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.
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