4 The botanical origin of tea is under debate. Some argue that tea originated in India (see Baildon 1877) while others say that China—and specifically Yunnan, with its rich wild tea tree resources—is its birthplace (see Chen Chuan 1984; Chen Xingtan 1994; Evans 1992). Still others integrate various statements, placing its origin in the foothills of the Himalayas or in Southeast Asia, including Yunnan, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and India (see Ukers 1935; Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2003; Mair and Hoh 2009).
5 These areas are famous for producing Puer tea, but the northern, central, and southern areas of Yunnan also have tea resources. In addition to Puer tea, Yunnan also produces green tea and red tea (usually referred to as black tea in English) (Chen Xingtan 1994).
6 Some regard the Hani and Jinuo as the earliest tea harvesters in Yunnan (see Gao Fachang 2009: 25–29).
7 In China, large-leaf tea occurs mainly in Yunnan. Other tea areas, such as Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Fujian, and Sichuan, mainly produce small-leaf tea. Yunnan also has its own small-leaf tea, which was transplanted from Sichuan, to the north of Yunnan.
8 Debates still exist in the tea science about the difference between oxidation and fermentation. In reality, it is often hard to judge when oxidation ends and fermentation begins. I accept the view that oxidation is one type of fermentation (Cai Rongzhang 2006) and thus there are two kinds of fermentation in tea processing: oxidation and microbial enzymatic reaction.
9 Jasmine tea, which has green tea as its base, is the most popular scented tea. Other types of tea may also be scented, such as scented red tea, scented oolong tea, and scented Puer tea.
10 In some areas of China, stir-roasting is still done by hand. Tea farmers use charcoal or wood to heat a large wok; fresh tea leaves are poured into the wok and stir-roasted (without oil), either by hand (wearing gloves) or with bamboo sticks, until their color and intrinsic quality has changed. In modern processing, this is done by a machine.
11 That is the Great Pearl River Delta, which includes Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao. In all these regions Cantonese make up the majority of the population.
12 Besides these two opinions, there are also other views, such as that storage was initially undertaken by tea producers in Yunnan who could not sell their tea products and had to keep them for a long period (Ruan Dianrong 2005a: 107).
13 For an earlier phase of the volatile tea industry in Fujian, China, see Gardella (1994).
14 This survey was undertaken by the Promotion Association of Kunming Ethnic Tea Culture and the Long-Run Puer Tea Institution of Yunnan Agricultural University (Yunnan Daily 2006c).
15 In fact, several other kinds of dark tea are also compressed, such as those produced in Hunan and Sichuan for export to Tibet and Mongolia.
16 See chapter 63 of Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), which “finds flavor in what is flavorless” (Lao Tzu 1998: 132–133).
17 At that time, these stories were called legends (chuanqi).
18 However, the martial arts fiction scholar Chen Pingyuan (1997) insists that jianghu refers to the space for knights-errant, who are different from bandits and hermits.
19 Written by Shi Nai'an in the fourteenth century, The Water Margin is one of the so-called four great classical Chinese novels. Some cite Luo Guanzhong as an additional author.
20 Wu is an independent documentary filmmaker and writer in China. For more information on his life and works, see Filmsea (2003).
21 For the literature on food governance and regulation in postsocialist countries, see Dunn (2005) and Caldwell (2009).
22 On gift giving and guanxi, mainly in rural areas, see also Yan Yunxiang (1996) and Kipnis (1997).
CHAPTER 1
1 Some people call themselves Xiangtang, but they are also officially recognized as Yi.
2 It is not completely clear when the Han became involved in the cultivation of tea. Some records say that the Han joined in tea cultivation in Yiwu soon after their migration, while others recount these events without mentioning an exact date. It seems more likely that, from the time the Han migrated to Yiwu until about 1900, tea cultivation and rough processing were practiced primarily by the indigenous ethnic groups. The Han mostly organized fine processing in commercial companies and participated in trade.
3 For the Western academic accounts about the caravan routes between Yunnan and other Southeast Asian regions, see Forbes (1987); Hill (1998); and Prasertkul (1989). There is also a rich scholarship in Chinese on these routes. See Lei Pingyang (2000); Mu Jihong (1992; 2003); and Liu Qinjin (2005).
4 According to Zhang Yingpei (2006: 5), Li Shi (1988: 1) first notes in his Xu bo wu zhi (Sequel of natural history) that the Six Great Tea Mountains had been one of the main tea production areas of Yunnan since the Tang dynasty in the seventh century. There are several versions of the history of the Six Great Tea Mountains: for instance, in some literature, Yiwu is replaced by Mansa, or there is no Mangzhi (Jiang Quan [1980] 2006; Zhao Zhichun 1988).
5 For this history, some of the literature says that the tea materials were sent to Puer, while others say it was sent to Simao. In general, it seems that the tribute tea factory was established in Ninger County under the capital, Puer, for fine processing, and the General Tea Bureau of Simao was responsible for the whole tribute tea task. See Huang Guishu (2005: 88–90); Lei Pingyang (2000: 28); and Ni Tui ([1737] 1981: 593–594).
6 The French built a meter-gauge railway between Kunming and Hải Phòng in 1910, which was then used to transport tea, too.
7 As I have mentioned, many Han inhabitants in the Six Great Tea Mountains were originally from Shiping. Shiping merchants were one of the most famous trade guilds in Yunnan throughout the Ming dynasty, Qing dynasty, and Republican period, and they also had associations in Menghai and Simao (see Luo Qun 2004).
8 Most scholars believe Tibetans started drinking tea in the eighth century. See Hill (1989) and Yang Bin (2004). Yang Haichao (2010) argues that tea drinking dates to the Wei and Jin dynasties. He examines the various names and pronunciations of the word for tea in both ancient Chinese and ancient Tibetan throughout different periods.
9 The Tibetan traders usually covered the caravan transport from Tibet to Yongsheng (Lijiang), or sometimes as far as Puer, while the remaining routes were dominated by the Han or Muslim Chinese (Hill 1989). The journeys of Tibetans directly to Yiwu, as mentioned in the following special case, were actually uncommon.
10 This is the general situation. At present a few tea-processing units in Menghai also craft tea by hand, and in Yiwu, there are also some so called tea factories, but these “factories” are smaller in scale than those in Menghai.
11 There were a few families in Yiwu who made artificially fermented Puer tea at their customers’ request, but raw Puer tea predominates there.
12 Cooking is often related to artificial work, but ripening is regarded as a more natural process. Mayfair Yang may have mixed them up. What she refers to in her discussion of the gift economy is more applicable to cooking. In this book, I am also talking about cooking, and I stress that this is a transformative process, in which outside traders seek to build up good relationships with local people within a short period of time.
13 See EBMCA (1994); Jiang Quan ([1980] 2006); Li Fuyi (1984); Ruan Fu ([1825] 1981); Tan Cui ([1799] 1981); and Zhao Chunzhou and Zhang Shungao (1988).
14 According to Arjun Appadurai (1996: 49), in the new global order, imagination is becoming “central to all forms of agency.” Picking up on the same theme, Marilyn Ivy (1995) traces how the rural Tōno is imagined as a nostalgic hometown representation of authentic Japanese tradition. Beth E. Notar (2006b), in her research about Dali in Yunnan, notes that popular narratives become standards of authenticity for visitors in imagining what Dali should be.
CHAPTER 2
1 The Xishuangbanna Supervision Bureau of Technology and Quality wrote a first draft in 2005, upon which the later provincial standard was based.
2 The data from local government indicated that there were fifty te
a-processing units in Yiwu in 2007, but I was told by many locals that there were actually around eighty.
3 The Xishuangbanna Supervision Bureau of Technology and Quality has set some guidelines for rough processing, but these guidelines are advisory, not compulsory.
4 In Wen's words, “Its blandness is unique; its aftertaste lingers in the mind” (dan ding tianxia, huiwei wuqiong).
5 According to Wen, unpruned tea trees grow more slowly and therefore develop richer flavors.
6 Other research has also provided cases to show that tourism is increasingly viewed as a “destroyer” of culture. See, for example, Oakes (1997) and Hillman (2003).
7 This process parallels the story of milk in America, where everything true in the “progress story” became untrue in the “downfall story” (Dupuis 2002). In the former, milk is imbued with various positive virtues and related to the pure pastoral landscape, but in the latter story many aspects of its quality came under suspicion and significant doubts emerged about whether or not to drink it. The story of milk has unfolded over the past century and a half, whereas the packaging and unpackaging of Puer tea has occurred in only about five years.
8 Notably, these counterfeits were mostly handmade, but they were often hard to distinguish from the originals. However, while talking about the nineteenth-century industrial revolution in the West, Walter Benjamin ([1936] 1999) notes that it was easier to identify a manual copy from the original.
9 For discussions on the difference between Western and Chinese understandings about individualism, and about the rise of the Chinese individual, see Yan Yunxiang (2009).
10 In the late Ming period (the late sixteenth to early seventh century), individualism was embodied by trademarks that were popularly used for many goods in order to protect intellectual property (Clunas 1991: 66–67). And in contrast to the Maoist era, when unification was demanded, the Reform era allowed more space for variation and self-presentation. Following the Western model, new individual identities came on the scene, often embodied in the freedom of consumption choices (Croll 2006).
CHAPTER 3
1 This is a process that has also happened elsewhere—for example, in Shangri-la, as mentioned by Ben Hillman (2003) and also described by Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein (2006).
2 To learn more about the detailed administrative changes of this area, see Pu-Erh (2007b) and EBSAA (1996).
3 This tea is called either jin gua gong cha, as it looks like a golden melon, or rentou gong cha, as it also looks like a human head, or together as rentou jin gua gong cha, Human Head–Golden Melon Tribute tea.
4 The transliterated term is Puer, according to the Chinese pinyin spelling system, or Puerh, according to the Wade-Giles system used by Western scholars in the past.
5 This was initially stated by Ruan Fu during the Qing dynasty ([1825] 1981: 396) and later cited in many other works. See Li Fuyi ([1939] 2000: 57) and Zhang Shungao (1988: 79).
6 The Chinese novel Dream of Red Mansions (Honglou meng), written by Cao Xueqin during the eighteenth century, includes a scene describing how the concubine Jia Yuanfei, a daughter from the Jia family, went back home for a short visit, kindly approved by the emperor.
7 Some other tea experts who had participated in tasting the Golden Melon claimed, alternatively, that such aged Puer tea had become tasteless. See Deng Shihai (2004: 15).
8 Also known as the Water Festival, the Dai New Year was a New Year's celebration held in Yunnan as well as in many Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Laos, Burma, and Cambodia.
9 This caravan was jointly organized by the Youth Foundation of Yunnan, the Tea Association of Yunnan, and the Commercial Club of Yunnan. According to media reports, all the revenue from the auction was donated to the Hope Project of China, a foundation that patronizes education in undeveloped areas of China (Riftea 2007).
10 The eleven subareas are Kunming, Chuxiong, Yuxi, Honghe, Wenshan, Simao, Xishuangbanna, Dali, Baoshan, Dehong, and Lincang.
11 However, this classification approach also admits that tea material from a certain place can be more suitable for producing a certain kind of tea. For instance, it is acknowledged that the medium-sized tea leaves from Fujian or Taiwan are better than the large tea leaves of Yunnan for making oolong tea.
12 For Western academic accounts about the caravan routes between Yunnan and other southeast Asian regions, see Forbes (1987); Prasertkul (1989); and Hill (1998).
13 For films made in Yunnan, especially the fiction films since 1949, see Li Miao (2006).
14 This point is debated; according to some researchers, other important goods—such as salt, cotton, opium, and guns and other metal tools—were carried (see Prasertkul 1989; Hill 1998; and Giersch 2006).
15 The Swedish East India Company opened up sailing and trade routes to Asia in the eighteenth century. Götheborg was one of the biggest boats in the fleet but sank in 1745 near Sweden after its third voyage to Guangzhou, China. Salvage operations were conducted in the following century and proved that Chinese tea, porcelain, and silk were the main transported goods of that time. The Swedish East India Company started to rebuild the Götheborg in 1995, and the rebuilt vessel sailed towards Guangzhou, China, again in 2005 (Yunnan Daily 2006b).
16 For a more detailed discussion of suzhi, see Andrew Kipnis (2006).
17 Because raw Puer tea neither requires artificial fermentation nor has to be naturally fermented as long as aged Puer tea, it can be produced more quickly.
CHAPTER 4
1 The number 75 refers to a certain way of blending tea leaves initially applied in 1975; the third digit, 7 or 4, refers to the grade of the basic tea material; and 2 stands for the Menghai Tea Factory. Dayi 7572 is artificially fermented tea, and Dayi 7542 is (naturally fermented) raw tea. Both of them are products of the Menghai Tea Factory.
2 This was a modification of the popular slogan “The entire nation was in arms” (quan min jie bing).
3 Here bankers refers to powerful Puer tea investors, including some big tea companies.
4 The fees are not clearly specified in the formal notification. Some traders I spoke with told me that the geographical mark for each Puer tea cake (357 or 400 grams) cost ¥0.09 (for members) or ¥0.13 (for nonmembers).
5 I heard from many tea traders that this didn't really assure the authentic quality but was just a new way for the local government to collect more fees.
CHAPTER 5
1 Judith Farquhar examines the politics of food in China through three works of popular literature, all touching upon eating: The White-haired Girl was written in the 1940s; Hibiscus Town and The Gourmet were both published in the 1980s.
2 As an anthropologist as well as a practitioner in Chinese medicine, Judith Farquhar (2002) uses the holistic way of treating illness in the individual body as a metaphor for curing diseases in the national body. She argues that “everyday life in Reform China is still inhabited by the nations’ Maoist past” (Farquhar 2002: 10).
3 In the early 1990s, a collectively owned tea factory was established in Yiwu and locally produced maocha was sent to it as well.
4 Some local people told me that in the 1960s terrace tea planting had also been advocated by the local government, but not on the scale of the early 1980s. This information was echoed in the Mengla County Annals (EBMCA 1994: 226).
5 To pollard a tree is to cut off its top and branches.
6 I interviewed traders from both Hong Kong and Taiwan. Generally speaking, it is acknowledged that the forest tea preference was initiated by the Taiwanese. But the habit and concept of storing and drinking aged Puer tea was initiated by Hong Kong people, and later co-opted by the Taiwanese.
CHAPTER 6
1 Like most areas of Xishuangbanna and nearby Southeast Asia, Yiwu has dry and wet seasons. The dry season lasts from October to May, and the balance of the year is the wet season. The annual rainfall in Yiwu is about 1,500 to 1,900 millimeters, and the wet season accounts for 80 percent of the annual rainfall (EBMCA 1994:
55; Zhao Rubi 2006: 4).
2 See the talk between the Master and his student in The Analects (chapter 12). The Master says that after people become “multiplied” and are “enriched,” the next step is to “instruct them” (Confucius 1997: 162–163).
CHAPTER 7
1 The website can be found at http://www.sanzui.com.
2 For other aspects of research that stress that identity is constructed via relations with others, see Ohnuki-Tierney (1993) and Notar (2006b).
3 However, by early 2009, when I returned to Kunming, these events had become infrequent as a result of the continuing recession in the Puer tea market.
4 These interpretations have been drawn from insights from the Baidu website: http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/17288829 (accessed 20 June 2010).
5 Once the tea is put in the pot it is brewed several times, depending upon the category and amount of tea. I refer to each of these brews as a “run.”
6 In the English version of Jin Yong's The Book and the Sword, the definition of “inner force” given in the glossary is: “the part of kungfu concerned not so much with particular techniques (moves, styles), but with the basic underlying physical (breathing, posture, etc.) and spiritual (meditation, concentration, consciousness) training, which gives the techniques their inner strength” (May and Minford 2004: xix).
7 Shaolin kungfu is a martial arts style named after the Shaolin Temple in central China. It is often practiced with sticks and vigorous motions. By contrast, the Taiji (Grand Ultimate) school of kungfu stresses inner spiritual training. For further details, see the glossary in the English translation of Jin Yong's The Deer and the Cauldron (Minford 1997).
CHAPTER 8
1 There are many works dealing with how localization copes with globalization in consumption. See, for example, Watson (1997); Wu and Tan (2001); Wu and Cheung (2002); Grasseni (2003); and Dikötter (2007).
2 Mengku is part of the Autonomous Lahu, Wa, Bulang, and Dai County of Shuangjiang in Lincang.
Puer Tea Page 24