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.
Several years ago I received an email from someone expressing some nervousness about buying young Puer tea because they were concerned about how it would age, which is fair enough, but then they said they were concerned they might purchase in error some ‘western boutique puer’. Since then I have been slowly trying to formulate a response.
It got my interest because I had never heard the term. I looked on line and the only reference I came up with was on ‘A Tea Addict’s Journal’ from a few years prior, also questioning the meaning of the term.
Since I’d never seen ’boutique’ being used as an adjective before I was curious and decided to check my Larousse. It’s a bit out of date, so I double-checked on-line to confirm my understanding, which is that in French, ’boutique’ simply means a shop. More often than not, selling expensive clothing and accessories, etc. predominantly aimed at women. Almost by definition small scale, as opposed to ‘les grands magasins‘. In English, the meaning is similar to the French: a small, specialised, and probably expensive, shop.
In French it’s only a noun. There are plenty of other words in French to describe what I guess the adjective ’boutique’ is trying to express in this case in English: chi chi, chic, bijou, mignon, maybe. What the shop sells is not ’boutique’ as in: ‘I bought a boutique little handbag in that shop in the Marais the other day‘.
The idea that something, for which one might create the adjective ’boutique’, would be inferior also doesn’t quite fit since ’boutique’ generally implies the opposite: quality. So it’s not a particularly good choice of word to denote something inferior, or even ‘fashionable’ (if implying that the object in question has a limited shelf-life. But, if we’re being sarcastic, why not?
My french friends, I supposed, could reasonably call their tea shop a ’boutique de thé’, if they wanted to peddle it’s smallness and class.
It’s another of those words like sommelier which has been purloined. Call me old fashioned, but I reckon there’s no such thing as a ‘tea sommelier‘ in French. A sommelier is a wine waiter/ress or wine steward. Nothing more, nothing less. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure what a ‘tea sommelier’s job might be: stocking teas and pairing them with food maybe?
So what, having got all that out of the way, is ‘western boutique Puer’ really referring to? I thought it might have made sense if it was referring to small scale, expensive Puer made for niche markets, or something. The author of the term seemed to think it referred to tea processed in such a way as to make the tea more accessible/appealing to Westerners, (although he seemed unsure exactly how that was done) but in so doing, the tea was somehow rendered unsuitable for ageing,
That’s not a new idea. In Chinese people refer to ‘市场茶/shi chang cha‘. Tea that is made ‘for the market’, i.e. made to be sold and drunk, not to be stored. But I find it hard to imagine that any Western tea makers/merchants would be doing that: intentionally producing tea that was not going to age well. I’m also not sure many people would go out of their way to do that with old or ancient tea tree tea. It doesn’t make much sense, particularly given the current cost of fresh tea leaves. Generally, tea from ancient or old tea gardens is already very drinkable but I guess folks might do it with bush tea. It could well happen unwittingly however.
The other thing I have trouble imagining is that any Chinese Puer producers would go out of their way to make tea specifically for a Western market, given the size of that market compared to the domestic one. But if there is someone somewhere doing that, then what are they doing?
Raw or ‘sheng’ Puer processing looks pretty straight forward: the leaves are picked, maybe spread out in the shade for some time, ‘fried’, rolled and then sun dried. It doesn’t look like rocket science. But within that process there are a whole bunch of factors that can be varied, intentionally or not, to produce different outcomes.
The basic variables are:
Leaves
Going into the wok most people would agree leaves should not be ‘over-wilted’, say, 2-4 hours tan qing time.*
Size
A larger wok is generally better, and maybe thicker. Say 90 -100cm diameter, Set at an angle on the oven for ease of use. Too small a wok means holds heat less well and the amount of tea that can be processed is small, so overall less consistent result.**
Amount
The ideal amount of fresh leaves to put into the wok at one time is mostly determined by the size of the wok, but say about 6kg in a 90-100cm wok) †
Temperature
The ideal temperature of the wok surface is probably around 250°C in the middle portion of the wok. It will be a little cooler toward the edges, but after firing a couple of woks of tea, it should be quite uniform. Most people will agree that the temperature of the wok needs to be quite high at the outset. The first few minutes is key. What happens after that is of some debate. ††
Handling
The method and speed of handling the leaves in the pan is the ‘art’ of firing tea. The leaves must be turned uniformly (relaxed and steady): inside out as well as top to bottom to avoid leaves in the middle being ‘steamed’ without coming into contact with the wok’s surface. Movement controls the speed at which the tea dries out and one must avoid tea leaves drying out before they are ‘cooked’. The leaves must be shaken out intermittently in the pan to help release moisture and help bring out the fragrance but must be done judiciously. (Too much shaking will dry the leaves more quickly).‡
Time
Depending on all of the above the length of frying time might be around 12-20 minutes.
Cooling
After the leaves are taken out of the wok they need to cool before rolling. This is generally done by shaking them out onto a bamboo mat or ‘bo ji’ and leaving them to cool after that. The contentious practice of putting the leaves in a heap when they’re still hot is discussed below.
The basic variables are listed above.
*Some people say best not to wilt at all. Others will tell you several hours is OK.
** In the last few years there has been a trend for thicker woks. Some folks are now saying that whilst they hold the heat better, they are less responsive to changes in temperature so maybe not ideal. Managing the fire under the wok is as important as master the frying of tea. There is room for a little leeway, but not too much.
† Personal choice is dictated to some extent by physical stature, strength etc. Once the leaves start to loose moisture in the pan they become rather more difficult to handle. This is when it becomes easy to burn them.
†† There are many different opinions about wok temperature but generally speaking, lots of people tend not to like tea that they say has been ‘men chao’d/闷炒 at lower temperature. There is however, in tandem with the handling of the leaves, a fairly broad range of acceptable-ness. In any case, the ultimate aim is to arrest enzyme activity without killing them off completely as it is the enzymes that are going to kickstart the ‘fermentation/oxidation’ process later.
‡ If you’ve seen any of those videos of folks frantically throwing leaves high up into the back of the pan, you know what it doesn’t look like.
There is, what I think most people would agree, a range of acceptable variations in processing factors listed above that are still detectable in a newly made tea, but after it’s been stored for some time are rather harder to perceive. A friend of mine reckons ‘In the first four years, you drink the craftsmanship, after that you drink the tea.’ A clumsy translation, but you get the idea: Initially, various aspects of the tea-making process might be more to the fore, but after say, ten years, they will have receded somewhat, and what you’re left with is the basic quality of the original material. So if it was good, and hasn’t been damaged in the processing or subsequent storage, it should still be good.
The two things that people new to Puer tea might be drawn in by are fragrance and sweetness, and they may have trouble with bitterness and astringency. There are a couple of things folks could be doing to augment the former and reduce the latter during processing. Currently there are three things that people might be doing which are arguably detrimental to the tea, but will help reduce bitterness and astringency and can make Puer tea more fragrant in the short-term.
Wilting. This is an old contention: Some people say that ‘wilting’ was never per-se part of Puer tea processing, but, whatever you call it, or whether you give it a name or not, it’s something that typically has happened (see here, and here). From when the leaves are picked to when they go in the wok, the time, and the way they were handled, can vary considerably.
The length of time is important. It could be anything from an hour to several hours. Everything, including the leaves themselves and the way they are handled during that time , the weather, the altitude, can affect the degree of wilting. There could be times when leaves are wilted more than is desirable because of factors largely outside the producers control, but for sure there are some producers who will deliberately wilt for a longer period with the aim of reducing the astringency and bitterness – generally at the customer’s request. Over the last 10 years or more wilting troughs have become more common. They are not native to Yunnan Puer tea making, but have been used in the production of green tea. They aren’t inherently evil. If leaves are put on a wilting platform rather than on a bamboo mat on the ground, air will pass under the leaves as well as over them so they will lose moisture more quickly. Hence, the time they are left like that should be shorter. Most wilting troughs are equipped with a fan at one end which when turned on will blow air into the tunnel underneath which will then be blown up through the leaves, thus increasing the rate of wilting. Some producers don’t use the fan, some do, some say they only use it with summer tea. So it’s something to watch out for. There’s really no need to use a fan with spring or autumn tea.
Tea that has been ‘over-wilted’ is probably fairly obvious; it can be quite smooth, fragrant and sweet, but in my experience, somehow lacks structure/backbone/body/vitality. It’s good to be vigilant in any situation, particularly where wilting troughs are present, simply because it’s probably easier to exceed an ideal resting time for fresh leaves before frying. If fresh leaves are put on bamboo mats on an earth or concrete floor, they’re not going to loose moisture very quickly, so an hour or two either side of ‘the ideal’ will probably not make too much difference. The supposed aim of the ‘tan qing‘ process is for the moisture content in the leaves to be reduced a little (typically said to be about 10%).
Frying. Frying times can also vary considerably. This again depends on the state of the leaves, the temperature/nature of the wok (material, size, thickness, age, etc.), and the desired outcome. For some years there have been producers who fry tea for longer periods, as much as 35 or 40 minutes, toward the end of the frying the temperature of the wok is reduced and the tea is alternately left in a pile in the wok for a minute maybe and then shaken out. The process is typically repeated several times. Some people will even begin rolling the tea whilst it’s still in the pan, so once it comes out it needs little if any rolling. The stated aim of this is to make sure that leaf stems are properly fried to reduce any redness that may otherwise occur once dry, but it can also elevate the fragrance and reduce astringency. It’s not to everybody’s taste, and I personally don’t like tea like that, even though it initially can seem quite palatable. It’s a style of frying that I was first aware of in the He kai-Ban Zhang area around 2008/2009 which seems to have spread to other areas, albeit on a limited scale. It would certainly make sense that frying for a longer period of time, even at reduced temperatures, is going to be detrimental to the tea, but to what extent and whether it renders it unworthy of drinking five or ten years down the line, I’m not sure.
At the other end of the ‘sha qing’/杀青 spectrum you have the theory that tea should be fried just enough to reduce the moisture content sufficiently (a typical test is to take a leaf and bend the stem. If it doesn’t break, the tea is ‘done’). So it could be as short as 10 or 12 minutes. The idea here is that you preserve as much as possible of the constituents in the leaf on the understanding that the flavour will be more fulsome and the tea will age better. One ‘rule of thumb’ that one hears is that tea should be fried until the first time the fragrance comes out. That is enough. The theory being you want to seal things in, not let them out.
Another contentious element that many people now consider as detrimental is ‘ti xiang’/提香/enhancing the fragrance. This is done by shaking out the leaves more towards the end of the frying, and doing it beyond what is necessary to release moisture. Because of this, the tea dries out rather more than it would ideally. The aim of this step is to increase the fragrance of the tea, but Puer tea is not typically very fragrant when it’s young. It is generally understood that with raw Puer the fragrance will improve as the tea ages, and any attempts in the processing to artificially augment the fragrance are in error because once the tea has dried out to that extent it will not age well.
Some people are rejecting the ‘hand fried’ approach and using a ‘gun tong’/滚筒, a rotating drum fryer with hot air being passed through it. The argument is that the tea can be fried more evenly and more quickly at a higher temperature, producing a tea that is nearer the ideal described above. To do this in a wok takes a lot of skill and effort so is harder to maintain. The downside is that the person doing the frying still needs to be very skilled, as controlling the temperature, speed of rotation and time are all critical and a minor loss of focus could produce a less than optimal tea.
In recent years there have been other trends. One is ‘bao fa’/爆发: frying tea very quickly at a very high temperature, perhaps in an attempt to try and get closer to the ‘gun tong’ experience, but using this method it is very easy to produce tea that has a ‘dou xiang’/豆香, a beany fragrance, more reminiscent of a green tea. Not Puer tea. Folks doing this are sometimes working in teams so that people can rest between ‘fries’ as it is quite physically demanding.
At the other end of the ‘sha qing’ spectrum, there are folks who have been experimenting with low temperature firing with extended frying times.
The other thing that has been around for a while, is that when tea is taken out of the wok it is not immediately shaken out to cool before rolling, but is put in a small pile for some time (and occasionally even covered with cloth or sacking): it seems like times can vary from a few minutes to rather longer. The stated aim of this step is also to make sure the thicker stems are ‘cooked’ and increase fragrance/reduce astringency. This is a technique loosely borrowed from Yellow tea processing though the times may be rather shorter than those used for Yellow tea.
It seems very likely that this will have a deleterious effect on the tea’s ageing potential as the leaves are still at high temperature and are basically going to continue to oxidise/ferment – ‘cook’ if you will – when left in a pile for some time. It may be a question of degree, and a relatively short period of time may have a minimal impact on the tea’s ageing potential. Typical Puer processing, as mentioned above, is for the leaves to be shaken out immediately on leaving the wok to allow them to cool in readiness for rolling.
It is this last technique, [coupled with the practice of ‘ti xiang’ (they are not necessarily used in tandem)] which seems likely to have the most impact on a tea’s ageing potential and conversely, is not always so obvious in a new tea, though the colour of the broth will generally be deeper than one might usually expect.
Of course, there are always folks experimenting and trying to find new ways to tweak old practices. That’s surely not anything new. So there’s always going to be something to watch out for and learn from.
In 2021 it seems like we’ve been through a whole cycle (though it maybe hasn’t finished yet). There are people who were trying various ways of making tea some years back, who are now saying that that tea has not aged as well as they hoped and are again reviewing their methods and returning to what are understood to be ‘traditional’, or slightly modified ‘traditional’ processing techniques.
So what’s the conclusion?
There are certainly things people are doing to try to make young Puer more appealing, particularly to new Puer drinkers and some of that tea will surely end up in the Western market, but it may not all be bad. The factors discussed above are variables that can affect the tea’s quality and ageing potential, but their effects need to be seen as a whole, on a spectrum. We can’t say for sure which of any one of them on it’s own, in whatever degree, will definitely render a tea useless for ageing. Experimenting with the tea making process is also clearly not something new: the sheer variety of types of tea in China alone is testimony to that. Awareness of that fact should be enough to keep the consumer safe from erring too far from the well worn path of conventional Puer processing. Other factors such as the region, the ‘terroir‘, the season, the age of trees, etc. will also impact the ageing potential of any tea, and much as is the case with red wines, it’s not every year, grand cru or not, that produces a wine that’s equally good for ageing. So unless one is sure of what one’s doing, buy in small quantities, drink with awareness. Be skeptical, without being doctrinaire, and be prepared for some regrets: both for what you did and didn’t buy.
In the Yorkshire Dales where I grew up, the village school had no kitchen and school ‘dinners’ as we called them we ferried in from the town about seven miles away. I remember them arriving mid-morning in big alloy warming containers. The food wasn’t good and I had a particular dislike of the carrots which were badly overcooked. I unfortunately took the dislike home with me, where carrots on my plate were an unwelcome sight. ‘They’re good for you.’ my mother would say, which my eldest sister, being the enforcer, would reiterate. It took me till adulthood to re-calibrate my perception of cooked carrots. It maybe also left me with a residual disregard for doing something ‘because it was good for me’.
I can’t imagine many people drink wine or whiskey, or coffee, because they think ‘it’s good for them’. We drink those things because we enjoy them, savour the taste, the aromas, the sensations they produce in us. Unfortunately tea seems to have got boxed into the ‘drink it ’cause it’s good for you’ corner. My first reaction to hearing somebody championing the ‘drink it ’cause it’s good for you’ point of view is that whatever it is they’re drinking probably doesn’t taste good if that’s the main justification for drinking it. Why else would you use that as a selling point?
Puer, particularly raw Puer from old or ancient tea trees has got more than its fair share of stuff that’s good for you in it. Many years ago it was ‘ripe’ Puer that got the attention: the ‘weightloss tea’. The tea that some footballer’s wife drank to help keep in trim. Much early research also seemed to focus on pile fermented Puer because, I imagine, to a chemist the process of pile fermenting is somehow a more interesting topic for research. ( I certainly have a dog in the race and might as well at this point stick my neck out and say that I think ‘cooked’ Puer shouldn’t even be called Puer, having no historical basis, and bearing little resemblance to real Puer. Like coffee and instant coffee, they share a passing resemblance but can hardly be confounded). Anyway, it was a few years before there seemed to be much research around on younger and naturally aged Puer tea. What came to light was that pile fermented Puer had greatly reduced amounts of substances such as catechins, gallo-catechins and what have you because in the fermenting process much of the naturally occurring constituents got converted to gallic acid and thearubigins (the stuff that makes it look red), etc, and conversely there was actually more caffeine in the ‘pile fermented tea than in the ‘raw’. Conversely, it appears, that naturally aged raw Puer tea has a balance of whatever it had in it originally, but over time the less stable compounds: gallocatechins, epigallocatechins, being the first to get reduced to other things: equally good for you.
If you think something is good for you, it probably is, even if for others it may not be so. Surely the most injurious thing is to persist in something which you believe to be bad for you. So drink tea you enjoy. And if you think it’s good for you, it probably will be.Tea Health
It’s ‘Swing Festival’ again. Hard to believe. Another year gone. I’m not sure I could satisfactorily list what I’ve accomplished in the last 12 months. It seems like not much, but I’ve made a fair chunk of tea, and drunk a lot too. Some of it courtesy of an Aini tea farmer on Nan Nuo Shan whose tea gardens are between Shi Tou Zhai and Ban Po Zhai.
Someone once said to me ‘The thing that’s special about Nan Nuo Shan tea is that there’s nothing special about it’. It’s not exactly true: at it’s best it’s floral-fruity, with plenty of body, some heftiness with a distinct bitterness and astringency, and a good hui gan. A good solid tea that has so far escaped some of the extreme, fad-driven price fluctuations that have affected some other places. There’re differences between villages or tea gardens of course. Ban Po Lao Zhai is often a little more astringent than Shi Tou Zhai, etc. and of course, Ba Ma is another story.
This year it was raining heavily the day we went so we skipped the swing and stayed inside eating and drinking tea. The village, like others on Nan Nuo Shan runs on tea. They have tea gardens above Ban Po Lao Zhai even though they moved down from there many years ago to a village nearer the road because they still maintain land there that was apportioned to them at the time of the move. As with many other villages, people here grow some other crops too. Some rent land near the foot of the mountain to grow paddy, and they often grow some vegetables near the village.
Clouds rolling up the valley
The day before, I went to Pasha, where I hadn’t been for ages, but after repeated invitations from a tea farmer there I decided it was time to go. I went on the ‘new’ concrete road that was finished a couple of years ago that runs around the south of Nan Nuo Shan to Gelang He. It shortens the trip from Jinghong by about half. On the way I bumped into the tea farmer from Nan Nuo Shan who, on his way home had just had the misfortune to have a scrape with a Range Rover on a tight, sloping corner. They were lucky. Neither he nor his wife, who was on the back of the motorbike were badly hurt, but his bike was unrideable. He was waiting for his brother in law to come and pick them and the bike up. He forked out 2000 yuan to pay off the Range Rover driver to boot, even though it was questionable who was at fault. That’s the cost of riding an unregistered bike (something that many mountain dwellers do here), particularly on a tricky mountain road in the rain.
The road to Pasha. Maize and rice are grown at lower altitudes.
Pasha, like Nan Nuo Shan is inhabited by Aini tea farmers. Their language and customs are the same. They both celebrate Ye Ku Zha – Swing Festival – at around the same time of year.
I think I’ve finally figured out how the date of the festival is determined: according to some folks it starts on the first ‘bull’ day of the sixth month of the ‘nong li’ or traditional farmers’ calendar. But there’s a problem with that because in Pasha it started this year, 2017, on July 13th, which was the second ‘bull’ day of the sixth lunar month and the rest of the Gelang He area it started on the third ‘bull’ day. According to my host, they start on the third ‘bull’ day in the Julian month of July. Make of all that what you will.
Aini (Hani) people are outward-looking, readily adapting to and taking on things they like or see as useful – Nan Nuo Shan is pretty well stocked with upscale cars these days – and they are much more open to outsiders than say, Bama’s Lahu people. They are also often quick witted business people. But they have an interior life which is less easy to access – they have an Aini name, for example – not the name on their documents, a public name, a name ‘for the government’, but a name only used by close family or friends that someone like me will likely never be allowed to utter. Last year the tea farmer I just visited for Ye Ku Zha actually told me his name, but at the same time made it clear that it wasn’t for me to use it.
Whilst their lives are changing rapidly – everyone who can, gets a car, pulls down their wooden house to replace it with something ‘fait de beton’ – Aini people, in this area at least continue to value their own culture and are not in immediate danger of being ‘han hua’d’ any time soon, maintaining, apart from their own festivals, their own language and customs – children all grow up speaking their mother tongue – and they still take time to make some of their own clothes and bags, albeit only worn on special occasions.
Anyone who goes to Nan Nuo Shan will have heard about, or visited ‘Cha Wang Shu’, the ‘King of Tea Trees’ that is between Ban Po Lao Zhai and Ya Kou Zhai. It is estimated to be 800 years old or more, but apart from carbon dating, there appears to be no sure-fire way to tell a tea trees age as they do not have rings that can be counted in the way that most other trees do. Locally, there are only word-of-mouth assessments of age, ‘so-and-so’s grandfather says it was yea big when he was a boy’ or something akin to that. Or otherwise by comparison with a tree of known age.
Carbon dating has been used to establish the age of some tea trees. And so to the apocryphal tale of the original Nan Nuo Shan ‘Cha Wang Shu‘. It was growing a little way below Shi Tou Zhai, and had attracted a lot of interest from scientists. As early as the beginning of the 1950’s Yunnan College of Agriculture researchers were exploring the varieties of tea tree in this area. The story is that local hunters who were familiar with the area would act as guides to take researchers deep into the forest. On one such trip in late 1951 a tea tree that was 8.8 metres tall with a girth of 0.83 metres was found. A couple of years later, one Zhou Peng Ju from Yunnan Agricultural College Research Department came to examine the tree, and over the ensuing years an increasing number of botanists and specialists came to examine the tree. Eventually it was established that the tree was a cultivated variety of tea tree.
According to one version of the sequence of events, as more and more people came to visit the tree, the surrounding environment was badly affected and the tree itself was also damaged, and by the mid 1990’s the tree died.
The local version of the story is that scientists came and took samples for examination by drilling into the trunk of the tree, which lead to the death of the King of Tea Trees.
This photo, with the tea tree behind, from the famous visit in 1985, is about all the evidence that remains on Nan Nuo Shan.
Zeng Wei Ran and colleagues visit the tree in 1985.
According to the Lunar calendar, the full moon in late June or early July is the time Hani people celebrate Ye Ku Zha. The Chinese translation, 秋千节 means ‘Swing Festival’ because, similar to some other local minorities, a large swing forms a central part of the festival. In other parts of Yunnan the festival is also referred to as Zha Zha Festival and rather than a swing they may have a see-saw type arrangement where a horizontal pole, set atop a vertical pointed pole can both pivot vertically and rotate horizontally. There appear to be various founding legends for this festival, but it essentially celebrates ancestors, though in some areas it is said to also be a harvest festival.
Preparing the swing
Not all Hani people in Xishuangbanna celebrate it, but on Nan Nuo Shan and other Hani villages nearby they do. The time it is celebrated can also vary by as much as a couple of weeks. Traditionally the swing is made from four tall tree trunks, but due to the scarcity of the right height and thickness of trees, and restrictions on felling, it is common for the frame to be made of steel as it is in these photographs. The cross-pole is made from a thick length of vine and traditionally a number of thinner vines were strung over the cross-pole and braided to form the rope for the swing. Nowadays nylon rope is braided in the same manner.
Children lining up to ride on the swing
After the festival, which lasts about one week, the rope is left on the frame to be taken down and replaced with a new one the next year. The swing cannot be ridden before the first day of the festival when a cow is slaughtered and the meat shared out between the villagers. At that point villagers and visitors can ride on the swing and there may be a competition to see who can swing the highest, but according to village lore, the main purpose of the swing is essentially a form of cleansing ritual: by riding on the swing one can cast off ‘bad luck’ or inauspicious events from the previous year.
The village champion
At this time of the year, some way into the rainy season, tea farmers are not particularly busy. There may still be a little Summer tea being made in some villages where they have small tea trees, but generally there will be little tea until the Autumn and any crops that villagers may have planted, like rice or maize will have already been harvested or will not get harvested till the Autumn.
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.
Ancient tea tree in Bang Wai, December 16th, 2013. Photo by Wang Xiong
We are having the longest sustained cold spell in ‘Banna that anyone here can remember. For over a week we’ve been having night time temperatures of 10 Centigrade or less, with two or three nights getting down to 5 or 6 in Jinghong. Daytime temperatures have been getting up to 20. In the mountains it has been colder, with heavy frosts and ice in Bulang Shan and snow in Lincang.
There were a few days in 1999 that were cold, but according to local people, it was not that extreme and didn’t last more than 3 or 4 days.
The general perception is that early spring tea will not be pretty, but the flavour should be good.
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.
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.
