Tag Archives: Puer Tea Knowledge

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.*+

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.

Pressing Matters

In the world of Puer tea, opinions are not in short supply. How you get your cakes pressed is a case in point. There’s some logic behind the arguments, but it’s also about trends. Like how tight you wear your jeans, if you’ll excuse the analogy. One year loose fit is in vogue, the next straight, the next tight. It comes and goes.

Before we even get that far, how long one waits before pressing tea is another contentious issue. Generally speaking, the rule of thumb is to wait a month or so before pressing mao cha. The tea has just been made and dried in the sun and is going through a period of significant change and, the argument goes, is best left some time to stabilise. Plenty of folks wait longer. Some at least a year. But if you’re not living locally and need to get back home with tea in hand, or you need to get your product on the shelves, waiting longer may be a luxury you can’t afford.

Many local folks will wait at least till Autumn. This has the added benefit of avoiding the rush that occurs at this time of year, when many pressing outfits have waiting lists of at least a couple of weeks. In recent years, the wait time has perhaps been exacerbated by more people pressing smaller quantities of tea, and pressing smaller cakes, like 200 or 250 grams, which slows the process down.

Tea pressing factories prefer 357 g cakes as the other, smaller pressing options are more fiddly and slow (and the costs go up accordingly). But people who’ve got lesser quantities of tea are more likely to choose these options irrespective of costs. Of course, the much bigger tea companies are likely pressing their own tea anyway. Some people stick to 357 cakes because ‘that’s the tradition’ though the history of that is debatable. Some people go for 400g cakes or another variation, but still using the 357 bags, because they say it looks more ‘ba qi’ than 357. It’s true, kind of. The extra fifty odd grams definitely makes the cake look more plump.

The earlier idea – that bricks were made from junky tea – has been turned on it’s head in recent years with many people pressing 250, 500, or even 1kg bricks but using exactly the same material as cakes.

The process of pressing tea is essentially this:

The loose tea is weighed out (sometimes adding a few grams more to account for loss of weight through drying in the future), put it into the cylindrical container that will be put over the steamer, the ‘nei fei’ if there is one, is put under a few of the leaves on top (it will end up in the bottom of the bag once the tea is turned out of the container), and it’s steamed.

Nobody much talks about the water used, though it maybe has some small but discernable impact on the tea. Whatever the water, we’re only interested in the vapour in any case, so unless there are contaminants in the water that will vapourise, there should be no need to worry.

Steaming is generally for 20-30 seconds. If tea is steamed for too long – it happens occasionally if someone gets distracted, or there is a problem in the production process – it can subsequently have a rather dull appearance.

The pressure of the steam is important because one wants the steam to penetrate the leaves entirely and uniformly and also fairly quickly. Sometimes tea is steamed a second time if, in forming the shape, it has already cooled down too much to be workable, so it is steamed briefly again whilst still in the bag.

Some people like to use a hand operated or hydraulic press to lightly press the tea before putting it under a stone. This can help give the cake a more regular appearance and maybe saves having to stand on the stone, for added compression otherwise, significant amounts of tea are stone pressed. A team of 3 people can press oabout 300 kilos of 357 cakes in a day but around half of that for 200g cakes.

Stones vary in size, but generally are about 20cm tall and 30+ in diameter. The person doing the pressing stage of the work will generally stand on the stone and do ‘the hoola hoop’ 3 or 4 times. What one wants is a fairly uniform compression with the outside edge tight enough that the cakes is not going to fall apart at the edges.

There’s been something of a trend in the last couple of years amongst some folks who have been going for a tighter pressing. The logic is that the tea ages more slowly and therefor keeps its fragrance better than in a looser cake which tends to lose more of the aromatic properties more quickly.

Stone for pressing 3kg cakes

Another reason that is typically sighted for tighter pressings is when the tea is not intended for consumption when young and is to be kept several years for ageing. With that is the added factor of the nature of the planned storage: More humid storage could well use tighter pressings than dryer because the tea will age and loosen up more quickly.

A third idea is that blended cakes work better with a tighter pressing because the oils, etc. from the leaves are going to blend together more as they’re squeezed out giving a smoother drinking experience.

None of that is particularly contentious. The big area of discussion, and disagreement, is on drying. Here, opinions can get pretty polarised. There are broadly three schools of thought. The advocates of each say something along the lines of the following:

1. Tea must be dried in a drying room. The temperature is controlled, and is in the low to mid 40’s ). The temperature can be controlled so that it is lower than that of cakes drying in the sun. Air drying tea runs the risk of the tea going mouldy inside if not properly dry. Sun dried tea runs the risk of producing a sour flavour and the ultra-violet light can have a detrimental effect on the enzymes which are needed for the tea to age well.

2. Tea must be air dried. Historically, tea was not dried in a drying room dried. If the temperature is too high in a drying room it is detrimental to the tea. Room dried tea is initially quite fragrant, but for longer term storage air dried is better. If it is dried properly it will not run the risk of going mouldy.

3. Tea must be dried in the sun. Traditionally, pressed Puer tea was sun dried. Waiting till the winter when the sun is not so fierce is better. Tea needs to be air dried for a couple of days before being put in the sun to avoid it becoming misshapen, but it should be dried in the sun at a high enough temperature and for long enough for much of the moisture inside the cake to evaporate – that could be half an hour, or a couple of hours. Too long and the tea risks being damaged. Tea can also be dried in a ‘da peng‘, a perspex roofed drying platform such as is sometimes used for drying mao cha, but many people would not see that as an ideal option.

And then there are the ‘it depends’ folks:

It depends where and when the tea is being pressed: a little sun in the early morning may be OK. If the weather is inclement you may have no choice but to room dry.

People pressing in Jinghong will often favour room dried tea, because it’s also related to time and place. Jinghong is lower altitude (600m) and more humid than Yiwu or Menghai, for example. They also maybe don’t have a great deal of space to dry any other way. (tea that’s put outside to sun dry would take up a fraction of the space when stacked in a drying room.

People in Yiwu and Xiangming seem to favour sun-drying whilst Menghai folks tend to favour room-drying. This is maybe also to do with the different sizes of the pressing factories. Menghai probably has more large scale pressing operations.

It depends on the season: Air drying is possible into May, but later on, there is no choice but to room dry because of rainy season humidity. The risk of mould developing in tea that has not been properly dried is too great.

It also depends where the tea is being sent: if the tea is air dried and sent somewhere dry, it may be OK, but if sent somewhere more humid, it may be a problem.

It depends if you’ve got time. Room drying takes a couple of days. Natural drying can take several days, so if you’re in a rush to get your tea dried so you can ship it to wherever, natural drying may not be an option. Also larger scale outfits are probably less inclined to air dry because of time constraints.

I’m pretty much in the ‘it depends’ camp. My preference is for air-dried cakes. I have sometimes put air-dried tea outside in early morning/dappled sun for a few hours. If one is not in a hurry, that seems like the best option to me. I have never tried full-on sun drying and don’t feel tempted to try , though I know people who do. If it’s done judiciously it may well be OK, and may even be beneficial, but I doubt anything over an hour or two is good if the sun is hot. Given that ultra violet light clearly has sterilizing properties, and it seems quite probable that it would affect, if not damage the enzymes in Puer. Using a drying room, if done judiciously, is probably OK too.

Most pressing places are small factory type set-ups with sheet steel roofing. They get pretty hot inside. Because steam is being used, they also get pretty humid. Drying room temperature is important, but certainly controllable. I am more concerned with what sort of exhaust system a drying room has: having 40+ degrees of heat is certainly not a problem (if you put cakes outside with an air temperature of upper 30s, they will surely get that hot. If you put them in the sun, even hotter), but making sure that moisture is extracted efficiently is important. So choosing the right place at the right time of year is important: At this time of year with waiting times of two weeks or so, if they are not reliable, it may be tempting for a pressing outfit to push their temperatures up a little in order to speed up the process. That would not be desirable.

These days, a typical practice for deciding when pressed cakes are dry is to weigh them, or rather weigh two or three from a batch. The weight can be compared with the weight of the mao cha weighed out for steaming.

‘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.

It’s Good For You

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

More Glyphosate

There was a brief discussion recently on LinkedIn following a post about Sri Lanka’s decision to ban Glyphosate, and the quandary that poses for tea producers. ‘Should we use Monsanto’s Glyphosate?’ was the title of the piece which went on to discuss how Sri Lanka is facing a dilema over pesticide use. I’m unclear about the timing as Sirisena introduced the ban a good couple of years ago which came after a previous ban was lifted after only a few months, in 2014. So sure, they seem to have been in a quandary over the decision for some time.

It’s a curious question. Imagine one was a world-class athlete who’d got used to taking steroids because they improved one’s performance, but slowly became aware of their harmful effects. If one was winning gold medals it might be hard to give up for fear of lowering one’s level of performance and only getting bronze, or perhaps no medal at all, but in tea there are no medals for performance. What is there to lose? Someone contributed to the discussion by suggesting pesticides are necessary to maintain production levels in an ever more populated world where starving people would ‘willingly risk an excess MRL or two rather than have no food.’ But tea is not food, though it may well be considered a staple by many folks in poorer parts of the world.

And Roundup is not insecticide. Not using it is not going to result directly in infestations of insects that will eat the crops or damage tea bushes, or maybe rust which will damage the leaves. The worst that can happen is that folks have to go into tea gardens and weed by hand. That’s about profit, or maybe reducing losses. But it’s hard to imagine using herbicides to keep labour costs down is going to turn a loss-making business round. On the other hand, opting for more labour intensive/creative methods of dealing with the problem, as Sri Lanka appears to have done may well prove worthwhile if it results in a more desirable tea. With Sri Lanka’s objective of reducing large scale plantations in favour of smaller family run tea gardens, it is ironically becoming more like Southern Yunnan.

Yunnan’s history of tea cultivation is rather different from Sri Lanka’s where the tea industry was developed by the British in colonial times. In Yunnan, the government has at various stages had a hand in developing the tea industry, but in Xishuangbanna there are not that many large scale plantations outside of some of the big tea factories and areas like Da Du Gang. There are a lot more in the Lincang/Lancang area. There were large scale (re) planting programmes around the middle of the 20th century, particularly in the Menghai area, but most tea producers are still smallholder farmers who are their own bosses. Many of them have in the past still choosen to use agro-chemicals in some way, certainly in bush tea plantations, but it has been a personal choice.

Da Du Gang tea plantations

Even though the use of agro-chemicals has in theory been banned in ancient tea tree gardens, it still happens, particularly with something like Glyphosate, the use of which will significantly reduce the labour time required by a tea farmer to manage his/her tea gardens. But ‘market forces’ eventually will prevail in most situations.

Sunshine and Glyphosate

More and more people understand, and are able to detect where Glyphosate has been used, and are averse to buying tea that may have been treated with it. So even when a buyer is not able themselves to detect its use, the fear that a customer may is a factor that will cause a buyer to err on the side of caution. This increasing awareness also brings other complications. Pretty much gone are the days when asking the farmer directly about which agro-chemicals they may have used would elicit a straightforward answer. One needs to be more wiley.

I was with a friend, and a friend of his, visiting some tea villages some way north of Yiwu. I had heard of a garden of 40-50 year old trees that had never been treated with agro-chemicals,so my friend had elicited the help of his friend who was from the area to see if we could find it. When we went into a village and found some tea that seemed like it might be interesting, he would say ‘这款茶不会超标吧’ /This tea isn’t over the limit (for agro-chemicals) is it? ‘应该不会!’ / It ought not to be!’ was the typical response. With its element of doubt, it was all you needed to know.

But doubt is persistent. Despite the EU having an MRL for glyphosate of 2mg/kg, none of the main testing companies, as far as I can tell, includes Glyphosate in any standard testing package. As I’ve discussed before, it’s apparently because Glyphosate requires a different method of testing, so cannot be batch tested along with a slew of other agro-chemicals. So it’s fairly common, here at least, for people to claim their tea ‘meets European import standards’, but miss or omit the fact that Glyphosate is not on the list, as a guy I know did, proudly announcing that four of his teas had all passed the ‘欧盟标准/European standard test’ and were chemical free, but he had missed that Glyphosate was not on the list. (Actually, in order to economise he had mixed four teas together and tested them as one, thus further compromising the test, but that’s another story).

Old tree tea gardens near Yiwu

P.S.In doing some recent online reading I revisited the Greenpeace – Lipton tea story and realised that there too, Glyphosate was absent. I have tried writing to someone at Greenpeace to better understand that absence: was it that Glyphosate was not tested for, or that it was, and none was found. If that were the case, given the number of other chemicals the teas had in them, it would be news-worthy in itself.

For an earlier piece on Glyphosate plus links to additional reading see here

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Weather Report

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.

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