Category Archives: Tea Research

Nan Nuo Shan Cha Chang (a sequel of sorts)

I just realised these last few days that it was ten years ago that I made a couple of posts about the old Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory in Shi Tou Zhai.

(see this post for a brief history of the factory and the man behind it Bai Meng Yu).

That was in 2011-2012. I was unable to discover much more new information about the history of the factory locally, but I did talk to the people who live in Shi Tou Zhai and had relatives who had worked in the factory. They shared a book they had with me, 普洱茶记/Notes on Puer Cha, and from which I copied a number of pages. I am waiting to confirm who the author was but I believe it to be 雷平阳/Lei Ping Yang. The section of the book on the tea Factory is mostly about the factory from the 1950s onwards. There are a few photos that were interesting but likely from the same era and may not be the actual tea factory.

Menghai Tea Factory receiving fresh leaves from ‘Puer Cha Ji’/普洱茶记

Within the next couple of years I went a few times to Northern Thailand and, mindful that Bai Liang Cheng (Bai Meng Yu) had gone there after his stay in Myanmar, made a few inquiries to see if any more was known about him there.

Chiang Mai has an interesting, mixed Chinese population who have been there a long time. There are Chao Zhou people who are mostly near the river, centered around Warorot Market, where there’s a small 华人街/hua ren jie/China Town.

Another distinct group of Chinese are the Hui people – Muslims from Yunnan Province – who have been there at least since the late 19th Century. Yunnanese mulateers, who were predominantly Muslim and formed a core element on the trade routes collectively known as ‘茶吗古道‘/ch ma gu dao – Ancient Tea Horse Road in English – made regular dry season trips from Xishuangbanna via Da Luo, Kyaing Tung (Keng Tung) in Myanmar, Chiang Saen on the west bank of the Mekong, Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, and then on from there on to Burma via Mae Sariang, finally arriving at Moulmein, an important port on the Andaman Sea. (Another possible route headed south from Jinghong to Muang Sing in northern Laos, and from there, after crossing the Mekong somewhere near Chiang Saen, joined the first route to continue to Chiang Rai).

Initially, the traders on the ‘Cha Ma Gu Dao’ were not permitted to cross the Ping River and enter the city proper, so they settled on the east side of the river, in the area that is now known as Wat Ket. Some people have said that this is where the earliest Chiang Mai mosque was established, but that is contradicted by other recorded accounts that place it in the Ban Haw area, south of Wararot Market on the west bank of the river. Ban in Thai means village or home and Haw (sometimes Ho) is a term, with slight derogatory connotations, used in northern Thai for Muslims from Yunnan, that has subsequently come to denote all Yunnanese Chinese irrespective of their religion. The Yunnanese themselves do not use the term.

Key commodities on these long distance trade routes were cotton, tea and opium – an image which has served to haunt them until recent times. But these early settlers had become well integrated into Chiang Mai society by the time the next wave, including KMT fighters, arrived via Burma in the 1950s. They were seen by many, both in Burma and Thailand, as being somewhat wild and lawless.

This latter group had no official documents (and even until quite recently many only had a form of ‘refugee card’ which severely restricted their movements) and their situation in Thailand was precarious. One elderly Hui Man in Chiang Mai described to me once how, at that time, if you were out, walking down the road say, and you saw another person you recognised as being a fellow counryman, you wouldn’t speak or acknowledge them for fear of exposing yourself and being subject to the consequences.

It was into this situation that Bai Meng Yu must have arrived after leaving Nan Nuo Shan in the late 1940s, via a soujourn in Yangon (Rangoon). Knowing that he was Hui meant that the mosque in Chiang Mai was a reasonable place for me to start making some inquiries. One could sense the initial distrust, engendered in part by the history mentioned above, but of course also because of having a strange foreigner coming and asking questions. Being able to speak some ‘Yunnan hua‘ possibly went some way to overcoming that hurdle and, having convinced them I wasn’t a spy or a government agent, I was warmly welcomed.

After a couple of visits I was fortunate enough to meet an uncle of Bai Meng Yu’s granddaughter, who was extremely helpful and friendly. He told me that she had, somewhere in her possession, a number of photographs of the original Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory. He had a photocopy of a written account that family members had made at the time of Bai Meng Yu’s death, recounting their knowledge of his life and including one photograph of the tea factory in which one could just make out some people, maybe in work clothing, standing in a wooded area, possibly clearing ground or constructing something, but 80’s photocopying in Chiang Mai was surely not what it is today and the photograph was not of much use other than to confirm its existence. His niece (Bai Meng Yu’s granddaughter) was friendly but not that helpful for her own reasons – she was busy with work, had just moved house, didn’t know where everything was, and really? Is anybody interested in that?, etc. etc.

So hopefully, somewhere in Chiang Mai, there are still a set of photos of the old original tea factory waiting to be re-discovered.

The rebuilt old school in Sha Dian, Hong He Zhou

On another trip I went to Sha Dian, a now prosperous town in Hong He Prefecture where Bai Meng Yu originally came from and picked up a copy of a publication put out by the local government in 2012 which has a fairly detailed account of the life of Bai Meng Yu, written in 1987. It doesn’t offer much new detail about the tea factory other than to say that he visited India on a trip to purchase equipment for the factory which was subsequently shipped to Burma and from there hauled overland by cart, and then carried by people back to Menghai. It sounds like a slightly more likely scenario than the one of the rolling machine being shipped direct from England since India already had a heavy machinery industry by the end of the 19th Century and a Scot, William Jackson who had gone out to India to work alongside his brother, the then manager of Scottish Assam Tea Co. and had invented a rolling machine some time in the 1870s.*+

Gateway to old town Sha Dian

On a subsequent visit to Thailand I also made a trip up to Mae Sai, north of Chiang Rai on the Myanmar border where Bai Meng Yu’s sister lived, and where he spent the rest of his life. His gravestone is in a small Muslim section of a cemetery on the south edge of the town

* The earliest tea rolling machines still in use in Darjeeling were manufactured around the 1850s so those, it seems, were shipped from the UK.

+ In a newer edition of Puer Cha Ji by Lei Ping Yang, it states that the machinery, or at least, the rolling machine was shipped from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Yangon (Rangoon), and from there via Kyaing Tung to Da Luo and then Nan Nuo Shan

Previous posts on Bai Meng Yu and Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory:

Yunnan 'Dian Hong' (Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory)
Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory Revisited

Tea House Talk: ‘Gu Fa’

I was riding through a village when I realised I was almost out of petrol. I stopped and went into a house to ask where in the village I could buy some. (There’s pretty much always someone in a village who will sell you a bottle of petrol. Usually 1.5 liter old mineral water bottles). They were in the back drinking tea and also had some fresh leaves wilting on a bo ji nearby. The tea they gave me reminded me a little of a Darjeeling type tea. ‘hong cha‘ I commented. ‘No’ they said, ‘这是古法！’ This is Gu Fa!

What the heck is ‘Gu Fa’? I wondered. They explained the process to me: fresh leaves are wilted (for maybe 12-13 hours) then the tea is lightly rolled after which it’s put out to dry in the sun. No sha qing.

The proposition is that in ‘ancient times’, whenever they were, lao bai xing may well not have had access to a wok to fire tea in and would have found some other way to process tea to their liking.

A year or two before that I had been introduced to some tea folks in Menghai. The lao ban described a similar process to me. He too maintained that this would have been how local tea was made in the past. He reckoned he had several tons of it stashed away waiting for the day when it was aged enough to pull it out and sell.

Quite some time later while having a discussion with a friend about it, he told me he’d read something online on the same topic in which it was proposed that the term ‘sheng cha/raw tea’ was originally used for a tea that was made more or less in the same manor as the contemporary ‘gu fa’, i.e. not fired/’cooked’, and that ‘shu cha/cooked tea’ was used to refer to tea that was pan fired, somehow in the same way that sheng cha is now made.

Gu Fa sounds like a marketing gimmick, but the idea is not that outlandish, and the tea is actually pretty nice. It’s not Puer, and it’s not really bai cha. It’s something else. With some qualities similar to a lightly fermented black tea.

‘Wu Long’ Puer. Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

A while back I saw the term ‘Wu Long’ Puer recently re-appeared on the English language internet, so I thought it worth revisiting this old topic as it comes up from time to time. I’m not sure when was the first time it was raised on the internet but I remember seeing something from maybe 2005 or 06. It seemed like it could be an appropriate coda to my previous post about processing tea and the implications for ageing.

To be clear, this is an English language term with, as far as I know, no Chinese equivalent. So it’s describing something which is described in a different way in Chinese. The idea seemed to be formulated from the perception that there was a new style of Puer tea that had been oxidised in a way that a ‘traditional’ Sheng Puer wasn’t.

The suggestion was that the tea had been rolled more (more heavily/longer?) with the effect that the tea flavour steeped out much more quickly and the tea had qualities which were reminiscent of Wulong tea.

My guess at this point is that that’s a misunderstanding. I think it’s not likely to have the effect that some folks have suggested. Rolling more heavily, rolling twice, etc. are not new, and whilst, of course, bruising the leaves more is going to break down more of the cell walls and may well result in more oxidation, I somehow doubt it would produce the effect talked about.

If anything, over the last ten years or so, there has been a trend toward lighter rolling, 抛跳/pao tiao, rather than tighter, originally driven, it seems, by Taiwanese demand. People coming to Yunnan and demanding tea that was rolled in a way that they thought looked better. Some tea farmers have told me that Taiwanese customers wanted them to roll straight – backwards and forwards – as opposed to a circular motion to create rolled leaves that were more needle shaped. Less twisted. This is not standard Puer fare. Traditionally, if anything, people rolled tea more tightly pre 2000s, so this doesn’t easily fit with the proposition that post 2000s Puer was rolled more, creating an ‘Wu Long’ type flavour/aroma.

At least, if additional or heavier rolling is a factor, it’s more likely that any extra rolling in tandem with other factors produced the result talked about. Sure, it’s difficult, I haven’t drunk the tea that someone else drank that made them think it had been ‘wulonged’, but the variables in tea making are not infinite.

Another factor with heavier rolling is that the flavours will be steeped out more quickly, so the tea will be less ‘nai pao’ / 耐泡 and the flavour in the early steeps more intense. This is also another reason why there has been a trend to lighter rolling: to make early steeps less intense and to have the tea steep more slowly.

Of course, if other things are done in the processing of Puer, to reduce bitterness and astringency for example, then heavier rolling is not going to produce such a marked effect, and the tea will generally have poorer structure, and steepability.

The only time I have heard a term in Chinese which I would say is referring to the same thing was many years ago when someone referred to a raw Puer as ‘fa jiao cha’/发酵茶/fermented tea. As now, the understanding was that it was tea that had been processed in such a way as to cause it to ferment in a way similar to other types of fermented tea: Wu Long, black tea, etc. and not proper Puer processing.

But even fairly excessive wilting – with autumn tea this is not that uncommon, where the tea is picked in the afternoon and then left overnight to be fired early the next morning – if the tea leaves are piled at a correct depth, it will not on its own produce an ‘Wu Long’ kind of fermentation. So it seems that it’s more likely a combination of factors of which excessive wilting may be a part.

One thing that can cause a light ‘fermented’ aroma is if the sha qing is not done well, or a combination of tan qing and sha qing are not managed properly, which can result in the stems of the tea leaves, which typically have more moisture in them, not being ‘fired’ properly, and enzyme activity not being arrested sufficiently. The result being that once the tea comes out of the pan it continues to ferment, producing an aroma in the dry tea that is reminiscent of a fermented tea -‘hong shu wei/红薯味/sweet potato taste, as some people call it. Personally, I wouldn’t think it was similar to Wulong, but who knows.

‘King of Tea Trees’ A Sequel

I don’t recall, a decade or so ago anyone much thought of picking tea from single trees. ‘单株/dan zhu’. It’s a thing that started in the last few years. Perhaps as Puer tea has become more expensive and as tea drinkers have been exploring the world of Puer more deeply. I guess it’s also a marketing thing: selling exclusivity. But since every ancient tea tree is unique, there is some logic to it also: even trees in the same tea garden can be quite different. Sometimes there can be a number of sub-varieties or forms of sinensis assamica growing next to each other: one more bitter, another sweeter. It’s done with larger, older trees where a single tree might only flush once a year in Spring, and may typically yield say five to ten kilos of fresh tea, which might produce a couple of kilos at most of maocha.

Xishuangbanna, Menghai Ancient tea tree No 46.

A few weeks back a tea farmer friend took me to see a tea tree which is clearly quite old: the girth at the base is probably getting on for 100cm and the trees branches cover an area of at least 10㎡, helped by the fact that it must have been polarded a long time ago. Let’s say it’s six to eight hundred years old, judging by other trees in the vicinity that are of known age.

‘Have you drunk tea from this tree?’ I asked. He hadn’t, but a few days later he called me up. ‘I’ve got some.’ he said. ‘Some what?’ I asked. ‘Some tea from that tree.’

I was busy and It was nearly a month before I managed to get round to visiting him. When I did I was expecting the tea to be long gone, but he’d kept it.

The fragrance is excellent, with floral qualities and a hint of something I can’t put my finger on – vaguely citrus. The broth is rather fine, certainly compared to ‘da zhong huo‘ from the area. It has a very slight bitterness and good ‘hou yun’. The broth is clear and a little viscous. Apart from a very slight feeling on the tip of the tongue, which is frankly not enough to detract from its attributes, its really a very nice tea. I brought a handfull back to drink with some friends who at first thought it was a Xiang Ming xiao ye zhong tea. Not at all like the Menghai tea that it is.

The processing looks like it was pretty good. Very even and no red stems.

Yunnan 'Dian Hong' (Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory)

nan nuo shan cha chang

Nan Nuo Shan Cha Chang. The building on the right was one of the earlier to be built. The building lower down came later.

Hui People have a long history in Yunnan; associated with trade (hence tea),  government and rebellion. From as early as the 8th century they dominated the trade routes throughout Yunnan and beyond.

During the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (1280-1644) they settled widely throughout the province, some moving into positions of power, but by the 19th Century (Qing Dynasty), conflict with Han Chinese saw many move into Burma (Myanmar). Under Du Wen Xiu – they established a Caliphate in Dali, only to be overthrown by the Han some years later. Important Hui settlements were established further south, particularly around Tong Hai and Jian Shui. In Xishuangbanna, Menghai had an early sizeable Hui population.

Bai Liang Cheng, know locally as Meng Yu was one such Yunnanese Hui man. He was born in 1893, attended a private school and, subsequently Yunnan School of Politics and Law.

By his late 30’s, Bai Meng Yu had been asked to become the head of the provincial government (under then Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai Shek), a post he declined, having no interest in politics. He was then appointed to work at Mo Hei Salt Works as an insurance officer, where he worked for two years or so.

In 1932 he was transferred to Puer Department of Taxation. In the course of work he travelled extensively throughout the region, visiting Fuhai (now Meng hai) Mengzhe, etc.

His interest in the area grew and he became intent on seeing the region develop economically. It was allegedly on these trips that he had the idea of setting up a tea factory: an idea he is said to have mooted to Liu Chong Ren, the then head of Yunnan Department of Finance, who had considerable faith in Bai, and endorsed the plan.

On the basis of this he travelled extensively throughout China to understand more about the tea market. Central to his plan was the idea of creating a modern, highly mechanised factory and, to this end he also visited Japan to learn about tea making.

On his return, he proposed his plan to the provincial government but, according to details from the time, the initial response was that the government ‘..would solely rely on taxes for revenue and not “eat the food off the beards of ordinary people”, and only in this way would a healthy, diversified economy develop.’

By the end of 1937 however, Liu had given his agreement to the establishment in Nan Qiao, Mengzhe of an experimental tea factory. It was to be called Yunnan Si Pu District Experimental Tea Factory. Bai Meng Yu was to be in charge.

In early 1938 the first stage was completed. Subsequently Bai was responsible for the planting of more than 100 mu of tea gardens in Nan Qiao.

Nan Nuo Shan, not far from Fuhai, where there were already extensive tea gardens was the site of the second phase. In April of that year the second factory was completed at Shi Tou Zhai in Nan Nuo Shan. Said by some to have been the most modern tea factory of it’s time, it was fitted with equipment from England that arrived 6 months later having been hauled by bullock cart from Rangoon in Burma (Myanmar) up to Kyaintong in Shan State and from there across the border to Daluo and on to Menghai (another version of the story says that Bai Meng Yu had visted India in his prepaparations for the factory and that the equipment was shipped from there). Ovens, cutting machines, rolling machines, a generator. All that was needed to set up a modern tea factory were installed in the factory that covered an area of 500 square metres.

The factory at that stage had 17 rooms including cutting, drying, rolling and sorting rooms. By the end of 1938 the factory was ready. It was called Yunnan Si Pu Enterprise Bureau Nan Nuo Shan Experimental Tea Factory. Having previously surveyed the market, Bai Meng Yu had already set his expectations high – the factory was to produce high quality black and green tea.

By March 1939 Nan Nuo Shan tea Factory had already produced it’s first black and green tea.

Another man, Fan He Jun was not far behind him. He was setting up another factory in Fuhai (present day Menghai) to be called Fuhai Tea Factory. This was to later become the now ubiquitous Menghai Tea Factory but Bai Meng Yu was a good 6 months ahead of them.

At the same time in Lincang, Feng Qing Tea Factory was being developed and there is some debate about which factory was the first to start production and claim the accolade of pioneering Yunnan Dian Hong.*

In the same year, the government introduced measures to control tea exports, which is said to have given the Nan Nuo Shan factory some trouble, but Bai Meng Yu approached Fan at Fuhai Tea Factory and the two co-operated for a time to produce Dian Hong.

One of the main activities of the factory at this stage was to distribute funds to farmers for an extensive planting programme. The approach was to use high quality, domestic stock for planting tea bushes following modern scientific methods. Bai oversaw the planting in Nan Nuo Shan of over 100 thousand mu (66,000 hectares) of tea bushes.

In 1941 the factory went into production, attracting a lot of interest from other in the industry. That year they made 2000 dan of tea (a dan is a pole and two baskets that is traditionally used throughout Asia to carry goods, but here refers to a unit of weight – 50kg. i.e. 100 tonnes in total).

In order to move further into the export market, the factory concentrated on black tea, and Bai Meng Yu recruited the help of a number of famous tea masters from Shanghai and Hangzhou. The factory made black tea of excellent quality following stringent guidelines: (allegedly) only when there was dew could the farmers pick tea, they had to keep the leaves in the shade, ba jiao (a variety of small banana whose leaves are used traditionally for wrapping food) leaves were used to line the baskets and farmers were prevented from overfilling or stuffing the baskets.

At this stage, they were relying on the old tea tree gardens on Nan Nuo Shan for their supply source and there was a high demand that they were apparently unable to meet. At this time, black tea was Yunnan’s single biggest export.

By the early ’40’s, business was badly disrupted by the war in South East Asia. The Japanese army was in Burma and the route to SE Asia had been bombed and was closed. Production at Nan Nuo Shan stopped.

In November 1942 the Japanese army were near Daluo (in Menghai County). Fuhai Tea Factory moved all it’s technical personnel to Chongqing, but Bai stayed in Xishuangbanna. The workers who had stayed at the Nan Nuo Shan Factory formed a civil defense force and fought alongside the Guo Min Dang (KMT) 93rd Army to push the Japanese out of Daluo.

Nan Nuo Shan 'Er Chang' tea gardens

In the foreground is the site of the second Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory. All that is left are a few bricks.

After the end of the war in 1946 Nan Nuo Shan quickly went back into production and took over some Fuhai resources as they had not yet returned to the factory. For the next two years they made tea non-stop. Bai Meng Yu also set about building a second facility near Xiang Yang Zhai. Planting and research on different varieties of tea tree also continued. Bai’s eldest son, Bai Bing Cong, who had just graduated from Fudan University joined his father in Nan Nuo Shan.

By the end of 1948, the political landscape was shifting: The upper echelons of Yunnan Government were in a state of conflict. The former head of finance, Liu Chong Ren, had already left for Hong Kong and Si Pu Enterprise Bureau was without anyone in charge.

Bai had been in Nan Nuo Shan for 10 years and was reluctant to leave, but the situation was disintegrating rapidly. He decided to go to Burma and stay near the border, apparently hoping for an improvement in the situation that would allow him to return but, following the exhortations of people in Nan Qiao, Bai Meng Yu, along with a much larger exodus which later would include many retreating KMT soldiers, moved to Burma and then eventually northern Thailand where there had for centuries been a sizeable Hui population. He lived in Chiang Mai (and then Mei Sai) till his death in August 1965.

Little seems to be known about his later years, and the man who played a key role in the creation of Yunnan ‘Dian Hong’ Black tea, and also in creating an, albeit embryonic, modern tea industry in the province, has become little more than a footnote to Yunnan’s ancient, but ever evolving tea history.

Subsequently, the equipment from Nan Nuo Shan was taken over by Fuhai, and the tea gardens near ‘Er Chang’ (No 2 Factory) were put in the hands of Yunnan Tea Research Institute, though in practice the gardens are left to local people to pick.

Little is left. The people are all gone except for one elderly Hui man who worked at the factory as a youngster, married a local Aini woman and remained.

The Shi Tou Zhai factory is dilapidated, with apparently no interest in preserving it. The second factory – a more modest set of workshops – has been raised, and all that is left are a few bricks. What does remain there however, on this picturesque low hill in the shadow of Nan Nuo Shan, is a sizeable, now 70 year old tea garden. A legacy of Bai Meng Yu.

Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory 'Er Chang' tea gardens

Looking back down the hill. The tea gardens that were planted by Bai Meng Yu and Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory are on both sides.

*Dian is the old name for Yunnan. Hong means red. Chinese people refer to Black tea as Red tea

See here for a subsequent posts:

Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory Revisited

Nan Nuo Shan Cha Chang (a sequel of sorts)