that Yunnan was simply the area producing the basic material of Puer tea but that the people of Yunnan didn't contribute to Puer tea's trade and consumption as much as the Cantonese. The post was fiercely attacked by Hongtu, who enumerated many facts about the Yunnanese contribution to tea. To him, these great contributions had long been masked because Yunnan was remote from the political and economic center of China. Hongtu's strong identification as a Yunnanese could also be seen from his full web name, Hongtu Lantian, which means “red earth and blue sky,” a popular description of Yunnan's natural landscape.
To entertain his honored guest, Hongtu brewed his favorite tea, a ten-year-old raw Puer tea originating in the tea mountain of Mengku. Mengku is located in Lincang, a southwestern subdistrict of Yunnan bordering Burma (see map I.1).2 In recent years it had emerged along with Yiwu, Menghai, and several other places as a famous production site for Puer tea. According to Hongtu, Yiwu tea tasted too weak and Menghai tea was barely acceptable; only Mengku tea was enjoyable, full-bodied, and lingered long enough on the palate.
This particular tea had been aged in Kunming. In addition to Hongtu, Zongming, and myself, there were three other guests, all frequent visitors to Hongtu's tea shop and supporters of Mengku tea. Having gotten used to the taste of Yiwu tea during my fieldwork, I found the Mengku tea scarcely palatable, with a less subtle combination of sweetness and bitterness than Yiwu tea. I found that the Mengku fans at this tasting used the same language of praise as Yiwu supporters did: “The tea of Mengku/Yiwu is the remarkable flag of Puer tea,” or “If you want to learn about Puer tea, you must first practice drinking and understanding the authentic tea of Mengku/Yiwu.”
Zongming also declared his fondness for Mengku tea, but he didn't give it the same praise as the others. To him, the more problematic issue at that moment lay in the difference in flavor of teas not between different production areas, but between different storage places. The Mengku tea brewed by Hongtu was said to have been stored in Kunming for ten years, but in Zongming's opinion it had not been sufficiently aged. He thought it was still too raw and far from smooth. To tea drinkers from the Pearl River Delta, smoothness was an important property, and they thought it resulted from storage in a relatively humid place, such as Hong Kong or Guangdong. For them, good Puer tea needed to be smooth in the throat when it was swallowed—as smooth as the slowly stewed soup (lou fo tong for Cantonese pronunciation; lao huo tang for standard Chinese Pinyin) commonly eaten as part of their daily meal. Drawing on ideas from traditional Chinese medicine, they argued that smooth Puer tea was warm for the body. By contrast, raw Puer tea was too irritating; it was intrinsically cold, and hence harmful to one's health (see Anderson 1980).
Zongming's response to this Mengku tea reminded me of a scene I had witnessed in Yiwu. In April 2007, I met a group of travelers from Guangdong who were visiting a Yiwu family who produced Puer tea. The family master brewed some recently made raw tea, a superior type according to him, to entertain his guests. The guests, however, felt nervous about this fresh tea. They sipped only a tiny bit from each run. At the third run they asked the master to stop and suggested that he brew the aged tea they had brought from Guangdong. One guest told me that he felt his heart pounding when he tasted the raw tea. Nevertheless, in the end, all the travelers bought a large quantity of raw Puer tea from the local family. Perhaps the “adventurous” raw tasting had made them foresee a good prospect for the fresh tea, hopefully via storage back in Guangdong.
Zongming, who had tasted various kinds of Puer tea, was not nervous in the face of the Mengku raw Puer tea. But like the Guangdong travelers in Yiwu, after tasting the Mengku brew, Zongming asked if he could infuse a Puer tea he had brought from Hong Kong, in order to show his preference. It was a twenty-five-year-old tea packed in a bamboo pipe that had been stored in Hong Kong. Its brew was darker than that of the Mengku tea. According to Zongming, it had reached a good degree of smoothness, had the medicinal smell that results from good Hong Kong storage, and was warm and beneficial to one's health. Now Hongtu found it hard to comment. After a long silence he said that the Hong Kong tea's smell was indeed special, but it faded once the tea was swallowed and couldn't be recalled until the next sip. He also remarked that the tea didn't have a long aftertaste, a property of that was very important to him. The other guests also commented on this tea's “strange” taste. They were trying to appreciate this twenty-five-year-old tea, and although they did not dislike it, they obviously didn't think it rivaled the Mengku tea.
In my experience, most Yunnanese, especially frequent tea drinkers, prefer raw and naturally fermented Puer tea, and they often have a preference for tea produced on a particular mountain—for instance, Yiwu or Mengku. Furthermore, they prefer tea that has been aged in Yunnan rather than elsewhere. Like Hongtu, they appreciate the lingering aftertaste of raw Puer tea. People from the Pearl River Delta, however, prefer Puer tea that has been stored in Guangdong or Hong Kong for at least five years. This aging, they think, creates warmth in the stomach as well as smoothness in the mouth. Such “standard taste” or “collective taste preferences” are shared by groups of people living in the same natural and cultural environment (Ozeki 2008: 144–145) and become the standard against which people judge other tastes.
Popular writers have increasingly argued that Puer tea could not be properly fermented until it was exposed to sufficient humidity and heat (Bu Jing An 2007). Hong Kong and Guangdong are close to the sea and are more humid than Kunming, which is located on a plateau.3 Accordingly, some people, mainly Cantonese, argued that Puer tea should be stored in the Pearl River Delta after production in Yunnan. Some even said that five years of storage in Guangzhou or Hong Kong was equivalent to more than ten years of storage in Kunming. They believed that Yunnan had excellent tea resources but was unsuitable for storage or that the Yunnanese hadn't known enough about storage, even though Yunnan also had humid areas, such as Jinghong in Xishuangbanna.
> After staying in Kunming for only one week, Zongming became sick, despite the warm and sunny weather. He began to cough and even vomited one day after eating spicy Dai food with Hongtu and several other friends. At that meal, he witnessed the Yunnanese capacity for eating spicy food. It seemed that the more pungent the food was, the more Hongtu enjoyed it, although he was sweating and his face was turning red. Another Yunnanese participant, Puzi, ate chiles quietly without his face changing color at all. At the start of the meal, Zongming tasted everything out of politeness, but soon he selected only the less spicy dishes. He didn't eat much, but he still suffered from the pungent food and had to use a lot of tissues.
A few days later, in Hongtu's tea shop, Zongming attributed his sickness to “water and earth not fitting” (shuitu bu fu). The dry climate of Kunming compared with the humidity of Hong Kong was one factor. Zongming also confessed that he persisted in the Hong Kong habit of taking a cold shower every evening.4 This was contrary to local custom and strongly criticized by his Kunming friends.
Puzi made this point in another way. He had recently stayed in Guangdong for several months and said he could not bear the Cantonese food at first. It was too oily, and it had no flavor. He could not get used to the Puer tea stored in Guangdong, either. He described it as “like having Chinese medicine rather than tea.” However, he soon found that he wanted more of this kind of Puer tea after a meal, as its medicinal flavor did, in fact, help him digest the oily food. In turn, after his digestion improved, he ate more, which then caused him to drink even more Puer tea. In the end, Puzi realized that he had grown to like Cantonese food and also the Puer tea stored in Guangdong, which he found to be complementary.
Puer Tea Page 20