Category Archives: Tea

Autumn – Nan Nuo Shan

I’ve been to Nan Nuo Shan more times than I care to imagine so I guess I feel like I know it fairly well and I had pretty much given up on the idea that I might find a tea garden there that was not over-managed, but this Spring on a spur of the moment decision I decided to do some exploring whilst I was unaccompanied. It was fortuitous since I found my way into some tea gardens that are part of Ban Po Lao Zhai, but that I had not visited before. There was one area of the tea gardens that particularly interested me and a second area which also looked good. The garden’s on one of the higher parts of Nan Nuo Shan, at a hair under 1800m, and the surrounding environment is surprisingly good. It’s a tea that turned out to be one of the pleasant surprises of this year.

After a rather sedentary summer, I went again to Nan Nuo Shan a day or two ago , this time with some friends. We visited some tea gardens that are part of Shi Tou Zhai, but lower down the mountain at a height of around 1400m, so not that high, but good enough. Some of the gardens here are managed with a slightly heavy hand but some, higher up the slope, toward the top of a ridge are better. Quite a few of the trees here have been copiced at some time and there are also quite a few smaller trees in amongst the larger ones. Some of these are clearly trees which were cut, or burned right back to the ground, but others look like they came later, naturally or otherwise. The environment around the gardens is quite good. My friend says he tasted some tea from here in the summer and that it was not bad so he’s toying with getting some Autumn tea from here this year. So, let’s wait and see. The gardens looked OK, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Some Old Tea Tree Gardens (and some lessons on transliteration)

Last week, I had a few days’ trip in the SFTM area. The weather was good – dry, warm in the day, cool at night – and I got to re-visit some places and also go to a couple of new places.

I’ve been trying to get to Ma Pia (吗叭/ma ba in Chinese) for a couple of years. I think it was the autumn before last, I was with some friends in Ding Jia Zhai who had just come back from Ma Pia with some tea. One of them had a couple of pictures on his mobile phone. The tea wasn’t up to much – there were some problems with processing – but the trees looked interesting.

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Spring Tea

Another really dry spring, though it looks like it’s going to rain this weekend. Tea prices have gone up anything from 25 to 50%. Earlier in the spring, people were saying that Dayi and Cheng Shen Hao were going round pre-ordering tea which ratcheted up the price, but then, as some others commented, they’re not necessarily willing to pay top whack, and there are plenty of tea farmers who have solid customers who they don’t want to blow off anyway.

One tea farmer was telling me yesterday that, in their village at least, it was an increase in folks from Guangdong that was pushing up prices. That may be maligning Guangdongers, there’s always been plenty of Guangdong people coming buying tea. In any case, the village has seen a fifty percent increase on the price of fresh leaves since last year, and over the last three days, it’s gone up 10 yuan a day. The weather, as always is also a factor: very dry, not so much tea. After it rains, there will be lots more, but then there’s at least a few days after the rain where it won’t be worth having if anyone picks it.

HM came back from Ge Lang He saying Pasha was full of folks from Ban Zhang buying tea – draw your own conclusions. BHT fresh leaves are around 750-800 yuan a kilo, which means prices around 3000 a kilo and the rest of Wan Gong not much less. Walong is still about half that. So here are a couple of pictures to be going on with:

Wa Long is a little like Man Lin or somewhere like that where, at slightly lower elevations, it’s surrounded by rubber, but right round the village, and the tea gardens, the environment is surprisingly intact.

Here are a couple of trees right near the village, but most old trees are in the forest above the village.

Coming up from the Xiang Ming road, one first gets to Wa Long Lao Jia, and from there you run along the mountain ridge to Walong. From the road between the two villages one can see Gedeng.

Lao Ban Zhang gets a Bank

The stories of Ban Zhang’s mercurial rise are two a penny, but here’s some concrete proof of the shift in the villages fortunes. A friend of mine was up there a couple of weeks ago and came back with the news that a bank has been opened in the village.

Yunnan Agricultural Credit Co-operative has set up a branch, replete with ATM, in Lao Ban Zhang – it must be the first mountain tea village in ‘Banna to get one. It opened for business on the 25th November.

From China Puer Tea website. See link below for related article and pictures

Read the original article on China Puer Tea website.

My friend Xiao Liu commented wryly that now no-one can use the excuse that they didn’t bring enough cash for not buying tea.

Roundup

After writing this post, I deliberated for some time on whether to post it or not. It’s not such happy reading, but in the end I’ve decided to go ahead. With ‘Publish and be damned!’ ringing in my ears, here it is:

“It stays in the soil for fifty years” he declared, which sounded a little implausible given that Glyphosate was invented in 1970 and has been commercially available less time than that. But it’s possible.

It was the tail end of summer and I was on a few days trip near the Lao border, going up the county road which runs from Meng Xing up to Jiang Cheng, and heading off into the mountains on the east side: Tong Qing He, Bai Sha He, Bai Cha Yuan, Wan Gong, Yang Jia Zhai, Yi Shan Mo, Zhang Jia Wan, Jiu Miao, and so on – and had bumped into a tea lao ban on the road. We were discussing the use of Glyphosate, or cao gan lin.

At the other end of the spectrum is the kind of hyperbole Monsanto pedals, even in the face of almost overwhelming research to the contrary, insisting that Roundup is as safe as mothers’ milk, or words to that effect. “Roundup.. agricultural herbicides continue to be a perfect fit with the vision of sustainable agriculture and environmental protection.” they say. That’s some pretty tall cotton too.

The feaces really hit the fan in 2000 when the patent expired: Monsanto dropped the price in order to stave off competition and there was a consummately large increase in sales although truth be told, Cao Gan Lin was widely available in China much earlier than that, made under license or not. (Recently the government has made attempts to reduce the huge over-supply of Chinese Glyphosate.)

Touted as ‘the most widely used herbicide in the world’ its use is extremely pervasive and has wide implications for users and consumers. I have no need to catalogue the research, one just has to search online, or if you can’t be bothered with that, click on some of the links at the bottom of the post.

Not surprisingly, there are few tea farmers with old tree gardens who will readily admit to using it. Some will acknowledge that they used it in the past, but not anymore. Unfortunately, evidence of it is quite widespread.

As Tea Urchin commented some time back, the presence of spraying equipment doesn’t have to sound the death knell, but when it’s in remote tea fields, unless they happen to have been growing some corn or something nearby, there’s not really any other reason they would have had the equipment there.

I was exploring some areas off the S218. One day, we had been walking in forest for an hour or so, crossing a stream in our path, we saw this:

If you can’t see clearly enough in the photo, it’s bags of Glyphosate.

Where there is a ready supply of water, this is a relatively easy method of clearing weeds. In this case it was done in a cleared forest area in order to plant some tea seedlings, so this does not necessarily mean that old tea trees are being treated the in the same way, but it is unfortunate evidence to come across in what should be pristine forest.

Most tea farmers have now have got strimmers to keep the weeds down, but it’s hard work and needs to be done two, or even three times a year to keep the weeds at bay. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that even in areas where farmers have to go by motorbike and on foot for up to a couple of hours to get to their tea gardens it’s not sure to be trouble free. It’s fairly common, in the small gazebos that most farmers have in their tea fields, to find spraying equipment.

I’m trying to resist being drawn to the conclusion that the more remote the area, the more likely the tea farmers are to have used chemicals on their tea gardens, but there are reasons why that could be the case.

Lao Feng (Mr Feng to you) once said to me you only had to look at all the queues of farmers waiting in hospitals to realise how widespread the use of agro-chemicals was and how injurious the effect.

It’s not that simple: farmers now all have health insurance, and western medicine particularly seems to be viewed as a panacea. (It’s common for people to go to a hospital or clinic for intravenous drug treatment for such things as a common cold.) So the preponderance of country folks in city hospitals cannot be construed necessarily as an indicator of their poor health, triggered by profligate or irresponsible agro-chemical use.

Having said that, the concerns are legitimate and I know people who believe that drinking water in rural areas is often affected to the extent that one could not sample tea in a village using their own water and be clear about whether any chemicals present were from the tea or the water, or both.

A Zhang Jia Wan tea farmer said to me a while back, “In 2005 we all used it, then we realised it was not good and haven’t used it since.” But it’s anecdotal. It’s not ‘everyone’. It’s a pointer that when sourcing tea one must be ever vigilant, and looking can only tell you so much.

The half life of Glyphosate in soil varies and is said to be as short as a few days and as long as half a year. What that means is that it could be ‘gone’ in a few months or there could still be small amounts in the soil a few years later. Residue in the plant is another issue.

Tea shop lore is that the year it is sprayed (typically in the winter months), Roundup may not be that obvious in tea, and is most noticeable in crops two years later, from when on it diminishes.

More recent research has shown that some of the so called inactive ingredients in Roundup are also harmful, meaning that the mix of chemicals is potentially more harmful than Glyphosate alone. (see links below)

So what to do about it?

For a couple of thousand yuan you can go to the government quality assurance office (zhi liang jian du ju) and give them a kilo of tea that they will test for all manner of things: DDT, Bifenthrin, Chlorpyrifos and so on, along with caffeine, theine, etc. But no Glyphosate. I once asked them at the local offices why. ‘Because cao gan lin is not on our list of permitted agro-chemicals’ they said.

It’s a fine logic – why would you bother to test for something that was not permitted? What’s much more bothersome is that if you check with all the big testing companies present in Asia (mostly western), none of them routinely test for Glyphosate as any part of their standard testing packages. It can be done, but you pay for it. It would be tempting to begin to see it as some kind of wider issue that a conspiracy theorist might have fun with, but a more measured view is that there is no straightforward, affordable methodology for testing for it.

So testing is not much of a solution. One has to rely on ones own accumen to detect it. The indicators have been well catalogued: tingling on the tip of the tongue or inner lips, or sometimes a slight numbing, puffy feeling, a prickly, dry feeling in the throat, and so on. Whether any and all of these are attributable to Glyphosate is a moot point. There could be many reasons a tea can produce these kind of sensations, and not all chemical, but it is a warning sign to be heeded.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/25/roundup-health-study-idUSL2N0DC22F20130425
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/07/30/glyphosate-toxicity.aspx
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/10/23/glyphosate-found-in-human-urine.aspx

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Why_Glyphosate_Should_be_Banned.php

http://www.pan-uk.org/pestnews/Actives/glyphosa.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Glyphosate

http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/market-insight-print.pag?docid=JEVS-5N2CZG

http://www.icis.com/Articles/2000/12/11/128125/us-patent-expiry-of-roundup-creates-uncertainty-in-glyphosates.html

http://www.beyondpesticides.org/infoservices/pesticidefactsheets/toxic/glyphosate.php

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=weed-whacking-herbicide-p

Lao Huang Pian

I was around Ge Deng somewhere drinking tea with Chen Lao Ban (Guangdong Chen) when a tea farmer brought a bag of tea he had made for him. Chen Lao Ban makes his own tea and also has some local people make tea. There wasn’t much, no more than three kilos. He looked in the bag, looked up and asked “Where are the huang pian?” “You complained about them last year” the farmer said, “so this year I took them out.” Chen Lao Ban, looked up, shaking his head in disbelief, but said nothing.

Bada Shan Autumn 2012 Lao Huang Pian

Such is the story of huang pian, or yellow leaves, sometimes called ‘lao huang pian’.

As indicated in the previous post on the causes of bitterness and sweetness in tea, it is the older leaves that are sweeter.

Tea farmers: Aini, Bulang, Jinuo, etc, would not traditionally use young leaves to drink themselves. They use the sweeter ‘lao ye’, which they brew up in a kettle – traditionally in a bamboo tube – maybe having baked the leaves first.

For them, younger leaves, and all the tea brewing paraphernalia, is a Han Chinese thing which is alien to them. Many a tea farmer will tell you that when they were young, they never had a gaiwan or bowls. It is something they have now, rather as part and parcel of doing business.

If tea is growing quickly, the leaves, even including the fourth leaf are supple, pliable, and will not produce huang pian. When tea is growing more slowly, or has been left longer before picking, the lower leaves become less pliable, and if they are picked, will make huang pian. These leaves will not be made more supple by time or the frying processes, and remain un-rollable.

Ideas about huang pian in Puer tea change. From an appearance point of view, they are less desirable, but from a flavour point of view they are fine, and in small number, will not be detremental to the flavour; bringing a little extra sweetness.

The practice of picking them out is to please the customer who is primarily concerned with appearance. In Spring tea there should never be many. Autumn tea has more, and summer tea the most.

If the tea leaves are picked well and there are are few huang pian, the farmer can pick most of them out when they are firing the tea. When there are more, the laboriuos job of picking them out of the mao cha has to be done. The benefit is that they then become a ‘product’ in their own right.

Too many huang pian will lower the value of the tea, but most tea producers are happy to see some in their mao cha, which they can then decide to leave in or pick out and sell separately.

At Zhi Zheng, as there are generally very few huang pian in our mao cha after it has been dried, we prefer to leave them in the cakes rather than pick them out.

Tea Shop Lore

There’s a bit of tea shop lore that says ” 一苦，二涩，三回甜/Yi ku, er si, san hui tian.” So ‘The first leaf is bitter, the second astringent, the third sweet.’

It seems like it’s true, but I was recently wondering if there was any scientific evidence to back it up. I was thumbing through a book I picked up a couple of years ago and found a discussion on the topic.*

Table of the variation in quantity of flavour producing compounds in same branch, different position leaves

Across the top of the table – is the leaf position: i.e. 1st leaf, 2nd leaf etc. with old leaves (lao ye) and (nen jing) supple stems at the right.

Down the left hand side are: dissolvable solids (水浸出物), polyphenols (茶多酚), catechins (儿茶素), caffeine (咖啡碱), amino acids (氨基酸) and water soluble sugars/pectin (水溶性果胶).

What the table shows is that polyphenols are highest in the first few leaves. The catechins are also highest in the 1st to 3rd leaves, caffeine is likewise highest in leaves 1-3, as are the amino acids.

If I might paraphrase, the author says “….Where the catechin and caffeine content in tea is relatively high, the liquor is full and refreshing, and is an indicator of high quality tea.

On a tea branch the level of polyphenols, caffeine, etc. is determined by the position of the leaf. The younger leaves have higher amounts of these bitter substances than older leaves, especially the first and second leaves after the bud. From there the levels of polyphenols, caffeine, etc, reduce.

Substances that cause astringence in tea are polyphenols, aldehydes, iron, and other compounds, of which catechins are particularly important.

The bitterness and astringency of ester type catechins (EGCG, ECG) is particularly strong. The content of these in the tip and first leaves is much higher than in older leaves.

Under normal circumstances, plucking a bud and one to two leaves will produce a tea with a much more bitter flavour than plucking three or four leaves. So, better quality tea that is picked more finely has a more bitter taste. It is also what makes poor quality tea taste relatively weak.”

The second table also has the same leaf position along the top, with theanine (茶氨酸), reduced sugars (还原糖), sugars/sucrose (蔗糖), and starch (淀粉) down the side.

What the second table shows is that the theanine is predominantly in the first and second leaf – with most in the young stems, reduced sugars and sucrose are predominantly in the 3rd and 4th, and older leaves (lao ye). Starch is markedly higher in the 3rd leaf.

Again, to paraphrase;

“There are three types of substances that produce a sweet flavour in tea:

1. Free monosaccharides and oligosaccharides such as: glucose,
galactose, fructose, rhamnose, maltose, sucrose, etc. which are the main compounds producing sweetness in tea.

2. Dissociative amino acids, such as: glycine, alanine, serine, threonine, proline and hydroxyl groups and those formed during tea processing: leucine, isoleucine, tryptophan, tyrosine acid, bitter alanine, methionine and valine.

3. Synthetic intermediates of catechins and dihydrochalcones and their derivatives and products of coumarin isomerization, etc.

The substances that cause sweetness in tea are more plentiful in spring and autumn tea, its taste is sweeter,richer with less bitterness and astringence, which makes it better than summer tea.

So looking at different leaves on the same branch, sucrose, sugars, etc, sweet substances are more abundant in old leaves than young leaves, and gradually increase with the age of the leaf.”

*Taken from ‘Deciphering Puer’ by Xu Ya He, published in 2006 by Yunnan Publishing Company/Yunnan Fine Arts Publishing.

** L theanine is believed to contribute to the ‘unami’ or brothy flavour of tea and is said to counter bitterness, as well as being attributed with other psychotropic effects, caused by raising levels of GABA Gamma-aminobutyric acid and dopamine.

Hand Made Paper from Man Zhao – Correction

For the last few years I’ve been under the misaprehension that the paper made in Man Zhao outside Meng Hun, the hand-made paper which is used widely for wrapping puer tea, was made from the bark of the Mulberry tree. I was wrong.

The bark now rarely comes from local sources as there are insufficient trees to support the village industry, so most of it is imported from neighbours: Thailand, Myanmar, Laos. It’s called gou pi shu locally – which I somewhat predictably assumed was ‘dog skin’ tree – it is in fact 构树/gou shu, Paper Mulberry, broussonetia papyrifera.

I could perhaps be forgiven as the leaves do look a little similar.

There are a number of photos here

And some links here:

efloras.com

Wikipedia

Kew.org

The Map is Not The Territory

Download the USGS dataset for this region, and you’ll find yourself staring at something that looks like the skin on a Sharpei.

Because it’s a big file and takes some time to download, I have edited a small section and added a couple of major towns for reference. The purple dot in the middle, with no name, is Jinghong, on the banks of the Mekong.

Google Earth is useful for similar reasons, as one can get a good idea of the topography of the area.

For the likes of Google however, Xishuangbanna is undoubtedly a cartographic backwater: some of the images are years out of date.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the last two years pawing over Google maps, and the less popular Microsoft Maps (now Bing).

It would be an exaggeration to say that oxbow lakes have formed since Google updated some of its images, but it’s close: rivers have certainly changed their courses, villages have disappeared, highways have been built: the main highway from Jinghong to the Lao border, which was finished soon after I first came here seven years ago, is still not on the satellite images.

A while back, I was with a friend in the mountains, and we were identifying villages as we went. I asked a couple of times about a village I had seen on Google satellite images, but my friend was insistent that no such village existed. On arriving back home I compared Google and Bing images. In the former photo there was a village, in the latter, no village. The entire village had moved and been razed. My friend had no recollection of the village, but it was surely there some years ago.

This particular image was updated at the beginning of March 2013. The previous image was from 2001. A lot can happen in twelve years.

Google Earth image. Puxi Lao Zhai. Dated January 2001

What’s good about this is that Google provides an historical reference. Many roads have been built or changed and villages moved in the last decade, and many of Google’s images of this area date from 2001/2.

Google Earth image. Puxi Lao Zhai. Dated March 2013

Bing generally has better resolution pictures, and is more up to date, but it’s good to reference them both for comparison – not least because of cloud cover, as in the image above. The resolution on recent Google images is much better than earlier photographs: older images can often look like this:

Me Yang – Google

Rather than this:

Me Yang – Bing

So a caveat for Puer drinkers who are inclined to spend hours on Google or Bing trying to find exactly where their favourite tea comes from. Amazing as Google and Bing are – who would have imagined ten years ago that this kind of information would be freely available – they have their limitations.

Early Spring Tea

Well, the hoopla of early Spring tea is done. Yet another round of price increases with plenty of exaggeration thrown in for good measure. Ban Zhang xiao shu for 3,800/kg, Man Song for 4000 to 6000 a kilo depending on who you are and who you talk to, Bing Dao for seven or eight thousand.

HM’s riff is that sheng cha has not yet reached it’s ceiling and that compared with Long Jin et al. it’s still very fairly priced. He is certainly not averse to paying top price for what he believes to be top grade tea, so I was surprised to hear him voice the idea that this year’s Bing Dao was not worth that much.

Zhi Beng ancient tea tree gardens

The rain early on in the year brought the first flush sooner than has been the case in the last few years, but then the tea was thinner in flavour. After the third week of March things improved, so there was a relatively brief window of time when the tea was good, and then it was Ching Ming Jie which, according to Han tea culture, signals the end of early Spring tea. Of course, it works as a rule of thumb for the most part, but there are always exceptions. Many tea farmers will try and tell you that in any case, the second flush is better than the first, but nobody much believes them.

In fact, it might make more sense to consider the lunar calendar rather than the solar – on which Qing Ming Jie is based – when picking tea, and by which it seems like harvesting might best be done on a waning moon.

Tea from more bei yin tea gardens have, to my mind at least, produced more interesting tea. Though this is not the case everywhere. The weather of the previous two or three years was in a sense an aberration and it is perhaps good that it has not continued. Though the current situation is also cause for concern.

Looking across to Mi Bu

Since the February rain, nothing. Hardly a drop in most places. So the second flush has not yet shown itself in many areas, though this is not universal. Many farmers reported a drop in gu shu yield this year, which is always good for helping to push up the price, but others reported above average harvests. Of course it’s not just the climate. There may well be other factors, like over-picking, that could bring about a drop in yield.

Sourcing good tea is not getting any easier: One needs to be paying attention, be resolute, have good contacts, have a good wad of money in one’s pocket, and some good luck too.

There was the usual flush of stories: like the sacks of tea in Gua Feng Zhai with last year’s gu hua cha stuffed in the bottom and some spring tea on top.

Near Ma Li Shu. The tree in the background with red flowers, but no leaves is a Kapok.

I was in one village, Ma Li Shu I think, when a tea farmer was lamenting the current situation: “These cha lao ban who only want tou chun tea. Whose going to buy the rest of the tea?” For them the trend of distinguishing between gu shu, da shu, xiao shu and first flush, second flush etc, is not particularly to their benefit. They perhaps feel that they need to be making significant sums of money on the first flush in order to offset the income from the rest of the season.

Certainly, the bigger producers, like the folks from Guangdong in Ya Nuo are good news for the villagers, as they will buy tea from all three seasons, so the farmers do not get stuck with tea that they have a hard time selling. This is a much more reliable income than picky tou-chunners who leave the farmer in a precarious position.

Looking across from Yang Lin. The mountains to the left of the valley are Ge Deng, to the right Man Zhuan

Horse's Mouth

Tea Tales from the South