Chinese Puer tea 3/3

Final part

Chinese Puer tea 2/3

Continuation

Chinese Puer tea 1/3

Nice video

普洱茶原料降价或超普洱茶原料降价或超20%

普洱出口有所下跌普洱出口有所下跌 

“几乎整个普洱茶行业的价格都明降或暗降了。”在昨日举行的2008年中国(广州)国际茶业博览会新闻发布会 上,一名广东茶商透露,今年普洱茶原料价格有20%以上的降幅,更有数据显示云南晒青毛茶价格比去年下降50% 以上。 

普洱茶出口有所下跌普洱茶出口有所下跌 在昨日举行的新闻发布会上,广东省茶叶行业协会秘书长张黎明透露了一组数据:“2008年1~9月我国茶叶出口 22.76万吨,同比增长4.97%,只有乌龙茶和普洱茶出口有所下跌,其中乌龙茶下跌2.99%,而普洱茶却下降 33.48%。” 

一名从2004年始进入普洱茶市场、主推古树茶的商家深切体会市场的变化:在2007年,整个市场的茶叶原料被 商家争相哄抬,价格不断上涨,导致普洱茶市场价格的快速上浮;而今年原料起码跌了20%~50%,导致市场价格 也相应下调。在该名商家看来,市场经过1年的沉淀,曾经存在的水分已逐渐被挤干,回到较为踏实的原地。 

不过,行内人士认为,普洱茶市场需要一段为期不短的时日才能恢复昨日风光,主要是高峰期时部分不良炒家破 坏了市场平衡,影响市场信心;另外,负面消息的传播也极大损害了普洱茶的声誉。 

也有观点认为,目前全国茶叶总产量的75%主要依靠内销,市场首先需要调动内需,令消费者重新接受普洱茶, 并对普洱茶有更深的认识;其次要树立正确的普洱茶标准,不将其视同单一的投资品种。(记者 林琳)

Newslinks (10.11.2008)

Delightful World of Puer Tea
By Brenda Koller
Special to The Korea Times

With countless coffee houses springing up everywhere in Seoul, you may be surprised to know that, second to water, tea is the most preferred beverage for the majority of people around the world.

But how often do you think about what type of tea you are drinking, where it was grown, how it was processed and what is the best way to drink it? I pondered those questions and more during a delightful afternoon at the ``World Tea Festival 2007'' held at COEX from June 27 to July 1.

About 200 booths from eight countries including world renowned tea companies exhibited everything you might want to know about tea culture from tea products such as pots and cups, tables, utensils, books, and most importantly, hundreds of different varieties and styles of tea.

Although tea has been popular for over 5,000 years, the market for tea is increasing. According to organizers of the event, sales of tea beverages in Korea have increased by 40 percent over last year with the Korean market valued at 40 billion won. 

Studies have shown that drinking tea has many health benefits such as reducing the risk of cancer and coronary heart disease, to name just two. And with more and more people following the well-being trend, it's no wonder that tea's popularity is on the rise.

All tea originates from the plant Camellia sinensis and there are four basic types _ black, green, oolong or white. The exception to this is puer tea (also spelled puerh, pu-erh, pu erh).

Tea was first discovered in China and the history of puer tea dates back centuries to ancient tea plants that still grow today in Yunnan.

I had the pleasure of discovering puer tea at the World Tea Festival when I sat down at the Jiyumyungcha puer tea store's booth. After the first sip I was enthralled; after the second sip I was hooked. Puer tea looks and tastes similar to black tea, but has a bold aroma and taste of its own, a taste that kept me lingering at the company's booth. 

It certainly helped that one of the company's servers, Jacqueline Park, spoke English and was more than willing to explain the many intricacies of puer tea to a novice drinker.

Park explained that there are two basic kinds of puer, one of China's most popular teas: Sheng Cha, which is raw, naturally fermented puer, and Shu Cha, which is cooked and undergoes an accelerated fermentation process. 

My taste tests revealed a preference for Sheng Cha, which is less woody or earthy tasting than Shu Cha. Puer is also categorized by shape and is available in a variety of shapes such as tea bags, loose-leaf, disc and bowl-shaped, which resembles little acorn-sized bowls.

In many ways, Puer tea can be compared to fine wine as it evolves as it ages and the value often increases with age. Park said that she has tasted puer tea that is much older than herself.

Puer tea purportedly helps with digestion and intestinal activities, not to mention the calming effect it imparts while savoring its unique flavor.

My interest piqued, the quest for additional knowledge of puer tea led me to David Kilburn, chairman of the Tea Museum, who suggested I visit his shop at Lotte Department Store in Myeong-dong. There, manager Choi Eun-sil (who is also fluent in English) introduced me to the company's eight styles of puer tea. Kilburn had suggested sampling two in particular.

Jinhong puer is a blend of puer from Yunnan and cinnamon from Sri Lanka, which is based on a traditional method used by the Jinuo tribes people in China. The blend imparts a delicate cinnamon taste that pleasantly enhances the flavor of the tea.

Of particular interest at the Tea Musuem was the orange puer, which not only tastes delectable but also looks lovely. It is made by removing all the fruit from the inside of a small, bitter orange native to China. 

The tea is then pressed inside the shell and allowed to dry and mature. Choi crumbled part of the orange in with the tea before allowing it to steep. The tea was most pleasant, imparting a refreshing touch of citrus.

I'll admit, I would be hard-pressed to give up my afternoon shot of espresso, but I simply cannot imagine a day without tea. And now my tea drinking has been greatly enhanced with delicious and mysterious puer tea.

Perspectives on Storing and Aging Pu'er Teas: Buying Aged Tea -- But Why?

by WARREN PELTIER

A Brief Historical Perspective

Not so long ago, aged tea could be had for pretty cheap. But all of a sudden, a lot of people in Asia got pu'er crazy, and started buying up all kinds of aged pu'er -- any pu'er -- regardless of quality or price. Let’s take a glimpse at some of the historical highlights of all of this:

Hong Kong has a long history of Pu'er drinking. Pu'er is used here for its medicinal properties, and has long been a favorite tea for consumption during dim sum meals in Hong Kong teahouses.

People’s Republic era: Hong Kong became the “tea storehouse” for pu'er tea. It was sent from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, where some was consumed locally by Hong Kong people, and some was exported to South East Asia.

1950s: one tong of good quality pu'er bing cha cost just a little over 3 HKD. By that time Guangdong people knew that the older pu'er gets, the better it is. But at that time, even old pu'er was only 1 yuan per pound more expensive than newer pu'er. 

1986: One 30-year-old aged Hong Yin (Red Label) bing was selling in Sheung Wan-area tea stores for a little over 170 HKD; some Lao Hao bings aged to 50 or 60 years were selling for 800 HKD. At that time it was already considered very expensive. But today it would be worth in the tens of thousands of HKD.

Starting in the 80s, Hong Kong’s economy started to boom, creating wealth, and a wealthy class of people. Some of these people started collecting pu'er teas as a kind of investment speculation.

In the mid and late 90s, some of the big teahouse owners went overseas -- because of uncertainty about Hong Kong’s future. But after 1997, they came back, started to clean their storehouses, and discovered that there were many kinds of good-quality aged pu'er in their stores. They then proceeded to sell off these stores to collectors in Taiwan and overseas. And two teahouses in particular -- Gam San Lau (金山樓) and Long Moon Lau (龍門樓) (see end-note) -- had stores of Tong Qing Hao Lao Yuan Cha (同慶號老圓茶), aged to almost 100 years in their possession.

Pu'er collectors, especially from Taiwan, would go to the tea farms and factories in Yunnan, sometimes buying up whole crops of tea leaves before they could reach market -- and thus securing their own private stock of tea to be privately pressed into bings for aging.

And that is what kicked off the big pu'er mania -- where everyone who was anyone had to have 100-year-old aged pu'er in their collection. And then supplies of good pu'er, even recently produced, became scarce. Of course, the likelihood of finding 100 year aged pu'er nowadays is virtually impossible.

Value Decisions

Just assume that there were some real, verifiable 100-year-old aged pu'er available for purchase to lucky you. And best of all, that you could actually afford it without going broke. Would that particular brick or bing of pu'er be worth it? That’s the question that has to be asked with any aged tea. Is it worth it to buy this tea? First of all, you probably don’t know the whole history of that tea. Sure, you can research wrappers and factories and batch codes. But that doesn’t tell you anything about how Person A, who first bought the tea, stored it. It doesn’t tell you whether the tea happened to come in contact with any extraneous odors. It doesn’t tell you that Person B stored the tea on a shelf next to a pair of his stinky shoes. It doesn’t tell you that Person C, who then bought the tea, brought it home in a rain storm, and it got all soaked. It doesn’t tell you that Person D doctored the tea by adding extraneous scents from camphor wood to the tea, just because that person thought that the tea smelled kind of like stinky shoes and mold, and thought that it would smell better (and perhaps taste better too) if it were scented with camphor wood.

Since you don’t know the exact storage methods used during the history of that tea, and since you haven’t tasted that tea, how will you know if that tea, aged 100 years is really good or not? You can’t know. And you also won’t know if it’s worth the price you paid. It just may be too big a risk to take.

So how pu'er teas are stored is important, not just for drinking, but also for resale value, if one were to ever be insane enough to sell part of his/her pu'er collection. Of course, pu'er manufacturers know how to age and store tea. And they know how to ship it. So you don’t have to be worried so much how the tea was stored in some warehouse at the factory.

But whether a tea is aged 10 years or 100 years, how the tea was stored is an important factor that will affect the quality of the tea over time. The longer the period of aging, the more important how a tea was stored during all those years becomes. And because of this, one should keep in mind that just because a tea is old doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good. Of course, Chinese have a saying with pu'er: “the more aged, the better the tea becomes.” But that’s all relatively speaking. If the pu'er was stored improperly, or under non-ideal conditions, then it may be mediocre -- or bad -- aged tea.

In the past few years, in Mainland China, many extremely wealthy people (including many who don’t know a thing about pu'er) got into collecting pu'er as an investment. They speculate in pu'er, driving up the prices -- and driving real pu'er lovers out of the market. There are now many pu'er drinkers who are extremely negative about buying aged pu'er. And they refuse to buy any pu'er until the prices start reflecting the actual value of the tea. 

I myself refuse to buy any aged pu'er, partly because of outrageous prices, and partly because I’m not sure how that particular tea was stored; and also because there are so many fake and forged aged teas that it’s too complicated to keep up with. Now, when I buy pu'er, I visit several reputable dealers where I can sample many relatively new (aged 3 years or less) sheng pu'er bings; and compare prices. If I taste a particular sheng pu'er and I like it now, then when I take it home and store it away for say 7-10 years (or even longer), surely it will taste much better after proper storage and aging. 

Did the Pu'er Bubble Go Bust?

Pu'er prices rose dramatically in the first half of 2007, with prices of mao cha doubling. But this didn’t last long. By the end of June, prices had fallen dramatically as the following examples illustrate:

2007 Price Comparison Prices of Mao Cha

April 1, 2007

Banzhang Ancient Tea Tree: 1400 yuan/Kg

Bulang Shan Ancient Tea Tree: 600 yuan/Kg

July 1, 2007

Banzhang Ancient Tea Tree: 600 yuan/Kg

Bulang Shan Ancient Tea Tree: 300 yuan/Kg

According to market reports, in July 2007, pu'er mao cha prices remained calm, but tea farmers in Nan Nuo Shan (南糯山) and Bu Lang Shan (布朗山) were unwilling to ship their harvests because the going price was so low. And factories in Menghai stopped receiving shipments of tea; many factories reduced the production of shu pu'er. 

So overall, the market was in a bit of a turndown in 2007. No longer were consumers driving the market based on quantity: by the end of the year, they were demanding quality. And that drove prices back down. The demand just wasn’t there anymore.

Today’s Pu'er Market

At the end of June 2008, in Guangdong’s Fang Cun Tea Market, we see pu'er tea prices going down -- sometimes dramatically. A 357-gram 2008 Da Ye 0622 Sheng Bing is selling for 350 yuan per tong. With seven bings in a tong, that comes to 50 yuan per bing. Don’t take my word for it -- see for yourself at this page.

If the prices of pu'er continue to fall, that will be good for consumers. And maybe now is the time to start stocking up on pu'er. A recent trip to the Dong Pu Tea Market, in Fuzhou’s Jin An district, seems to verify suspicions. Tea vendors there say business is slow. Shu bings were selling for a mere 30 yuan. A 400-gram 2007 Meng Ku Large Tea Tree shu bing sold for 80 yuan. And that was the vendor’s asking price. I didn’t even try to bargain him down. If I had bought a tong or two, I probably could have got them for 60 or 70 yuan each. Keep in mind, Dong Pu Tea Market is a backwater tea market with only about 20 vendors. Much larger Pu'er markets, like Guangzhou or Shenzhen, or even Fuzhou’s larger Five-Mile Pavilion Tea Market, probably have stores of sheng bings at a much lower price point. Pre-2007 bings however, and the more famous brands of pu'er are still selling for a relatively high price. As the 2008 bings come onto the market, though, I suspect they will sell for relatively cheaper prices than in the past.

If you want further proof, you can check online auction sites like eachnet.com. The lowest price for a 250-gram 2000 sheng zhuan (brick) was 21.8 yuan. Shu bings are going for as low as 18 yuan. You see similar low prices on online tea vendor sites in China. And that leads to another question: with prices so low, what will the future hold for the new huge tea markets that sprouted up overnight in places like Shenzhen during the days of Pu'er Mania?

Pu'er Reality Check

What makes people go so crazy about pu'er anyway? Is it the moldy smell that people find so captivating or what? What’s all the mystique surrounding pu'er? And why would individual pu'er collectors go out of the way to buy a whole tea farm’s crop and hoard it? Why? Tea Hoarder! That’s tea insanity! And why would anyone be willing to fork over hundreds to thousands of yuan for a single bing? If you compare the quality of leaf in a bing to that of any other kind of tea (say Tieguanyin, for example), are you really getting value for money? For the most part, the pu'er leaf that is used for bings comes from the 4th to the 8th leaves on the bush (or tree). These are pretty large, coarse leaves that are used. Don’t fool yourself: those leaves aren’t big because they come from some thousand-year-old “ancient tea tree.” So why would anyone willingly spend large sums of money for teas that are made with so-called inferior quality leaves? I find it ironic that the teas I buy actually cost as much as, or even more than, the teaware I buy. It’s an expensive lifestyle.

Sensible Enjoyment

So my advice is: Wait awhile and see if cheaper prices make their way through the supply chain. And then, buy pu'er because you like the taste, not because of fame or reputation, or because of the duration of aging. Tea should be enjoyable, not an aggravation. If some of your pu'er tastes good now, then drink it now and enjoy it. Why wait to store it? But if you can wait, then store some away and see what happens. So, enjoy some now, enjoy some later. Maybe that’s the best way to buy and store pu'er.

Why YIWU : A Puer Tea Home

By Kathy Zhang (Jinghong Zhang)
Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program,
Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies, The
Australian National University

I have now visited Yiwu, the small township (xiang) in Yunnan province of China where Puer tea is produced, twice. The first occasion was in November of 2002, when I happened to be there with a film crew, but I was there for only one day. The other time was in February of 2006, when I was able to be there for a week, and I had a clearer aim in mind, since I was undertaking a preliminary visit for my planned Ph.D. project on Puer tea. Although both were short stays, I found Yiwu an interesting place and a good site for further research. 

In February I took the bus from Jinghong, the capital city of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, in Yunnan Province of southwest China. It took me about four hours travelling southeastwards to get to Yiwu, one of the towns in Mengla 

County (xian) of Xishuangbanna. 

Going on the memory of my last visit, I turned off at the middle of the main street and got to the so-called “old street”, which is more rural in appearance. Old family houses line the street, with farmland in between them and shrub tea plantations in 

the surrounding hills. There are more wild tea trees in the more distant villages of Yiwu, places which are inhabited by a variety of ethnic groups – the Han, the Dai, the Yi, the Yao, and the Bulang. 

What is special about the old street in Yiwu is the architecture, which is all in typical Han vernacular style, although Yiwu is in Xishuangbanna, a place famous for its diverse minority ethnic groups. From the mid 17th century, a group of Han immigrants from Shiping came to Yiwu. Shiping is a county in the southeast 

of Yunnan, and the people there are mostly Han. The original minority groups in Yiwu were the Yi, Bulang and Dai, who made use of wild tea trees, but it was not until after the immigration of the Han that the Yiwu tea trade became famous. 

Instead of the curious looking up and down that a sudden visitor from the outside might be expected to invite, the locals here usually give me a friendly smile and ask me into their homes to chat. And soon after entering a family’s home, I get to know its particular history. Almost every building along the old street has been famous as a trading post for Puer tea, especially during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The landlord may have changed, but stories of how the first landlord diligently and cleverly ran and boosted the tea business are still told. 

In 2002, in a clean and comfortable courtyard, I first learned from Zhang Yi, the retired township head, how a brick of Puer tea was made in the traditional way by hand. Also from him, I got to know the fame of the “Six Great Tea Mountains”, located in southeast Xishuangbanna, famed for their ancient wild tea trees. Yiwu is one of these tea mountains and is famous for having been a ‘tribute’ tea area for 163 years (1732-1904) (Zhang Yi 2006: 71), when tea was presented to the Imperial court. Owing to the political climate, the tea industry of Yiwu was halted from time to time, especially during World War II and after 1953 (Zhang Yi 2006: 76-77). Zhang Yi was the one who took the lead in reviving the hand-worked Puer brick again in Yiwu in the mid-1980s, and his success encouraged the other locals to do the same. 

Most families here are in the tea business. Unlike the situation in many counties of China where young people leave to find better opportunities outside, the rise in the demand and price of Puer tea in recent years has encouraged local youths here to stay at home and join the tea industry. After a short break during the Spring Festival, people begin the first picking of the year in late February or early March. The process is divided into several phases and different production units. One family I visited this February has relatives living in another village where the wild tea trees grow, 30 kilometers from Yiwu. Their relatives in the country undertake the task of picking the leaves and deactivating the enzymes through oxidisation. Then the tea leaves are taken by van to the town family, who press the tea leaves into tea-bricks, package, and sell it. The proceeds are then distributed equally between the two families. If business is not done through family connections, the town people usually have some instituted relationship with a certain group of village people and assign the work to them in a similar way. 

Yiwu is not the only place producing Puer tea. Other areas of Yunnan such as Simao, Menghai, Lancang, and Lincang are also famous for it and have ancient wild tea trees, too. The name of ‘Puer’ itself comes from a place in Simao, which used to be an important point of goods collection for taxation purposes. Moreover, ‘Puer’ tea does not necessarily refer to any particular category or species of tea tree. All kinds of tea can be made into Puer tea, after the particular post-fermentation process which distinguishes Puer tea is applied. But the large-leaved variety of tea 

in Yunnan is acknowledged to be the most suited to this process of post-fermentation. 

Puer tea can be further divided into two kinds, according to different methods of post-fermentation. One is ‘raw Puer’, in which post-fermentation is done via natural exposure to the air for a time, without anything else being done. The other is ‘ripe Puer’, where post-fermentation is accomplished in a shorter time by artificial means. Both raw and ripe Puer tea can be kept for a long time, unlike green tea. And the belief that the older Puer is, the better it is, is now becoming popular, which has made a lot of people buy and store Puer tea as a kind of antique. 

Something has happened to Puer tea in the past twenty years. During the 1985 Technological Exposition in Kunming, nobody showed any interest in Zhang Yi’s Puer tea. In the early 1990s, the price of Puer tea before production in Yiwu was ¥5 (US$1 = ¥8) per kilogram; then it was ¥15; then ¥25; in 2005, it reached ¥60 as the basic price, and sometimes even ¥80 or ¥100 per kilogram, with a local family’s annual income reaching ¥50,000 - pretty good for these local farmers. Mostly such income is earned from just picking or processing tea leaves, but other related industries such as tea packaging, porterage, ‘tea culture’ performances, and so on, have been boosted too. A brick of Puer tea sold at ¥50 in Yiwu will be three or five times more expensive in Kunming, Beijing, Hongkong or Taiwan. And its price will definitely increase a lot after being stored for over five years. 

In 2005, a traditional-style caravan of horses organized by some private tea companies of Yunnan started out from Puer to travel overland to Beijing, duplicating the route followed when Puer tea was carried to Beijing as a tribute during the Qing dynasty (1644- 1911). When they finally arrived in Beijing, after more than half a year’s travel, a brick of Puer tea fetched ¥1000 at auction, almost 20 times as much as those sold in the original place. And in April of 2006, another caravan carrying Puer tea was organized by the local government of Yunnan. This time, Yiwu was selected as the starting point, and the destination is hoped and expected to be Taiwan. 

These caravan routes are called the “Ancient Routes of Tea and Horses”. These routes came into being more than two thousand years ago because of the trading and transporting of tea by caravan between southwest China and southeast Asian countries, and were first named in this way by Mu Jihong and another five young scholars after a 90-day investigation on foot in 1989. There are countless ‘Tea-Horse routes’ between Yunnan and outside, and Yiwu is one of the most important starting points, since wild tea trees grow there. Some stories are being now popularized which tell how Puer tea first became naturally fermented during the long travels when it was carried by caravan. Whether these stories are truth or myth, researchers, traders, government leaders and even consumers enjoy chewing on them very much since they seem to prove that Puer tea is really some kind of treasure. Of course, apart from the caravan spectacle mentioned above, most Puer teas at present are carried by means of modern transportation. Along with further research on the ‘Ancient Routes of Tea and Horses’ and the local government’s effort to develop Yunnan as a ‘Tourism and Cultural Province’, Puer tea is getting another chance to boom. 

And Puer tea is becoming a popular and fashionable drink in big cities around China, in some ways even more popular than Longjing or Wulong, which should be drunk when fresh and can’t be kept too long. Both in Beijing and Kunming I heard sayings like: those who don’t drink Puer tea are considered as of little culture; those who drink tea but don’t drink Puer “have no deep sense of tea”. Even those who actually do not like Puer are trying to get used to it. And almost everyone will ask the tea seller one question before actually buying any: “how old is this brick of Puer?” Age usually decides prices, so this can be a hard question for a middleman trader to answer. In Yiwu I got to know that the outside traders usually specify some requests when they pre-order the packing of a piece of Puer brick. First, the weight of a piece or a tube of Puer brick (a tube includes seven pieces) should be marked exactly; second, the product should be made of good quality tea leaves but the tea origin is actually decided pretty much by the traders during the later process of packing; third, no definite date of tea production should be marked on the package, since this only needs to be known and checked during their personal meeting. 

Faced with hot competition between producers, and a variety of different tastes among consumers, it’s hard to say which place produces the best Puer tea. And although post-fermentation is the common process constituting Puer tea, varying geographical conditions and trivial differences of production can lead to diverse tastes of the tea. But for the Puer tea of Yiwu, there are some conspicuous points about its traditional production: 

1. Instead of large-scale enterprises, people adhere to small-scale family businesses which remain the primary unit of tea production;

 

2. People prefer to make raw rather than ripe Puer; 

3. Production by hand is preferred to mechanised production. 

But meanwhile, these traditions are being challenged. In February of 2006, I got to know that a new policy established by the local government is putting pressure on Yiwunese to change their traditional methods. In order to make all Puer tea products in Yiwu conform to a certain agreed standard, the policy prescribes that each unit in the Puer tea industry should be of a certain scale, mainly referring to the size of production; those businesses producing on too small a household scale should close down. As I observed, a lot of families were working hard to extend their processing spaces before the deadline, either within their present houses or by building an additional room outside not far away. But actually this policy is objected to by a lot of locals, since many of them do not have enough money for extension at the moment, or they think the extension might destroy the original architecture, which is an important signs of Yiwu’s identity. For example, Zhang Yi, the pioneer of Yiwu’s Puer tea, said that it is not really necessary for a unit to reach a big scale, as long as it reaches an adequate standard of cleanliness. 

From Zhang Yi’s viewpoint, Puer tea in Yiwu as well as in other places in Yunnan is facing some other problems. First, Yiwu has both tea trees and shrubs. The former are grown naturally on old plantations and have a stronger taste. The latter were developed by people later and are much shorter and younger than the former, but can grow much more quickly. In recent years, the former in Yiwu has an annual production of 70 tonnes; the latter 250 tonnes. However, the annual figure appearing in the market labeled Yiwu is no less than 3000 tonnes, and most are marked as ‘from trees’, which cannot easily be verified by a common consumer. Where do those surplus teas come from? It is really questionable. Secondly, the over-use of pesticide in tea shrub planting is a common problem on many tea plantations. Even if it is true that “the older the better”, what is the point of storing for ages a raw brick which might have come from a plantation where pesticides have been over-used? And how can Puer tea enter the world market successfully? Thirdly, people are so deeply involved in making profits out of Puer tea that with the proliferation of various artful processes it is becoming very difficult not only for consumers or second-hand buyers to tell the exact age of the tea, but also hard for a tea producer to distinguish if the tea leaves he gets from villages are from shrubs or trees. 

The three preferences mentioned above characterise tea production in Yiwu and will form the basis of my further research, through which the voices of the locals versus voices from outside about Puer tea can be examined. Meanwhile, the new challenges facing Yiwu should be examined to see how they will influence future production in this area. 

References 

Deng Shihai (2004) Puer Cha [Puer Tea]. Kunming. Yunnan keji chubanshe. 

Mu Jihong (1992) Dian Chuan Zang dasanjiao wenhua tan mi [Cultural Search among the Triangle of Yunnan, Tibet and Sichuan]. Kunming. Yunnan daxue chubanshe. 

Zhang Yi (2006) Zhongguo Puer cha gu liu da chashan de guoqu he xianzai [The Past and the Present of the Ancient Six Great Mountains for Chinese Puer Tea]. In Puer cha jingdian wenxuan, ed. Wang Meijin. Kunming. Yunnan meishu chubanshe. 

4th South Eat Asia Puer Trade Fair

The 4th South East Asia Puer Trade Fair will be held from 14 Nov 2008 to 23 Nov 2008 at the Mine Exhibition Centre between 11am to 10pm.

Admission is free.  

"Tea Art Inspired Harmonious Lifestyle Through Tea Brewing"

Of All the Tea in China, 'Puer' is the Hottest

Source: Dow Jones Newswires

02/10/2007

Zhuhai, Oct. 2 - In this booming economy, the latest investment fad has everything to do with the price of tea in China.

More precisely, it has to do with the price of puer.

A type of tea commonly pressed into Frisbee-shaped cakes, puer (pronounced "poo-ahr"), was long the domain of a small group of tea collectors. Earlier this year, speculators discovered the tea, driving up its value.

Puer, with a medicinal flavor and smoky aftertaste, improves with age unlike other teas that grow stale. Sellers claim it aids weight loss and lowers blood pressure.

The price of one of the hottest varieties of puer soared to nearly $35-a-cake this past April, seven times the $5-a-cake value just three years ago. Today, a cake of puer sells for nearly $16, a 60% backslide from the peak, fueling fears of a crash.

Puer's popularity reflects how China, awash in cash and slim on investment outlets, is primed for speculation of even the most ordinary -- or unexpected -- assets.

The puer boom spurred 45-year-old Yunnan native Zhang Bing to open a puer exchange in June to help traders find willing buyers and sellers. The exchange, lined with shelves of puer cakes, doubles as a meeting place for a puer club Mr. Zhang started last month.

"It's just like stocks," said Mr. Zhang, eyeing the latest puer price fluctuations on a flat-screen TV mounted by the doorway of the new exchange.

Such efforts are frowned upon by collector Bai Shuiqing, 52, who is so well-known in the industry that his autograph appears on commemorative cakes of puer. Mr. Bai says he already has the "guanxi," or connections, to sell his tea.

Mr. Bai is reluctant to talk about the value of his puer, saying he collects it for its taste, not its monetary value. Still, he estimates his 56 cakes of 100-year-old puer are worth about $640,000. He has two 150-year-old cakes whose value he declines to discuss. Last year, Mr. Bai started selling hand-selected cakes of puer marketed under his name.

At his vast tea warehouse in Hong Kong, Mr. Bai picked up a small piece of the tea, broken from its original cake, and placed it in an earthen teapot engraved with his name. He poured hot water in to rinse the leaves, discarding the first infusion, in what is called "awakening" the tea, and poured the second into a small, clear serving pot.

"Smell this," he said, beaming, and held out the steaming pitcher of clear brandy-colored liquid, a hue indicative of well-aged puer. "This is the best tea in the world."

Mr. Bai says he can divine the age of his puer by taste alone. Still, he keeps the authentication papers for aged cakes carefully sealed in plastic.

Like wine, puer is judged by vintage. At the top of the scale are 150-year-old cakes that can fetch more than $13,000. Newly minted cakes -- which taste bitter and strong compared with aged ones -- range from $13 to $25. Ideally, puer should be stored in airy, humidity-controlled rooms, away from sun and pungent odors that might penetrate the leaves.

Puer, once a gift for emperors, was long relatively unknown in mainland China. Even in Yunnan, where the tea is cultivated, locals preferred plain old green and black tea.

But puer's popularity in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Guangzhou trickled to the mainland around 2004, stirring interest among consumers. Sensing a tourism peg, the local Yunnan government in 2005 sponsored an unusual publicity campaign for the tea in a modern-day version of the caravans that once plied trade routes to Beijing.

The caravans were stocked with puer from Yunnan tea companies that co-sponsored the event. The procession made promotional stops in major cities along the route to the capital. The voyage was broadcast on TV, anchored by Zhang Guoli, a famous actor best known for his role as Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty, the era from which puer dates.

Puer's popularity skyrocketed, and the elite crowd of puer connoisseurs was joined by newcomers who possess neither their expertise nor their devotion to it. A 150-year-old cake of puer went on a promotional tour of the country in March, starting from the Forbidden City in Beijing. It arrived in Yunnan province later that month in the city of Simao, which had changed its name to Puer to help promote tea sales. The tour was sponsored by the city's government, which billed it as a homecoming for the tea.

The Yunnan government recently named puer one of the region's 10 prized cultural resources. In Beijing, puer cakes were marketed as a replacement for traditional moon cakes during the recent mid-autumn festival. Puer is cropping up in restaurants, which display prized vintages like a wine list. Exclusive clubs are opening in Beijing and Guangdong, where the rich gather to drink the tea and learn about its history.

Businessmen armed with cash were elbowing for puer by the case (each case contains 84 cakes). Tea leaves are being hoarded. It used to take weeks for the first batch of puer to sell out, according to Scott Wilson, a tea seller based in Kunming. This year, by the time it arrived in town, the entire stock was sold out.

Mainland Chinese tourists, toting magazines that chart the value of name-brand puers, visited Hong Kong tea shops to buy out entire stocks of recommended tea, says Henry Yeung, managing director of Sunsing Tea House in Hong Kong.

"They don't know anything about tea," sniffs Mr. Yeung, 30. Like others in the old-school puer crowd, he says novices, clueless about how to select and store quality puer, are likely to be duped by fakes.

Counterfeiters have printed knockoffs of popular labels, prompting one maker, Menghai Tea Factory, to employ Chinese money-printing technology to make its wrappers hard to duplicate. The company also set up a hotline for tipsters and established an investigative team to track suspects.

Other factories have cut production of regular green and black tea. Farmers are mixing in lower-quality leaves to puer harvests to artificially boost production. Long-time puer drinkers such as Mr. Yeung turn up their noses at the 2007 vintage, which they say is poor quality.

The boom has set off a wave of conspiracy theories on how it began. Some distributors whisper it started after one company withheld supplies to create the illusion of demand. Others posit that greedy businessmen hired imposters to bid up prices on their stocks of puer.

Tea industry officials fret about a crash. Still, current values are more than double what they were a year ago.

Farmers could be among the hardest-hit from a bust. Industry watchers say that thanks to puer, this year marks the first time tea farmers -- many of whom are ethnic minorities living on the southern Chinese border -- have made a livable wage. The broad-leaf trees that produce puer take three years to mature, meaning farmers who have invested in tea trees are gambling that prices will stay high.

Collectors like Barry Tam aren't worried. This year, the 33-year-old who lives in Hong Kong bought a 100-year-old puer cake for about $13,000 and says he sold it six months later for double that. If the bottom should fall out of the puer market, reasons Mr. Tam, "even if I cannot sell it, I'll drink it."

景迈古茶树风波

思茅市澜沧县景迈村万亩古茶园中最大最具代表性的一株千年人工栽培型古茶树在千家寨“茶树王”官司开庭前悄然死去。2004年8月，到澜沧出差的韩雷发来了这张绿色茶林背景衬托下的凄惨照片。根据历史记载，500年前古茶园发生一次大火灾，400多年前遇一次大虫灾，20世纪中后期曾遭乱砍滥伐，历经沧桑。千百年过来，古茶园的茶树，全靠自然肥力生长。

辛存的这棵千年老茶树是景迈村乡民的茶神。年复一年，傣族和布朗族老人都要携带子女来这里祭祀膜拜，因为从古到今，他们一直靠采茶、卖茶生活。1950年，末代头人苏里亚采摘古茶鲜叶，精心制作茶叶献给毛主席。淳朴的少数民族用献茶的方式，表达他们对党对政府的信任和感谢。

近年来，情况发生了变化。2003年初，县政府与美籍台商蔡林青的101公司签订了一份合同，决定以每年收取22万元费用的条件，将景迈村万亩古茶园的使用权以保护的名义承包给蔡林青的101公司，期限为50年。合同规定，景迈村居民从古茶园采摘的茶叶必须交售给101公司。采茶的傣族妇女说，1984年土地改革后，茶树被分给各家各户，前些年各家自己揉茶制茶出售，近几年有人购置茶机办起了茶叶加工厂。景迈村勐本社村民波三府投资5、6万元购置了一大一小两台揉捻机，一台滚筒杀青机，一台百叶式烘干机，每年可收购加工出售十多吨晒青毛茶。当地政府在履行同101公司签定的合同过程中，要求古茶园附近的20多家加工厂搬迁，或者将厂子出售给101公司。大家都不明白，他们的损失该由谁负责。波三府受到威胁，不搬迁，厂房将被推土机铲平。另一茶厂厂长黄长宝说：“我们觉得不公平，每年22万的承包费我们也出得起，为什么我们不能与101公司竞标？这样即使输了我们也心服口服。”对此，澜沧县有关官员的解释是：“101公司有着其他厂所不具备的古茶保护意识和专业知识，因为古茶树很特殊，不是谁说保护就可以保护。”二十多户茶厂的工商营业执照被收缴了一年多。波三府今年9月重新拿到营业执照，经营范围已被更改为“新植茶叶收购、加工、销售。”当地茶厂收购、加工和销售古茶园茶叶将成为非法行为。茶农说，“开始，101公司的鲜叶收购价格是十元一公斤，后来降到四元一公斤。”

在101公司承包和实施保护措施一年多后，千年古茶王“仙逝”了，空剩一座“茶王亭”。

茶友还记得，二零零四年五月十六日，南风窗记者尹鸿伟发自云南思茅的报道《滇茶异象》中“‘独家’保护古茶树？”的文章。文章曾用小标题发出疑问，“看上云南千年古茶树的人越来越多，对于古树来说，这是祸是福？”记者采访时间发生在五月上旬，那时这棵景迈村万亩古茶园中的标志性大茶树还活在世间。提供千年古茶王“仙逝”照片和消息的韩雷说，“由于人工建了护栏,并在旁边建亭子,像公园一样供人游逛，生态环境的变化、破坏，最终造成‘茶王’死亡。”

蔡林青说，“古茶王出现的问题，与村长的施肥行为有关。”村长的管护行为发生在101公司承包前的2002年，到2004年5月，记者还看到茶树活着。蔡林青又说，“或许有人泼硫酸破坏，造成茶树死亡。”

10月23日，我们赶到景迈村。村民将古茶王移到村头寺庙前，死亡干枯的树干直指县环保局“经济建设与环保协调发展”的宣传标语。

村头小卖部前有几个村民说，“101公司用液态化肥辣死了古茶树。”蔡林青则说，“村长带人挖走古茶树，是为了破坏现场。”不管怎么说，古茶王不可能死而复生。

县经作中心和县森林公安分局一行六人6月18日到景迈古茶园对茶树死亡情况作实地调查，在向县人民政府的报告中写到：“1999年冬季严重霜冻后，管护农户于2002年进行过修剪，同时进行根内施肥，肥料为钙镁磷肥，数量10公斤左右，通过管护，2003年古茶树抽发出新梢。2003年冬季和2004年春季101公司对古茶树进行了铲草施肥等管护措施，施肥方法为外围打孔深施液肥和根部开沟洒施磷肥，同时进行根部培土。肥料和数量具体情况不明。”

万亩古茶园在1999年冬季严重霜冻中都挺过去了。调查组认为：不合理的管护措施将会加速茶树生势的衰退。

Pu Er Expedition

Extracted from www.yunnantea.net

A strange ‘mule team’, carrying tents, sleeping bags and waterproof tarps tramped through the dark, impenetrable primeval forests of the Ailao, Wuliang and Shuangjiang Mountains. Among the team, there was the 60 year old honorary chairman of the Tea Association who is now also the vice director of the Yunnan Provincial People’s Congress, comrade Huang Bingsheng, as well as the young biology student Guo Minghui. They are not ‘backpackers’ in the modern sense of the word, nor are they outdoor sportsmen. They are part of a series of investigative activities into the ancient tea trees of the Pu’er tea region organized by the provincial government, scientific and educational departments in early March. At the Guangzhou Trade Fair in the early eighties, Mr. Guo Honglian, president of the Hong Kong Kongkow Tea Trade Association told me that Hong Kong tea aficionados have discovered a thing or two through long-term Pu’er drinking: Vietnamese, Thai and even Chinese Pu’er’s from Guangxi and Guangdong Provinces are fine right away, but unsuitable for long term storage; Yunnan Pu’er however, is perfectly suited for this, and through long term mellowing loses its bitter flavor, has a smooth taste and mellow aroma – it is definitely the top of the Pu’er teas. In those years at the trade show, I saw that the Pu’er tea booths from Guangdong, Sichuan and Guizhou Provinces were so empty that birds could nest there, while my booth was always being barraged by tea traders from Hong Kong and Macao. Yunnan Pu’er tea has spread far and wide, standing high above its contenders. This is closely connected to the richness of ancient and cultivated tea trees in the Yunnan Pu’er region. As for the compounds that are so important in making the uniqueness of Pu’er tea such as tea polyphenols, tea catechins, caffeine, L-theanine and water extract are all present in much higher quantities in the Yunnan large leaf tea than in small leaf types. Right now, there are over 200 types of tea-related tree that have been discovered, mostly distributed through China’s South and Southwest. Yunnan Province is home to 47, while Guangxi has 22 and Guangdong, 20. As for actual tea trees, there are 34 types, with Yunnan being home to 31 plus two variations. Most of the cultivation-type teas belong to the tea family (Camellia sinensis) and the Pu’er variety (Camellia sinensis var.assamica); wild tea trees usually fall into the quinquelocularis series Dachang (Camellia Tachangensis) or the pentastyla series Dali (Camellia Taliensis). Wild tea trees have also been discovered in northeastern, southeastern and central Yunnan, but their properties are different from the giant tea trees of the Pu’er region of southwest Yunnan. The goal of our excursion was to seek out the origins of the Yunnan Pu’er tea family, and explore the biological mysteries of Yunnan Pu’er tea.

I.

March fourth, the first station of the expedition, Kunlu Mountain, Pu’er County. Here, the Hong Kong movie star Zhang Guoli donated 20,000 RMB (USD 2,400) to maintain an ancient tea tree. Mr Zhang came to Kunming (Yunnan’s Capital) to make a film. On the first day, he tasted some of my aged Pu’er tea, and has been hooked on in ever since. He has seen a lot in his days, and is a very sophisticated tea drinker. Since then, his entire family including his wife, Deng Jie, have stopped drinking aged Wulong (Oolong) tea. In order to obtain good visual documentation, for this trip he asked a friend to bring his professional video camera the day before we began our trip. The student Guo Minghui, who has filming experience, is our trip photographer.

Kunlu Mountain, which lies in Kuanhong Township, Pu’er County, is part of the Wuliang Mountain Range. The terrain is steep and hilly; after searching the entire area, we were unable to find a suitable place to set camp. It was comrade Huang Bingsheng who finally found a flat meadow to set up our tents. This was our first night on the mountain. Li Jian, nicknamed Mountain Ghost (or Mountainholic) by his buddies at the Red Extreme Outdoor Club, was responsible for leading us in setting up the tents. The new campers made a lot of fuss, finally getting all the tents up. Mountain Ghost said to me jokingly, “you really are something else, you brought a provincial leader all the way out here to sleep in a tent”. In the night, we talked about the Tea Route market in ancient Pu’er. In fact, the main commodity there was actually salt. That day in Kunlu Village, I had seen a few salt-licks that had been worn smooth by countless cows and goats; I even took a picture. Yunnan is nowhere near the ocean, and the need for salt is a big problem for the hill-tribes that live here. Pu’er’s Mohei Township is home to an underground salt mine, which provides sustenance to the villagers of the surrounding tea mountains. Aside from cow and goat hides, the largest commodity traded for salt is tea. It is no surprise that a large trading market emerged in Pu’er and that this place became the center for Pu’er tea. In earlier days, the Pu’er region did not produce so much tea. In the early 1970’s, as Sino-Vietnamese relations fell apart, patriotic Hong Kong tea traders organized a boycott against Vietnamese Pu’er tea, and came to the mainland in search of new sources. In 1973, the Foreign Trade Ministry sent an urgent telegram ordering Yunnan to produce over 200 tons of tea leaves for Hong Kong. The Provincial Tea Company began planning that year for tea factories in Kunming, Xiaguan, Menghai and Pu’er to begin producing Pu’er tea. In future plans, the Pu’er Tea Factory would always have the smallest production. According to historical records, most of the tea produced in southern Yunnan came from Pu’er, where it was then shipped off in all directions, which is why this variety of tea was named Pu’er. Historically, the name Pu’er was a general term for large leaf Yunnan tea varieties that had been allowed to mold, then worked into any type of tea. Modern Pu’er tea refers to molded tea that has been fermented and carefully selected. Some people who don’t understand the history still mix the names up, coming up with laughable names like Pu’er black tea, Pu’er green tea, etc…

In Tang Dynasty times, the district of Yinsheng (modern day Jingdong, Xiajing Valley and Pu’er) was administered by an official named Li, who loved tea. He never returned to his hometown in Jiangsu, rather settling down along a mountain ravine in Kuanhong Township and planting two tea orchards on Kunlu Mountain. The orchard at Kunlu Village consisted of 372 trees, while the other orchard had about the same. As for the age of the trees, it seems they should be much older than those at the ancient tea orchard on Menhai’s Nannuo Mountain. These trees are very tall, all measuring over 5 or 6 meters. A ladder must be used to pick the leaves. The trees’ posture were wide open or partially open, most of the tender branches had visible hair; the leaves were between 6 and 15 centimeters in length, the leaf surface was flat or slightly bulging, the leaf edges had fine, sharp teeth, and there were two to three scales on each flower bud. I reckon that these trees cannot produce a considerable amount, but the value of tea from old trees is definitely quite high. These orchards lived on under the care of the Li family descendants for several hundred years. During the Nationalist Republic, a Li descendant, named Li Mingren took over the family business, using tea to cultivate people when he invested 1,825 silver pieces to construct the Kuanhong School. Li Mingren also served on the Provincial Congress. After he died, people carved a tea tree on his gravestone.

At dawn we set out from our campsite at 1700 meters above sea level, following along the meandering mountain path. Comrade Huang Bingsheng moved very fast, and often had to stop and wait for everyone to catch up. He previously served as the director of the Agriculture Bureau, later serving two terms as the provincial vice governor in charge of agricultural affairs, so he spent a lot of his time climbing around the mountains of the countryside. There is definitely a big difference between exercising and not. Kunlu Mountain is on the lower reaches of the Wuliang Mountain Range, and the altitude is rather low, at only 2,200 meters, just south of the Tropic of Cancer line. The tree that Zhang Guoli sponsored lies on a 70 degree slope at 2,100 meters. The environment of the surrounding area is pristine, with the only evidence of humans being a painted number, JC253CM. This tells us that the root diameter is 80.57 cm, and at least 25 meters tall. This is the largest tea tree on Kunlu Mountain, and is part of the Dali pentastyla series (Camellia Taliensis). The giant tree is full of luxuriant leaves, and the trunk splits into three forks. To compete for sunlight with the surrounding vegetation, the tree shoots right up to the sky. Only at the very top of the tree do we see side shoots. The slope was too steep for us to measure the trunk. As the surrounding vegetation was extremely thick, we were unable to photograph the entire tree, and we resorted to crouching on the ground to find a good perspective. There are many mountain tea plants on Kunlu Mountain, and the wild tea trees are even more abundant.

The mountain was not so high, but the road was very long. Today we walked no less than twelve or thirteen kilometers. In the forest, the canopy blocks out the sun, and it’s not so bad. When we were a few kilometers from Kuanhong Township, the trees retreated, and the scorching sun soaked our backs with sweat and made our minds numb. When Miss Majia from the Sugar and Tea Department of the Agriculture Bureau cried out in shock, our minds were brought back to alertness. There was a green two meter Bamboo Leaf Snake stretched across the path. He was sticking out his tongue and working his eyes about, watching us tauntingly, not leaving until a few minutes later.

II.

The investigation into ancient cultivated tea trees is a part of a larger investigation into ancient tea trees in the Pu’er tea production region. Through the period of investigation we visited Nannuo Mountain in Menghai County, the Hekai Manmai Village, the Banzhang ancient tea orchard of Bulang Mountain, and visited the ancient tea orchard of Jingmai in Lancang County. A few years back, we made a mistake, emphasizing high production levels across the board, and the reform of low producing orchards. Large swaths of ancient tea orchards were lost. The director of the National Tea Quality Testing Center Luo Shaojun told me that enormous monoculture tea orchards were not a good thing. The natural environment is gone, the pests multiply, and there is no choice but to use large amounts of agricultural chemicals. Since the European Union raised its standards regarding pesticide residues, I went to Europe several times to meet with the German Tea Association and the OTG Tea Company. OTG Director Kaufman told me that the Chinese “666” chemical compound is very stubborn, remaining in the soil for more than twelve years. The grass that grows form the soil holds the pesticide residues, which are embedded into rabbit meat when they eat the grass, and transferred to humans who eat those rabbits. There is already scientific evidence to show that this chemical compound has carcinogenic properties. In the past several years, we have had no choice but to avoid these high risk pesticide areas to organize our tea exports. Tea is a healthy beverage, not junk food, but if there are pesticide residues the drink cannot be healthy.

The main inhabitants of Nannuo Mountain are the Hani ethnic group. During the Nanzhao Kingdom (a non-Chinese kingdom that ruled over Yunnan and much of Southeast Asia –trans.) of the Tang Dynasty, Some of the Hani that were concentrated in the Ailao Mountain Range migrated southwards, passing through Yuanjiang, Mojiang and Jiangcheng into Xishuangbanna. But the Hani were certainly not the first residents of Nannuo Mountain. When the Hani arrived at Nannuo Mountain over one thousand years ago, there were already destitute tea orchards left behind by the Puman people. The Puman people were ancestors of the modern Bulang, and the descendants of the ancient Pu people. The Pu were the earliest people to cultivate tea in Yunnan, and are called the “ancient tea farmers”. In December 1951, the Yunnan Provincial Tea Research Institute (then called the Fuo Hai Tea Testing Ground for the Yunnan Provincial Department of Agriculture and Forestry) discovered an ancient tea tree measuring 550 cm in height with a 138 cm diameter at the base. They respectfully named it “King of Tea Trees”. In 1954, the noted botanist Cai Xitao examined the King of Tea Trees. In 1957, the nation’s tea experts, professors and scholars ran a comprehensive set of tests on the King of Tea Trees, and produced definitive evidence that the tree was in fact cultivated; it was a living fossil of the Chinese people’s domestication of the tea tree. The Nanuo Giant Tea Tree is characterized by elliptical leaves of 11 cm in length and roughly 4 cm in width and the leaves all tilted diagonally upwards, gradually sharpening to the tip. The leaves were a deep green, and the leaf flesh was thick and soft. The edges of the leaves were flat, with many shallow teeth and a very visible main vein. The new sprouts were sturdy and of a deep green hue with lots of hair; it had a strong ability to produce new sprouts. Since the 1980’s, the amount of visitors and cars steadily increased, and the surrounding natural environment was seriously damaged. The tree itself was wounded many times, and in 1995, the king of cultivated tea trees at Nannuo Mountain passed away. On May 8, 2002, the head of the provincial Tea Research Institute Zhang Jun and the director of the Menghai County Tea Office Zeng Yunrong discovered another relatively ancient and large cultivated tea tree on a remote slope deep in the Forest of Nannuo Mountain. Cultivated tea trees are characterized by: mostly bushy or partially treelike trunk shape, a fully or partially open posture, hairy tender branches, leaves 6 to 15 cm in length, flat or bulging leaf surfaces, fine teeth on the leaf edges, and two to three scaled flower buds.

Directors Zhang and Zeng had us walk through the ancient tea orchard for several hours. This tea orchard stretches almost 2,000 hectares. Nannuo Mountain has an average of 126 days of fog per year, and receives between 1500 to 1750 mm of rainfall; the relative humidity is above 80%, the altitude about 1400 meters above sea level; the earth is very thick and the soil fertile. This is the natural environment for large leaf tea trees. The area was truly full of life. There are over 8,000 hectares of ancient tea orchards in Menghai County, mostly concentrated in the inaccessible mountain areas. An ancient tea tree was recently discovered in a ravine near Banpozhai village. The tree is 530 cm tall, with coverage of 935x750 cm; the main trunk is 76.4 cm in diameter at the base, and 40 cm in diameter in the center. The first branch is 60 cm off the ground, and there are 6 main branches. The posture is open, and the coverage is very wide. The Hani people just happened to be celebrating their “Hongxi” Festival, the festival for the harvesting of the tea leaves. I saw a two year old Hani child already holding her bamboo cup full of tea. That night we pitched camp on the crest of a hill roughly fifty meters from the giant tea tree. In the tea forest, one can easily find trees so large that it takes several people holding hands to completely wrap around the trunk. These trees are definitely older than the tea orchard. We were puzzled: how did the first inhabitants plant the tea orchard without destroying the forest? Could they have already been aware of the natural relationship between tea trees and surrounding flora? At night, the large bright moon crept slowly over the treetops. Day after day, year after year through hundreds of seasons and dozens of generations, the world’s oldest and largest forest of cultivated tea trees produces bounty and enriches the life of humankind from the high Yunnan Plateau.

We were left breathless by the tea orchard’s ability to balance with the local environment. This was truly a forest in tea and tea in forest. All manner of flora and fauna were thriving on the ancient tea trees, even rare orchids bloomed on their trunks. Worms were living on the trunk of a tea tree in the ancient orchard at Jingmai, and thousands of spider mites came to devour them. Miss Ma cried out to comrade Guo Minghui. We could not believe our eyes as our photographer flew to the scene and captured the amazing sight on film.

It was impossible to find a suitable flat area in the ancient tea orchard, and we resorted to laying tea leaves on the ground to cushion our tents. The Hani households have concrete platforms in front of their wooden houses for drying tea leaves. Pu’er tea is produced with molded tea leaves that have been dried in the sun; they still contain about 12% or more of water. The molded tea leaves have a high water content, and they naturally ferment through the process of trading, storing and shipping. For red (aka black) and green teas, the fresher the better; as for antique Pu’er teas, one must look for the proper production processes, accumulated age and sufficient mellowing. It is completely different. In Taiwan there was a person who wrote a book, saying that he stores his Pu’er in cold storage. A few days before, I showed this to the Kongkow tea trade association vice director Tang Songfa; we looked at each other and had a good laugh. Mr Tang said jokingly; let him sell his Pu’er ice blocks. Vintage Pu’er is not made in the modern refrigerators of today, but tempered through the ages along ancient stone roads. In those years, I must have rented out every air-raid shelter in Kunming to store Pu’er tea, and later modified the Yiliang Tea Factory Pu’er storage house several times, organizing research groups to do experiments on prevention of mites and optimization of the mellowing process. These activities accumulated rich experience towards the successful production of Pu’er tea.

At the Simao Pu’er Tea Festival last year, the secretary of the Simao Tea Association Huang Canhui led Ms Luo Shaojun and I around the tea city to taste some Pu’ers. Some of the booths were shouting up a storm about their tea, but it was no good. Since I hadn’t tasted any good aged Pu’ers, I wasn’t very interested in the whole thing. At a booth near the central gate, a young woman passed me some of the Pu’er she was brewing. I took a sip, and the mellow aroma seeped into my lungs; my eyes lit up. The girl said that the tea had a history of over thirty years. I asked where it was produced, and the answer was Lancang. That sounded about right. I asked, “Lancang Tea Factory?” As I finished that sentence, the old woman who was beckoning people at the gate came over and locked her eyes on me. She recognized me. At the Kunming Trade Fair in 1980, I had oversold our reserves of Pu’er tea, and the company sent me out to organize more to fill the order on my own. I ran all around, and met the then director of the Xiaguan factory Luo Naixin, and the Menhai factory director Zou Bingliang, both in charge of inspection. Lancang County has many ancient tea orchards, and their factory had just been added as a Pu’er tea producer. The old woman’s name is Li Yingmei, and was in charge of quality inspections; her husband, Wang Yongtai is the factory director. They had a batch that they thought was no good, and they were very anxious. I told her that there was nothing wrong with it, and that I could take it to the provincial company immediately. I also told her to keep the tail end of the batch, because it would be very good later on. Li Yinmei told me that I was drinking from that batch right now. She packed up a bag of it just for me.

There are too many counterfeiters of Pu’er tea, especially fake labels and dates. I went to a teahouse in Qujing with Zhang Guoli. The City Council member responsible for cultural affairs, Vice Secretary Yu Chao asked us what type of tea we wanted to drink. Zhang Guoli said, “Old Zou is here, so let’s drink Pu’er”. The tea came, and it had a ‘new water taste’ as they call it in Hong Kong. Guoli cocked his brow, and muttered “soy soup” with amusement. I went to the shelf and took the tea down for a look. This was a “seven” brick, which showed that it had been stored for five years, and it was marked as “China Local Livestock Product Import and Export Company, Yunnan Tea-Leaf Company Division.” I told the boss it was counterfeit. The boss said he had parted with a dear amount of money for it. I’ve worked at the provincial tea company for over twenty years, even serving as vice president from 92 to 2000. In the late eighties, with the reform of China’s foreign trading system, the Yunnan Tea Company quickly dropped the word ‘Division’ from its name. The proper name in 1990 became “China Local Livestock Product Yunnan Tea Leaf Import and Export Company. This brick of tea could have been produced in as little as three months. The teahouse boss gave in with a deep sigh. The green-molded tea produced at the ancient orchards is the best of Pu’er. But this type of counterfeiting is astonishing. Whenever the spot market price goes up, people from all around put their tea up on the market, putting on whatever label is selling at the time to get a high price.

A lot of the chaos on the market can be attributed to the misleading information in some irresponsible publications. The Book of Pu’er Tea published in Taiwan in late 2000 is full of errors. The China Tea Yunnan Provincial Company was established in September 1950 and ended in January 1956. On page 56 in this book, the text for plate 40 identifies the tea as Fuohai Tea Factory produced in the 1940’s, China Tea Yunnan Provincial Company red tea seal round-brick; likewise print 42 on page 53 and print 43 on page 60 show Menghai Tea Factory China Tea Yunnan Provincial Company, early green seal round-brick. In the 1950’s, the provincial company only had the Menghai tea factory producing for domestic and foreign sales. But plate 52 on page sixty is labeled as Xiaguan Tea Factory, 1950’s China Tea Company Yunnan Provincial Division tea seal iron pressed round brick. Even more farfetched, plate 54 on page 71 has a tea identified as a 1980’s tea seal round brick from the Yunnan Provincial Tea Company Kunming Factory. That’s a brief sketch which I’ll follow up with an explanation of the problem. If time allows, I plan to write an article specifically detailing all of the errors. Erroneous information misleads business, and there is a lot of money involved with tea. This is very irresponsible.

People often ask me why they haven’t seen this type of tea in recent years. This is a very interesting question. Pu’er tea is dried and molded in the sun and then mellowed afterwards. There are two routes for mellowing. The first is natural aging, known as fresh tea cakes (or green tea cake, -another reference to freshness- trans.); the second process is to add moisture and temperature, stacking the tea moist, and the cakes are known as mature or ripe cakes. As I said before, my province only began testing artificially fermented Pu’er in 1973. Before this it was just production of heated or dried molded tea for shipping everywhere. Pu’er tea naturally ferments over time in the process of long distance shipping, so the consumption structure was that Yunnan people drank the first-stage dried molded tea while people in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao and Southeast Asia drank real Pu’er – the finished product. It was this pattern that muddled many a consumer. Hong Kong consumes four thousand metric tons of Pu’er tea yearly, which is a daily rate of at least ten tons. In a Hong Kong tea house, if you don’t first specify that you want Xiang Pian, Tie Guanyin, Longjing or Black (Red) tea, then they will surely bring out a pot of smooth Pu’er tea. In the 1960’s, to support Vietnam and counter America, the Hong Kong Teck Soon Hong Company encouraged tea traders to buy their Pu’er tea ingredients from Vietnam. When the mainland supply was cut off during the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Zhou Cong from Yunnan’s Tengchong Prefecture brought some Hong Kong Tea traders to Thailand for artificially fermented Pu’er tea to cover the market. In the eighties, I extended a special invitation to Zhou Cong to come to Kunming and the Menghai tea factory to exchange about the art of Pu’er tea production. Someone brought out a brick of tea saying that it was a 1960 Simao Pu’er and asked me to appraise it. I didn’t even have to steep it to tell him it was rubbish. Anything can be faked except for the passage of time. The flavor and aroma that the ages leave behind on Pu’er tea can never be counterfeited.

III.

We hadn’t planned a visit to Lan Cang County’s Bangwei giant tea tree in our journey. After we had examined the Jingmai Tea Orchard, we were given lunch by the local people. Ms Yang Liuxia, director of the Simao Tea Breeding Ground heartily recommended this Bangwei tea tree. If we wanted to go to Bangwei, we could arrive at Shuangjiang late at night. We finally made our decision.

Up and out several kilometers, a gravel road opens to the right, which leads from the villages to the county seat. The road is very wide, and is rather flat and level. After twenty kilometers, we entered into a collection of villages along a section of concrete road. Wendong, my heart jumped. I recognized it. There was the commissary, and over there was the cafeteria where I ate ‘rice treats’ with her. Thirty years ago, this place was called the Wendong Commune; now it is called the Wendong Ethnic Wa Township. In ’76 I lived in a Mangnuo Wa village connected to the Wendong Commune for one year with my work unit. There was a girl in the work unit named Tan Xiaoling who was a year younger than I. She had just graduated from the Institute for Chinese Medicine and worked at the Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine, and was the medic for our work unit. She had gentle, delicate features and was soft and refined in her ways. She wrote beautifully, and was skilled and confident in Tang and Song poetry forms. I was a lazy and careless individual, until she came into my heart, and I devoted myself to caring for her.

Mangnuo Mountain is surrounded by a vast area of tea orchards, and there are many tea plants growing on the mountain. To the back of the mountain lies a tributary of the Lancang (Mekong) River, Xiaohei River, and across the river is the county of Shuangjiang. Mangnuo Mountain and Kunlu Mountain are both along the Tropic of Cancer. Aside from the Wa, this area is also inhabited by the Bulang people. They use traditional methods for drying and molding tea. When there are few fresh leaves, they roll them with their hands; when there are many fresh leaves, they roll them with their feet on a 2.5 by 2 meter bamboo plate. The Wa girls of Mangnuo never wear shoes, and the bottoms of their feet are covered in thick, tough callus. Whether they walk on rough stones or sharp brambles, it is just like a smooth flat surface to them. The middle-aged women smoke dried tobacco from bamboo pipes of all shapes and sizes. I often saw the women using their feet to stamp out the burning tobacco coals. I told Ms Tan, you are better at communicating with these Wa women, try to get them to stop using their feet to roll the tea leaves. When the tea harvest was at its peak, she ran around back and forth telling them, but to no avail.

The Wa family home is simple, and there are only three objects made of metal: a knife, the stand for the cooking fire, and a bronze cymbal. The bed is covered by a self-woven mat, and water is held in a bamboo bucket. When the sky is cloudy, the tea leaves are laid out on a bamboo mat to dry over the fire. This is the reason why molded tea occasionally has a smoky flavor. The Wa boys are totally fashion conscious; no matter how poor they are, they have to buy one of those Red Light Brand radios for 47 RMB (USD 5), and carry it over their shoulder all day. At night, they bring it to the door of a girl’s house, and accompany it with their gourd pipes. If they’re lucky, the object of their affection will knit a bag to carry the radio. When I was in elementary school, I often played with radios, and this was put to use when I arrived at Mangnuo. The mountain folks from miles around came to have me fix their radios. There was one kid in the village named Yan Kan whose radio had broken a wire. Sometimes it played, and sometimes it didn’t. He was hysterical. At the time, even the sale of a big fat pig didn’t provide enough money to buy a radio. I lit my tongs up and soldered the broken wire. You could flip the radio around and it still played, and Yan Kan became my good friend.

Manager Song Wengeng was the head of the work team, and lived at the headquarters. Tan Xiaoling and Chen Hangao also lived at headquarters. At Mangnuo, I was the only one in the tea business. Yan Kan often took me up the mountain to wander in the tea forest. Each time we went, I’d bring a small bottle of kerosene from the commissary, and a bundle of rice straw. Whenever we came across a hornet’s nest on a tree, Yan Kan would chop a stalk of bamboo, wrap the rice straw around the end, soak it in kerosene and light it up. When the nest was threatened, the hornets would swarm out and attack the torch and be buried in a sea of fire. Yan Kan would them climb the tree and grab the nest, and that night at dinner we would have tasty hornet larvae for desert. One time, I spotted a large hornet’s nest, and Yan Kan said that we could not touch it, because it had an owner. I was confused. In this wilderness, how can it be owned? Apparently, someone came before us and discovered the nest but had no kerosene. He snapped a branch there to mark the spot, signifying his ownership.

Yan Kan told me that a half-day’s walk down the road there was a granddaddy of tea trees, the largest tea tree in Wendong, reaching over two stories in height. Yan Kan’s Chinese is rather lacking, and I didn’t fully understand the place name he said. In fact he was talking about the Bangwei giant tea tree. One can only walk there, and the round trip takes a full day. Yan Kan said he’d take me to see it. Tan Xiaoling also promised to go. The vice director of the Grain Oil and Foodstuff Company and vice director of the work team Li Hua would not let us go. She said that two metallurgy workers had been killed nearby, and the upper levels sent a notice sayingthat our unit could not go out randomly. In the end, I was never able to pay my respects to this granddaddy tea tree.

Old Song and Chen Hangeng knew of the flame between me and Tan Xiaoling, and secretly created opportunities for us to be together. Right before we were to return to Kunming, we went up the mountain together to collect some tea for Yan Kan to prepare. I made sure that Yan Kan would tell his mother not to use her feet to roll the leaves. There was no electricity at Mangnuo, and at night I read Darwin’s The Origin of Species by a weak oil lantern. Yan Kan told me something. A few years back, the old village leader went to town for a meeting. The place he stayed in had electric lighting. After the meeting ended, the village leader cut the wires and pulled out a light bulb to take home. He carefully made his way back, and through all those mountain roads managed to keep the light bulb intact. He took a piece of twine and hung the bulb over the common ground and called everyone together to see the pearl that glows at night. At night fall, that bulb surely refused to shine. I told the story to Mr. Song, and everyone had a good laugh. Old Song went to the commune for a meeting, and used the commune phone to call Wei Moucheng, the scientific director of the company’s production department. At the time, the party standing committee had written a document agreeing to pay the tea company for improvements in tea leaf production. Old Wei got a car and brought an ethanol generator and some tea rolling machines to the village. The pearl that glows at night began to glow. The old Wa villagers were overjoyed, and danced around an old man playing the gourd pipe, sending yellow dust in all directions from the grain threshing ground.

After we got back to Kunming, Xiaoling’s parents invited Chen Hangeng and me over to their house for dinner. I’ve never ironed my clothes in my life, and my clothes were wrinkled and ratty, and I had no etiquette, coming off as a total moron. Chen Hangeng on the other hand looked totally snappy, his brilliant Shanghai clothes were without a single wrinkle. Her parents didn’t have a single good impression of me, and were adamant in their refusal of our relationship. Xiaoling was devastated, and cried all the time. This was the biggest setback of my life. When in Mangnuo Village, she was in my thoughts on many a night as I drifted off to sleep. The day we parted, she came to the grass shack I had temporarily set up on the grounds of the old International Trade Center soccer field. I brewed two cups of the molded tea that we had picked with our own hands. Large leaf molded tea is extremely bitter. This was the first time we had held hands in over a year. She cried tears full of that bitterness. I am afraid of nothing on this earth but the tears of a woman. She slowly drifted off in a daze, and left for America soon afterwards. I took in the bitterness of those ancient tea leaves and lay awake through the morning. I didn’t have a lot of stuff back then, and when I moved out of the grass hut I took the hemp sack that Yan Kan gave me to hold the tea leaves and stuffed it into my old tape recorder. Later I got a new recorder, and the old one stayed at the foot of my bed.

Now it is that same mountain and that same road, though before it was just a dirt one. Our work team sat in the back of a pickup truck, eating dust and baking in the sun. When the cattle and children along the road saw our car, they would scatter off in a rush. We took a corner and there were five or six cows on the road. I was deep in thoughts about the past, and I cut the wheel a bit late. The jeep barely missed one of the cows, and scared a yelp out of Bao Weimin in the passenger seat.

After few kilometers past the Wendong public center lays Bangwei, and the giant tea tree stands just along the old path at the head of the village. The Lancang County government declared the Bangwei giant tea tree as a protected county cultural relic on September 25, 1992. The Bangwei ancient tea tree has a tree shaped trunk and stands 11.8 meters tall, with coverage of 8.2x9 meters. The base is 1.14 meters, and the lowest branch is 70 cm off the ground. There is one primary branch and three secondary branches. Experts believe that the Bangwei ancient tea tree has flowers and buds characteristic of wild tea, but the leaves, sprouts and branch tips are characteristic of a cultivated tree. It is a tree from the transition between wild and cultivated tea, and can be used directly. Its age is around one thousand years, making it the oldest transitional tea tree found to date. This tree has important historical and academic value for the research of the evolution of tea and the biology of its domestication. Though it was discovered early on, it has been protected well, and it thrives healthily to this day.

One day after twenty years, Xiaoling came to see me along with Chen Hangeng. Chen Hangeng was still not the vice director of the International Trade Ministry, I think he was a department head. I remembered the tea leaves. I didn’t tell them, I just made three cups of tea. The passage of time had mellowed the tea, as it mellows life. What was once just molded tea was now authentic Pu’er. The bitterness that once stabbed at the senses had disappeared, and was replaced by a sweet mellow flavor. Tasting tea is like life, who can really sort out the flavors? By then, I had already been in the Pu’er tea business for twenty years. I had already come to know that the more tea chemicals in the leaves, the more bitter the taste. Once the tea has been aged into Pu’er, it becomes smooth, and after mellowing for a long time, acquires a full bodied flavor and a lasting aftertaste.

IV.
Bangma Mountain is in Yunnan’s Shuangjiang (Twin Rivers) County, just west of Mengku Township. It is a southward offshoot of the Hengduan Mountain range, and its main peak stands at 3234 meters. The warm Indian Ocean air currents mix here with the currents of the Pacific Ocean, which creates unique climactic conditions, such as relatively high precipitation. The main peak which is covered in snow during the winter also maintains the necessary moisture for the vegetation covering the mountainside. There has been a change in the climate in the past few years, and the bamboo died off after a mass blooming, exposing a group of ancient tea trees. Among this cluster of tea trees, there are two with a trunk diameter exceeding one meter, roughly twenty meters tall, and many healthy, smaller ones. The newly discovered young tea trees are strong and full of life. These are also of the Dali family (Camellia Taliensis); these wild tea trees are clustered around an altitude of 2250-2720 meters covering an area of 373 hectares.

Many people know that the tea of Mengku is good, but few know that this place holds the ancestors of tea. A winding twenty kilometer road leads us to Dahuzhai Village Center. Halfway up the giant snow mountain at about 2600 meters, there has recently been an enormous wild tea tree discovered in a place called Tea Mountain River. It was discovered by a local Lagu boy named Zha Muyue. At first, we didn’t know he was the one who discovered the largest tea tree, and we chose him as our guide after being misled by many others. We were chatting casually when we heard about the story of discovering the tree. When there were no local government officials present, Zha Muyue quietly complained to us that he had not received a proper reward for his discovery. The last county leader had set a rule while in office that 5,000 RMB (USD 600) would be awarded to anyone who discovered a wild tea tree with a trunk exceeding one meter in diameter. It seems that the new county leader has not kept the former leader’s wishes. Under Zha Muyue’s guidance, we trekked across the primeval forest devoid of roads. We crossed hills and mountains, going from an altitude of 1700 meters to over 2500 in a space of about four hours and a distance of over ten kilometers. There are many obstacles to mobility in this primeval forest devoid of trails, and it requires much determination and resolve to negotiate the steep slopes. The refined associate professor of the tea department at the Agricultural University, Zhou Hongjie was telling us as we went how to determine whether a tea tree was wild. Our team’s biggest worry was Ms Ma Jia. Her legs had gone completely stiff a few days before as we hiked across the Wuliang Mountains. Everyone tauntingly called her ‘bowlegs’. She said she was going to collapse, and large blisters had already formed on her feet. Ma Jia is a good girl, in the city, she lives in the lap of luxury, and in the wild mountains she can grit her teeth and keep up with the team despite her blisters. Maybe it was when Mountain Ghost told her about her function for the trip, “big brother bear always goes for the pretty lady who falls behind the team”.

The slopes of Mabang Mountain are very steep, and a flat piece of land is hard to come by. At 2400 meters, we found a relatively flat depression under an enormous tree. This will be our campsite. Everyone hustled to scrounge up some grass to place beneath our tents. The head of the Rural Economic Affairs Committee Bao Weimin was setting up his spot under a large tree, and was totally engaged in arranging the area, pulling things here and moving stuff there in a series of useless activities almost running around in circles. Mountain Ghost had another snappy comment, “the male has two methods for attracting the female: one is with his beautiful fur or feathers, the other method is by building a proper den”. Everyone was clutching their bellies in laughter. After several days, setting up the tents came as second nature, and camp was set in ten minutes.

We still had some time, so we went to see a tea tree that was over one meter in diameter. This tree is situated at an altitude of 2720 meters, stands 16.8 meters tall, tree formation, measured 3.25 meters around the base, 3.1 meters around the trunk, and had coverage of 13.7x10.6 meters. The branch density was average. I was looking at a leaf sample from the book, and listening to Professor Zhou and Yang Liuxia, director of the Simao Tea Breeding Ground, give a lecture. Comrade Huang Bingsheng was also paying close attention. The wild tea trees of the Pu’er region are characterized by: tree shaped trunks, relatively straight posture, tender branches lacking hair or little hair, big leaves, 10 to 20 cm in length, flat surface or slightly curled, with sparse, dull teeth; there were 3 to 5 scales on the flower buds, big flowers with crowns reaching 4-8 cm, and 8 to 15 thick, white petals; some of them containing hairs. The tea industry requires a healthy respect for science. In the seventies, I was assigned to the operations center at the Provincial Bureau of International Trade, working on the tea trade under the guidance of Comrade Li Kebang. We discovered that there was a problem with the pressed tea that was being sent to Tibet from the Xiaguan factory. The Tibetans were experiencing dizziness, abdominal pains and diarrhea after drinking it. The National People’s Committee sent people down to investigate, and Song Wengeng sealed off the warehouse. At the time, tea production was limited, and the Provincial Tea Company issued a directive authorizing the limited sale of wild tea (known as forest tea) for border trade. We didn’t know if there was a problem with the ratios, poor transportation, or sloppy harvesting, maybe they had harvested another plant that looked like tea. In the end, there was a massive recall of pressed Yunnan tea from the Tibetan market.

Cai Xin from the Yunnan University tea department told me that our ancestors were very smart, they accumulated a rich knowledge in the long process of domesticating wild tea, and they figured out which trees would be edible or not. Blindly assuming that any tea tree was edible could cause problems. The giant Bada tea tree of Menghai was from the Dali family, but did not produce edible leaves. When selecting tea leaves, overuse of Irrawady variety (a.k.a. Yunnan-Burma Variety) can also be harmful.

The primeval forest is beautiful in the rays of the setting sun. The pictures that come out are enchanting. I used the soft light and set my camera on high speed mode and just held the shutter button. The winds came strong in the night, making the tents howl. Though this was the highest altitude that we had camped in, it did not feel cold; we still had to open our sleeping bags and just use them to cover our bodies. We talked a while about Yunnan’s mountain terrain, and about the peculiarities of the Hengduan Mountain range, which provided a unique geographic environment and climate, nourishing communities of large leaf tea trees for mankind. Wild tea tree communities always develop on or near the tropic of cancer. Of course the tropic line runs right trough Bangma Mountain. In the seventies and eighties, the surrounding provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan and Hainan took large quantities of large leaf tea trees back to their provinces to cultivate. When they arrived in their new homes, they mutated into middle or small leaf tea trees. Darwin’s words show us that what is maintained is the hereditary aspect, and what changes is the adaptive aspect. I conjecture that tea had found its perfect home along the tropic line.

On the second day we arrived at Zha Muyue’s newly discovered tea tree. This was the climax of or journey, everyone was very excited. It took three of us together to wrap our arms around the trunk of this giant ancestor of tea trees. We took some measurements: the base circumference is 4 meters, 3.5 meters at the middle of the trunk, coverage of 15.8x15.3 meters, 20 meters tall. The tree has four main branches, the first is 2 meters in circumference, the second 1.25m the third 1.8 and the fourth 1.1. More detailed information, including this tree’s age, will have to await further analysis by our experts. Once the results are in, this tree might be the oldest wild tea tree in the world. The discovery of this giant tea tree is further evidence that Yunnan Province is the birthplace of tea. Something else was very interesting; there was a tea tree that stood over twenty meters tall in an A shape. It turned out that it was two tea trees, one of the Mengzi family and one of the Dali family, who had naturally grown together. This is also unique in the world.

We were all in much better spirits on the road back than when we first went up. Old Bao has been working in agriculture for years, and climbing around the mountains to visit villages was a daily affair. Though he is now fifty years old and has been hiking for several days, he still mustered the energy to clamber up to the top of a tree like a monkey, climbing up along a six or seven meter vine. Mountain Ghost was there shouting, “He’s joining his ancestors”. There was another round of laughter. Going down the mountain is always easier than going up. I often go hiking, and though I go up the mountain slowly, my legs are solid. I went down the mountain quickly, almost half running, and was at the head of the pack the entire time. Mountain Ghost was up to his old tricks, coaxing Ma Xi to run faster, and secretly overtake me. I understood in my heart that Ma Xi was going to have a rough time tomorrow and the next day, and she would definitely be aching all over. At the last hundred meters, she got a second wind. I slowed down to a normal pace to let her be the first to reach the village and get her laurels.

The former Shuangjiang County leader Feng Guoxing is an old Dai Cadre and an old friend of mine. When he was serving office, I attracted some international investment to get a CTC production line imported from India and installed at Mengku Township, bringing all kinds of revenues to Shuangjiang County. He has always been grateful to me. As we ate dinner that evening, the conversation returned to ancient tea trees. Everyone was saying that the set award for finding the tea tree must be paid. Old Feng said that he was now working in the regional government, and that there was nothing he could do. The county tea office said that they had already paid three thousand RMB. I offered that the Provincial Tea Association would provide for the five thousand RMB award for the next giant tea tree to be found. I jokingly said, “If you guys play around and one of the villagers throws his ethnic temper and chops a tree down, that would be a great loss”. Mountain Ghost put his two cents in, saying that he already saw two felled giant tea trees on the mountain today. Old Feng looked perplexed, “what if those trees…” I was still saying my piece, “I’ve been in the tea business for thirty years, and today I finally had the chance to pay my respects to the ancestors of tea”, and as I spoke, I handed two thousand RMB to old Feng so that he could hand it over to that Lagu kid, Zha Muyue (Zha Muyue is the first on the left in the above picture).


V.
Qianjia Village (trans- village of a thousand homes), Zhenyuan County was the last stop on our journey. All in all, the large leaf tea trees of the Pu’er production region, including wild, transitional and cultivated, are mainly focused in the triangular region west of the Ailao Mountains and east of the Bangma Mountains. It is 70 kilometers along county roads from the Zhenyuan County Seat to Liujia, and then another 20 to Qianjia Village. Our travels of the previous days had all been along the Lancang River Region, and arriving at Babian River meant that we had entered the Honghe River (Red River) Region. The Babian River separates the Ailao and Wuliang Mountain ranges. The Zhenyuan County Seat is on the Wuliang Mountains, while Qianjia lies on the Ailao Mountains. One must cross the Babian and Ahmo Rivers, tributaries of the Lixian River, in order to reach Qianjia Village. Overall, there are a few specific geographic characteristics of the places where large leaf ancient tea trees grow in the Pu’er production region: one is high altitude, between 1000 and 2800 meters above sea level; secondly, they are all along the Tropic of Cancer, where the sun’s strong rays strike directly; thirdly, they are all centered around the Lancang and Lixian River Regions.

Once in the Ailao Mountains, the marks of human life become few and far between. While I drove I was I was wondering how there could have been a village of nearly one thousand homes deep in the forest high on the mountains. The car was enveloped in dust from the dirt road, and the scenery was unspectacular. It wasn’t until we reached Little Falling Water that I realized the power of these mountains, and the intensity of the natural environment there. We parked at an altitude of 1700 meters, and Qianjia Village was situated above Big Falling Water at an altitude of 2100 meters. To reach the king of tea trees we would still have to cross the primeval forest to an altitude of 2450 meters. The waterfall that the locals call Big Falling Water hangs halfway up the mountain, where the water spits out from the peak above. Its overall descent is 100 meters, ranging between 10 and 20 meters in width. It is a three tier waterfall, with the largest step 80 meters high

The mountains were steepest here. I was going very slowly up the slope, chatting with a local guy the whole way. During the years of the Tongzhi Emperor (Qing Dynasty), the imperial envoy Lin Zexue gathered the Qing army to surround and attack the Dali regional rebel leader Du Wenxiu. The ethnic Yi cavalry leader rounded up 3600 troops as reinforcements, not knowing that the Qing troops had already captured nearby Nanjian. Li Wenxue was sold out by the traitor Li Mingxue, and he died a heroic death on Wugui Mountain at Nanjian. After the death of Li Wenxue, the rebel army took to the hills. The crippled army of just over 1000 people set off into the forest in the middle of the Ailao Mountains to camp, planning to take advantage of the perilous terrain to continue their resistance against the Qing. I had traveled through Xiangyun Shuimu Mountain during the Chinese New Year holiday, and had learned that Lin Zexu had carved a plaque there, but I never knew why he had come to Yunnan. On this journey, I came to know another side to Lin Zexu. The local buy pointed out to me that behind the trees on those peaks was the fire beacon; the right backside was the Xueguo Mountain natural barrier, the center was Big Falling Water, where the rebel army had set up cannon batteries on either side. I sighed under my breath as I climbed the mountain and observed this obstacle which, to take an old Chinese saying “when one man stands in the way, ten thousand cannot pass”. One hundred years ago, the boundless Ailao Mountains had hosted a tragic point in history; one hundred years later, thick Winter Melon trees are sprouting through the collapsed ruins of Qianjia Village. I asked the local guy if there were still any descendents of the rebel army. He replied with certainty, “no, legend has it that the Qing army poisoned the Dulu River, killing the entire army”. I don’t believe that, but the rebel army truly disappeared, and no one knows where they went.

We still had a few kilometers to go to reach the King of Tea Trees, across the Dulu River and through the wild yet tranquil primeval forest. This is a national forest preserve, and a living gallery of biodiversity. We found a lot of plants related to tea. The camellia flowers had already bloomed, but many days later than in Kunming, and we could still see a few wilted flowers clinging to the bushes. When the rebel army camped in this forest, they were short of medicine, and used tea leaves to stay healthy. The King of Tea Trees is 25.6 meters tall, 1.2 meters across the roots, and 2.82 meters around the trunk. The coverage was 22x20 meters. This was the biggest single trunk tea tree we had seen on our journey, but sadly, the branch facing us was already withered, and the tree was getting worse, as the coverage was certainly no longer the recorded 22x20 meters. Two stone embankments had been piled around the foot of the tree, with two stone plaques standing upright. Not far away, there was also a small pavilion erected. These activities have already heavily damaged the surrounding natural vegetation. On the road back, Professor Zhou was saying that the tree had been harmed by some Taiwanese businessmen. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t figure it out, and I pried him with questions throughout our hike. He said that the building of the embankment and the plaques had destroyed the original environment, and that they had also signed an agreement to receive ten kilograms of dried leaf from the King of Tea Trees every year for trade. It takes five kilograms of fresh leaves to produce one kilogram of dried leaves, so those ten kilograms mean that fifty kilograms of fresh leaves are taken every year. What does this mean for an ancient tree that has not been domesticated? In order to protect the resources of the ancient tea trees, the national government has made laws protecting the environment surrounding them and against picking, processing and selling tea leaves from ancient trees more than 40 centimeters in diameter. Professor Zhou has seen the pictures taken by the old Yunnan tea expert Ga Shun in the early nineties. The Tea King stood tall and healthy, but now it was looking old and decrepit. The preserve managers said that the little money that had been promised by the Taiwanese businessmen was still mostly left unpaid. It looked like the Tea King’s strength had been sucked away by those businessmen. I snapped to attention as if from a dream. In 1982 I accompanied four Americans to see the cultivated Menghai King of Tea Trees. At that time, no one had erected any plaques or embankments, and the then head of the Menghai Tea Factory had simply put up ropes to keep people from getting too close. The tree was strong and vibrant. Then a pavilion and plaques were raised, and an embankment made to wrap the roots. This Tea King who had lived well for hundreds of years hobbled into the “afterlife” after only ten years of labors. Back on August 3rd, we were researching the Banwei giant tea tree in Langcang. The tree had an exposed root that was sticking out three meters. Miss Ma Xi has a good heart, and asked if we should bury to root. Professor Zhou said not to, because the best protection is to maintain the natural state. Not surprisingly, the Banwei giant tea tree is still lush and healthy to this day.

The guys at the Nature Reserve Management Station found a young monkey last spring, and have been caring for it for almost a year. We handed him some chocolate, but he didn’t want it. Little Yi took a bite himself and handed it back to the monkey, and he took it. He tasted the good flavor, and in just a few moments stuffed the chocolate into his cheeks. At lunch time, the little monkey cuddled in old Bao’s chest nibbling on a chicken’s foot. Old Bao handed him a bottle of strong rice liquor, and he sat there intently licking it off of his fingers, bringing us a good laugh. He got drunk and fell asleep off to the side. One of the environmental workers said that the little monkey went and joined the other monkeys a few times, but would always come back after two or three days. He had taken on human mannerisms and had trouble communicating with the other monkeys, often being bullied by them. Here there was good liquor and meat to be had, as well as good companions to take care of him. There one was exposed to the harsh elements and fierce competition for survival. I saw that the young monkey would never be able to return to the wild, but I wondered how he would find a girlfriend later on. I’m thinking that just like the king of tea trees, he should be living in a wild environment.

(Camp)
(Newly discovered tea tree)
(And ancient tree, left, and Dinosaur Vine)
(Dali and Mengzi tea trees growing together)
Zou Jiaju
Thursday April 1, 2004