That was in 2011-2012. I was unable to discover much more new information about the history of the factory locally, but I did talk to the people who live in Shi Tou Zhai and had relatives who had worked in the factory. They shared a book they had with me, 普洱茶记/Notes on Puer Cha, and from which I copied a number of pages. I am waiting to confirm who the author was but I believe it to be 雷平阳/Lei Ping Yang. The section of the book on the tea Factory is mostly about the factory from the 1950s onwards. There are a few photos that were interesting but likely from the same era and may not be the actual tea factory.
Menghai Tea Factory receiving fresh leaves from ‘Puer Cha Ji’/普洱茶记
Within the next couple of years I went a few times to Northern Thailand and, mindful that Bai Liang Cheng (Bai Meng Yu) had gone there after his stay in Myanmar, made a few inquiries to see if any more was known about him there.
Chiang Mai has an interesting, mixed Chinese population who have been there a long time. There are Chao Zhou people who are mostly near the river, centered around Warorot Market, where there’s a small 华人街/hua ren jie/China Town.
Another distinct group of Chinese are the Hui people – Muslims from Yunnan Province – who have been there at least since the late 19th Century. Yunnanese mulateers, who were predominantly Muslim and formed a core element on the trade routes collectively known as ‘茶吗古道‘/ch ma gu dao – Ancient Tea Horse Road in English – made regular dry season trips from Xishuangbanna via Da Luo, Kyaing Tung (Keng Tung) in Myanmar, Chiang Saen on the west bank of the Mekong, Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, and then on from there on to Burma via Mae Sariang, finally arriving at Moulmein, an important port on the Andaman Sea. (Another possible route headed south from Jinghong to Muang Sing in northern Laos, and from there, after crossing the Mekong somewhere near Chiang Saen, joined the first route to continue to Chiang Rai).
Initially, the traders on the ‘Cha Ma Gu Dao’ were not permitted to cross the Ping River and enter the city proper, so they settled on the east side of the river, in the area that is now known as Wat Ket. Some people have said that this is where the earliest Chiang Mai mosque was established, but that is contradicted by other recorded accounts that place it in the Ban Haw area, south of Wararot Market on the west bank of the river. Ban in Thai means village or home and Haw (sometimes Ho) is a term, with slight derogatory connotations, used in northern Thai for Muslims from Yunnan, that has subsequently come to denote all Yunnanese Chinese irrespective of their religion. The Yunnanese themselves do not use the term.
Key commodities on these long distance trade routes were cotton, tea and opium – an image which has served to haunt them until recent times. But these early settlers had become well integrated into Chiang Mai society by the time the next wave, including KMT fighters, arrived via Burma in the 1950s. They were seen by many, both in Burma and Thailand, as being somewhat wild and lawless.
This latter group had no official documents (and even until quite recently many only had a form of ‘refugee card’ which severely restricted their movements) and their situation in Thailand was precarious. One elderly Hui Man in Chiang Mai described to me once how, at that time, if you were out, walking down the road say, and you saw another person you recognised as being a fellow counryman, you wouldn’t speak or acknowledge them for fear of exposing yourself and being subject to the consequences.
It was into this situation that Bai Meng Yu must have arrived after leaving Nan Nuo Shan in the late 1940s, via a soujourn in Yangon (Rangoon). Knowing that he was Hui meant that the mosque in Chiang Mai was a reasonable place for me to start making some inquiries. One could sense the initial distrust, engendered in part by the history mentioned above, but of course also because of having a strange foreigner coming and asking questions. Being able to speak some ‘Yunnan hua‘ possibly went some way to overcoming that hurdle and, having convinced them I wasn’t a spy or a government agent, I was warmly welcomed.
After a couple of visits I was fortunate enough to meet an uncle of Bai Meng Yu’s granddaughter, who was extremely helpful and friendly. He told me that she had, somewhere in her possession, a number of photographs of the original Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory. He had a photocopy of a written account that family members had made at the time of Bai Meng Yu’s death, recounting their knowledge of his life and including one photograph of the tea factory in which one could just make out some people, maybe in work clothing, standing in a wooded area, possibly clearing ground or constructing something, but 80’s photocopying in Chiang Mai was surely not what it is today and the photograph was not of much use other than to confirm its existence. His niece (Bai Meng Yu’s granddaughter) was friendly but not that helpful for her own reasons – she was busy with work, had just moved house, didn’t know where everything was, and really? Is anybody interested in that?, etc. etc.
So hopefully, somewhere in Chiang Mai, there are still a set of photos of the old original tea factory waiting to be re-discovered.
The rebuilt old school in Sha Dian, Hong He Zhou
On another trip I went to Sha Dian, a now prosperous town in Hong He Prefecture where Bai Meng Yu originally came from and picked up a copy of a publication put out by the local government in 2012 which has a fairly detailed account of the life of Bai Meng Yu, written in 1987. It doesn’t offer much new detail about the tea factory other than to say that he visited India on a trip to purchase equipment for the factory which was subsequently shipped to Burma and from there hauled overland by cart, and then carried by people back to Menghai. It sounds like a slightly more likely scenario than the one of the rolling machine being shipped direct from England since India already had a heavy machinery industry by the end of the 19th Century and a Scot, William Jackson who had gone out to India to work alongside his brother, the then manager of Scottish Assam Tea Co. and had invented a rolling machine some time in the 1870s.*+
Gateway to old town Sha Dian
On a subsequent visit to Thailand I also made a trip up to Mae Sai, north of Chiang Rai on the Myanmar border where Bai Meng Yu’s sister lived, and where he spent the rest of his life. His gravestone is in a small Muslim section of a cemetery on the south edge of the town
* The earliest tea rolling machines still in use in Darjeeling were manufactured around the 1850s so those, it seems, were shipped from the UK.
+ In a newer edition of Puer Cha Ji by Lei Ping Yang, it states that the machinery, or at least, the rolling machine was shipped from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Yangon (Rangoon), and from there via Kyaing Tung to Da Luo and then Nan Nuo Shan
Previous posts on Bai Meng Yu and Nan Nuo Shan Tea Factory:
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.
A while back I saw the term ‘Wu Long’ Puer recently re-appeared on the English language internet, so I thought it worth revisiting this old topic as it comes up from time to time. I’m not sure when was the first time it was raised on the internet but I remember seeing something from maybe 2005 or 06. It seemed like it could be an appropriate coda to my previous post about processing tea and the implications for ageing.
To be clear, this is an English language term with, as far as I know, no Chinese equivalent. So it’s describing something which is described in a different way in Chinese. The idea seemed to be formulated from the perception that there was a new style of Puer tea that had been oxidised in a way that a ‘traditional’ Sheng Puer wasn’t.
The suggestion was that the tea had been rolled more (more heavily/longer?) with the effect that the tea flavour steeped out much more quickly and the tea had qualities which were reminiscent of Wulong tea.
My guess at this point is that that’s a misunderstanding. I think it’s not likely to have the effect that some folks have suggested. Rolling more heavily, rolling twice, etc. are not new, and whilst, of course, bruising the leaves more is going to break down more of the cell walls and may well result in more oxidation, I somehow doubt it would produce the effect talked about.
If anything, over the last ten years or so, there has been a trend toward lighter rolling, 抛跳/pao tiao, rather than tighter, originally driven, it seems, by Taiwanese demand. People coming to Yunnan and demanding tea that was rolled in a way that they thought looked better. Some tea farmers have told me that Taiwanese customers wanted them to roll straight – backwards and forwards – as opposed to a circular motion to create rolled leaves that were more needle shaped. Less twisted. This is not standard Puer fare. Traditionally, if anything, people rolled tea more tightly pre 2000s, so this doesn’t easily fit with the proposition that post 2000s Puer was rolled more, creating an ‘Wu Long’ type flavour/aroma.
At least, if additional or heavier rolling is a factor, it’s more likely that any extra rolling in tandem with other factors produced the result talked about. Sure, it’s difficult, I haven’t drunk the tea that someone else drank that made them think it had been ‘wulonged’, but the variables in tea making are not infinite.
Another factor with heavier rolling is that the flavours will be steeped out more quickly, so the tea will be less ‘nai pao’ / 耐泡 and the flavour in the early steeps more intense. This is also another reason why there has been a trend to lighter rolling: to make early steeps less intense and to have the tea steep more slowly.
Of course, if other things are done in the processing of Puer, to reduce bitterness and astringency for example, then heavier rolling is not going to produce such a marked effect, and the tea will generally have poorer structure, and steepability.
The only time I have heard a term in Chinese which I would say is referring to the same thing was many years ago when someone referred to a raw Puer as ‘fa jiao cha’/发酵茶/fermented tea. As now, the understanding was that it was tea that had been processed in such a way as to cause it to ferment in a way similar to other types of fermented tea: Wu Long, black tea, etc. and not proper Puer processing.
But even fairly excessive wilting – with autumn tea this is not that uncommon, where the tea is picked in the afternoon and then left overnight to be fired early the next morning – if the tea leaves are piled at a correct depth, it will not on its own produce an ‘Wu Long’ kind of fermentation. So it seems that it’s more likely a combination of factors of which excessive wilting may be a part.
One thing that can cause a light ‘fermented’ aroma is if the sha qing is not done well, or a combination of tan qing and sha qing are not managed properly, which can result in the stems of the tea leaves, which typically have more moisture in them, not being ‘fired’ properly, and enzyme activity not being arrested sufficiently. The result being that once the tea comes out of the pan it continues to ferment, producing an aroma in the dry tea that is reminiscent of a fermented tea -‘hong shu wei/红薯味/sweet potato taste, as some people call it. Personally, I wouldn’t think it was similar to Wulong, but who knows.
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.
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.
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
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.
This post started off as a response to a question that someone once in a while will ask about how we source tea, but then it developed into a little monologue about visiting tea villages looking for tea. I have left that part till the end.
So first, let’s go back a few years, to when someone once suggested to me, rather humourously I thought, that we might consider changing our farmer – singular – as though there could possibly have been only one.
A couple of things become clear very quickly: if you’re not just sourcing tea from a few places that are near each other, you need a team of people. Some people you can squarely rely on. You can’t be in two places at the same time, and though regional differences exist – Menghai flushes earlier than Liu Da Cha Shan, or whatever, there’s a limit to how much ground you can cover in the relatively brief period of time that is (early) spring tea harvest.
Different areas & villages can have slightly different approaches too. There’s a reason for this, so it makes sense to draw on local knowledge and skills, rather than have a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Of course, a skilled tea maker can no doubt quickly adapt, but in any case, having one person make all your tea is a physical impossibility, dictated by distance and topography.
So then, the ways that I source tea are essentially these:
Arrange for pickers to pick leaves from a tea garden we have identified, which are then taken to a place where we have someone take in the fresh leaves and make the tea. The trees may not belong to the person who makes the tea. The farmer who owns the trees sells the fresh leaves and may be involved in the picking. In this way we have the most control over the process. It is also useful where a farmer has good trees, but hasn’t necessarily mastered the skills of making good tea.*
The caveat, if it need be stated, is that the person taking in the fresh leaves must be skilled at recognising fresh leaves from different trees and sources, be familiar with, and trust the pickers, and know exactly where the tea is coming from in order to avoid tea from elsewhere being brought in.
Cha Wang Shu – the small blue roofs are typically tea processing places
In recent years this has become much more common, particularly in places like Gua Feng Zhai where there are often concerns about the origin and purity of ‘mao cha’. The year before last someone said to me ‘Gua feng Zhai fresh leaves are expensive but their mao cha is cheap.’ It’s not completely true, but you get the idea.
Another situation where we might make tea in a similar way is where the tea garden is too far from the workshop to carry the fresh leaves out, and so the tea is made on the spot and carried out as mao cha. Some tea from the Yiwu area is still like that – anywhere where the tea gardens are too remote to be able to carry fresh leaves out to the place of processing – e.g. Bai Cha Yuan before they made a new road from Ding Jia Zhai to the tea gardens.
Making tea in Bai Cha Yuan
The third situation is to have a known farmer with good trees and tea making skills make the tea themselves. This also works well, but one needs to be sure of the skill of the tea maker. If the quantity is relatively small – a few kilos – it may be no problem, but a farmer who can make 5 kg well, may have trouble making 30 all to the same standard.
One also needs to be clear if the tea farmer takes in leaves from other villagers – many do and are honest about it, but not all, so one needs to be sure of sources and consistency.
The fourth situation, which is not necessarily separate from the above, is to work with others in the business. i.e. have others who help monitor or supervise the tea making and sourcing. This could be people who are effectively paid or take a cut, or it could be others in the tea business with whom one has a good relationship and with whom you pool resources.
The next situation is buying on spec from a sample. One can occasionally can get some good tea like this, but mistakes can be made. If the volume is small, so is the risk. In any case, if someone comes to you with a sample of good tea, it’s worth the trouble to go and take a look at where the tea is said to be coming from. I have on occasion bought tea in this way.
The last approach is going cold to a village with no knowledge or connections , this can be fun, but very hit and miss.
You only have to look around online at various blog posts by people who have done this to see that it is probably the least reliable method of sourcing tea, but makes for a good story. Unless you get very lucky, this is at best exploratory – laying the ground for something in the future. It’s rather like a paper chase…
It’s something I personally enjoy doing – going somewhere I’ve never been before and seeing what turns up. But it takes time. You can’t accomplish much in a day. It generally takes a few visits to start to get a handle on the situation in any one village.
Because of this, it’s worth considering how best to go about it.
Ideally maybe, you would look at the trees first, assuming they’re nearby and you can find them, then visit the farmer with the best looking gardens. But this is neither practical nor reliable, as you likely still need someone to show you round and in any case, the owner of the best looking gardens may not make the best tea, or it may already have been sold.
So a better option is going to farmers’ houses and see whose tea making looks the best (most professional, consistent,) and try some of their tea. You can always look at the tea gardens later.This is also time consuming. The first tea you get offered is likely not the best – the tea farmer is also testing you: he’s not going to sell you his best tea if you can’t tell the difference – and you could easily spend a few hours getting to the better stuff. If you do that in a couple of places, the day has gone. It’s impossible to go round every house in a village in this way, so inevitably there’s some luck involved in where you go.
It’s a long time since I read Walden, but I remember the observation that “A farmer’s wealth is measured by the extent to which the barn overshadows the house.” or something like that.
It’s useful logic. You’re probably not going to find the best tea by going to the poorest looking house in the village – particularly one where they have old tea trees. Anyone now, who has old tree tea gardens, should be getting a decent price for their tea if it’s any good. Of course, there could be other factors: the farmer has old trees, but because of size, poor management, etc. it doesn’t provide a good income, or they’re just not good at business – A Hungarian winemaker told me his father would say “A good winemaker must be a good man, must be good wine-maker, and be a good businessman.” It’s the same.
So a reasonable way to start is to see who looks like they’re doing decent business. It doesn’t of course mean their tea is good. They might just be good at doing business, or the owners just took out a hefty loan to build the house, but there’s a chance you’ll find something, and they might know what good tea is, and maybe know where to find it.
Occasionally you might get lucky: someone ordered 60 kg of tea, but then didn’t come through, or only bought 30 kilos in the end – spring tea buying can be a little frenzied and sometimes folks bite off more than they can chew – so, if you’re timing is right, there it is waiting for you.
A couple of other things are important:
The first, is village politics. Villages often comprise of two or three extended families, and they don’t always all get on. Once one gets to know one farmer in a village, they will likely rather jealously guard the connection. One has to be a fine diplomat, or a little thick skinned to navigate the network of connections both within, and outside a village.
Secondly, if you don’t know what the tea from village X should taste like, it’s better not to attempt any serious tea buying. It’s foolish to assume you’re beyond being fooled.
You should know roughly what the price is before you go. Tea prices are actually fairly transparent: very early in the spring, when there may only be a few kilos of tea around, if you were to ask how much tea ‘A’ is, the reply will likely be ‘I don’t know, the price hasn’t come out yet’ “不知道，价格还没出来。”. But a week or two later everybody knows – ‘So-so Pa Sha is about X a kilo, higher quality, around X+Y′, or whatever it is.
Like taking an un-metered taxi: to ask the price of going to ‘A’, only shows your ignorance. They see you coming. If you’re only buying 5kg of tea, the price will be higher than if you’re buying 50.
Bartering is worth it if you think you’re getting a bad deal and or, you don’t have too many hopes of developing a longer term relationship with the farmer. If you want to build mutual trust, trying to hack the farmer down on the price is not going to help much, but letting them know you have an understanding of quality and value is surely worthwhile.
*It is quite common for farmers to sell fresh leaves to someone else in their village, and in this way ensure a potentially less profitable, but more secure income. In the past it has been quite rare for farmers to make their own tea. The common practice was for farmers to pick leaves and sell them to a factory for processing.
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
