The Pu-erh Brokers of Yunnan Province
Pu-erh is the Helen of Troy of tea that gets aged like whiskey, dosed like drugs, and coveted by millionaires. And it only comes from this one mountainous corner of ChinaBy Max Falkowitz January 23, 2017
https://www.saveur.com/pu-erh-chinese-tea/
At 4,000 feet, the paved part of the road stops. It's fall, the rainy season in Yunnan, so the dirt trail that follows is more quicksand than pathway. Deep rivulets formed by rain creep along the 40-degree incline; get your leg caught in one and you're liable to break an ankle on the fall.
Short of an army Jeep, nothing on four wheels will make it up quicksand hill, so we leave our truck in the village and hop on the backs of motorbikes driven by locals who've agreed to take us the rest of the way. The ascent is slow, the driver kicking at boulders and bushes with his flip-flopped feet to keep us upright. Me, I'm just hanging on for dear life, leaning hard into the mountain and this stranger's hips because if I slump back, the bike's engine stalls.
For centuries, pu-erh, pronounced poo-err or poo-ahr (and also spelled puer or pu'er) has been pressed into dense cakes (above) for easy transport; pressing also helps the aging process.Palani Mohan
There's no guardrail in sight, and the uninterrupted view leaves me dumbstruck with its primeval beauty. Mist cloaks the mountains sprawled across the horizon; up close, all you see is reedy bamboo, gnarled trees, gemlike wildflowers, and a near total absence of human settlement. Left to its own devices, Xishuangbanna Prefecture in southern Yunnan is jungle territory, and the sheer biodiversity here is awesome in the classical sense of the word.
At 5,500 feet, the road part of the road ends altogether. We walk, single file, along a trail I can just make out by following the footsteps of Paul Murray, the American tea dealer. The villager in the lead unhooks a machete from a bungee cord belt to hack his way through the bamboo overgrowth.
A few slips, falls, and dead branches conking on heads later, we finally reach a clearing. Close your eyes and imagine what Eden looked like. Got it? Here it is: a grove of knobbly, ancient trees dotted with fragrant pure-white blossoms. Dragonflies the width of my palm race through the air over sun-dappled banana leaves as wide and floppy as green blankets.
“Here,” says Paul, plucking a bud off the end of a tree. “Try this.” The taste is bitter and untamed—electrifying.
This is naturally grown, high-altitude, old-arbor pu-erh. The Helen of Troy of teas that's become synonymous with luxury and power but is only grown in this remote and mountainous corner of China. The precise location of which I've been sworn to secrecy about because Paul doesn't want anyone to know where he procures the really good stuff for White2Tea, his online company.
If you're hardcore about pu-erh, soon enough you'll hear about Paul. To some he's an enigmatic ambassador for a community of Western tea enthusiasts that trade brews and bravura in chat rooms and forums. To others he's a recalcitrant asshole who refuses to release enough details about his products and charges too much for them. In the world of pu-erh, such lacunae are more common than you'd think. Because while tea has drinkers, pu-erh has addicts. And here, in this magical grove on a mountain in Yunnan I'm not allowed to name, is a taste of the lengths those addicts will go to get their fix.
Dabu tends to the century-old trees in the grove her family has owned in Yunnan since the 1800s. Old-arbor bushes like these are the cream of the crop, prized for yielding leaves with exceptional depth of character.Palani Mohan
On the southwestern border along Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar, Yunnan Province is not what you think of when you think of China. Culture and food blend seamlessly into the nations of Southeast Asia. The Hani and Lahu people, two of the 20-plus ethnic minorities that have called the mountains home for thousands of years, could pass for Burmese or Tibetan. Much of the architecture looks Thai. The food wouldn't be out of place in Hanoi.
For all the wealth China has accumulated over the years, Yunnan has seen little of it. For decades that's meant relatively modest urban expansion outside the capital city of Kunming and crushing poverty in some rural areas where mining or cash crops of tobacco, rubber, bananas, and sugarcane can't pay the bills. Tea has been in Yunnan forever, but it's only in the past couple of decades that anyone's wanted to pay anything for it.
Scholars suspect Camellia sinensis—the bush all tea comes from—first originated in what's now Yunnan over to modern-day Assam in eastern India. And for hundreds of years growing, selling, and drinking pu-erh has been a daily staple of Yunnan life—a cheap local product pressed into dense bricks for portability, wrapped in bamboo, and laden high onto the backs of mules and men to be traded along caravan routes to equally poor places. Hardly the stuff refined elites even wanted, let alone lusted after.
Ripe Pu-Erh
An alternative to green “raw”-style pu-erh is “ripe” pu-erh, made from leaves that compost in big, humid piles for a few months, which accelerates the aging process to mimic the taste of vintage tea. It's generally less expensive than raw but also less complex.Palani Mohan
Then something happened. Starting in the late 1990s, tea farmers noticed an influx of well-to-do buyers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou, willing to trek all the way to the mountains and pay unheard-of amounts for their pu-erh. In the mid '80s, pu-erh sold for pennies a kilo. By 2006 prices had climbed high into the hundreds of dollars.
Seemingly out of nowhere, this regional bittersweet brew became an object of Chinese national obsession, a modern luxury with a cult following and a horde of investors thirsty to cash in on a gold rush. Faraway speculators paid top dollar for production lots they never bothered to taste. Crafty smugglers schlepped tea to famous mountains so they could sell it for higher prices. And forgers started blatantly copying successful brands' packaging to dupe unsuspecting consumers. The bubble burst in 2007, sending a rampant futures market spiraling downward out of control. Now prices are climbing again with no sign of falling. Pu-erh's rise has turned many of Yunnan's farmers and merchants into overnight millionaires. It draws tourists not just to the tea mountains, but to the entire province, and it's helped spur a new era of development in tea-trading urban centers.
Beyond Yunnan's borders, pu-erh is a shibboleth of sophistication, a battlefield on which self-styled masters come to blows over tiny details of cultivation, terroir, and storage. But here in the mountains, for people long used to picking, processing, and selling the tea for pennies, its unlikely success is simply a green miracle.
Watch: The World's Most Coveted Tea
"This place is not at all typical of pu-erh production today," Paul says as we clamber over ferns and errant roots. We're joined by Dabu, whose family has owned the land for 200 years. By Dabu and Paul's estimates, many of the tea trees are well over a century old.
Dabu sports faded green highlights beneath a traditional pink Hani headscarf, and her pin-striped blouse and dark blue jumper would look at home on the streets of Shibuya or Soho. She comes from a family of tea farmers, but at the age of 23 she's branched out in new directions, launching successful businesses selling honey, sugar, and modern variations on traditional Hani clothing. “I used to be afraid of this place when I was younger,” she says of their secret grove reachable only by treacherous hike. “But now it brings me to tears, it's so beautiful.”
Picking tea is tough work even on flat land. This picker makes the 1,500-foot climb up the mountain twice a day during tea season, hoisting a bamboo basket full of leaves on a wooden shoulder yoke.Palani Mohan
On a standard tea plantation, row after row of verdant bushes sweep over hillsides with geometric precision. It makes for great photos but not necessarily great tea. Tea planted as a dense monoculture saps soil fast, and the shallow root systems of young bushes can't drink up the deeper layers of nutrients that older trees can access.
The tea is an object of obsession, a modern luxury with a cult following and investors thirsty to cash in on a gold rush.
Here the trees have room to breathe, to grow into hulking sinister things, their bark crusted over by lichen, their roots entrenched in the earth. Smaller plants sprout up between the trees, adding critical layers of biodiversity lacking on plantations.
“It's not just about the age of the trees,” Paul says. “It's the whole environment, that nothing's been interfered with.”
All this wildness produces a tea with more energy and intensity than the plantation stuff, though at the cost of a much lower yield and a much higher price. But Paul doesn't care. “I tell Dabu's family, ‘It doesn't matter what it costs me. Just keep selling your tea to me, not other people.’ Finding this place has taken years of searching and building relationships, and I don't want anyone to know where it is.”
It's time to head back to the home of Dabu's aunt and uncle below. By now they're processing the day's haul of leaves and we don't want to miss it.
On the way down the mountain we pass two women hoisting massive bamboo baskets on their backs. They're on their way up to pick leaves from a nearby grove, then take them back to the village where the tea will be wok-fired, rolled, and dried, then sold either on-site to itinerant merchants like Paul or at larger markets. We saw these women before, casually ambling down the mountain on foot while we struggled our way up by bike. Two hauls a day are typical for them, one of them tells us after taking a deep drag on her pipe.
Er Lu rolls, kneads, and shakes wok-fired tea leaves before laying them out to dry on bamboo mats.Palani Mohan
Dabu's aunt Er Lu grabs a load of fresh leaves and uses her hands to toss them in a massive wood-fired wok.
The tea sizzles and sputters, giving off aromas of wilted greens, caramel, and incense. “She's cooking the leaves for longer than usual,” Dabu says, “to drive out some of the extra humidity.
“This time of year, with this much rain, all bets are off,” Dabu goes on, explaining that too much rainfall means there's no guarantee the tea will be any good, and too much moisture in the air means it takes extra skill to dry it properly. “You really have to know how to work with the leaves.”
Getting this step right is crucial for good pu-erh. You have to cook the leaves enough to break them down and drive away moisture, but not so much that you completely shut off the enzymes that cause oxidation, as you would if you were making green tea. Processed properly, the tea will slowly oxidize and ferment after it's dried, transforming over the years and decades from a sprightly green into an earthy brown with layers of dried fruit, leather, petrichor. Over time, the fresh top notes of the tea fade into something deeper, almost medicinal. Brackish bitterness becomes a mellow sweetness that lingers in your throat. The brew turns silky in the mouth and its warmth slinks through your body. It's rib-sticking.
It's this capacity for aging that's made pu-erh such an object of desire, that's driven prices up a thousandfold over the past couple of decades. Some old-school drinkers in Hong Kong won't even touch the stuff until it's been aged for 10 to 30 years—anything younger is too green, they'll say, too rough on the stomach.
The weird thing is, in Yunnan, almost no one ages their tea. Until the pu-erh rush of the past few decades, most locals didn't even know you could age pu-erh. Ask producers today if they have any interest in the stuff and they mostly respond with a shrug. "I prefer tea that's bitter first, then hits you with sweetness later," one tells me. "Aged pu-erh is only sweet."
Once Er Lu finishes cooking the leaves, she rolls and kneads them by hand to squeeze out even more moisture. Then she spreads them out onto mats to dry for hours in the tropical sun. The timing for all of this is critical: Wait too long to fire the leaves after picking and they may oxidize too much; knead them too little or too long and the taste won't be right; dry them on a too-humid day and the day's production may brew up cloudy or bland.
Paul gives some of his farmers specifications for how he'd like them to process their tea; for other sources he buys the loose tea as is. From there, he tastes and tastes and tastes, brewing fresh tea well into the night, as he composes blends of material from multiple sources for each of his productions. Once he's settled on a blend, he'll take his haul of maocha—"rough" loose tea—to one of Xishuangbanna's many factories where workers in hot, hazy rooms portion out leaves, steam them for a few seconds until soft and pliable, and press them into dense disks called cakes for easy transport and, ultimately, long-term aging.
After working through a few rounds of tea, Er Lu sits down with us and the rest of the family for a lunch of wild herbs dipped in prickly chile sauce, a deeply satisfying chicken and rice porridge, and refreshing pork and winter melon soup. And moonshine, of course: the preferred drink of tea farmers everywhere, cheaper than water and as good for killing stowaway ticks as for toasting every five minutes, as you do in Yunnan.
Meet your pusherman, Paul Murray, the American tea dealer behind White2Tea, which hawks boutique blends—and strong highs—to Western tea obsessives.Palani Mohan
Like most pushers, Paul doesn't talk much about himself. But you already know him. You went to high school together, where his uniform was band T-shirts, baggy jeans, and giant headphones. There was that one party senior year when you spent hours getting blazed while he spoke at length about Titian and Nirvana—then you graduated and never heard from him again.
After getting his degree in fine arts, Paul moved to China to study Chinese in 2005. He wasn't a tea drinker then—a brief stint as marketing director for an Italian wine company and an obsession with poker kept his attention elsewhere—and later he only adopted a tea habit as a source of caffeine to keep him up during hours-long online gaming sessions. But as he drank his way through the world of tea, he noticed how he kept getting sucked into pu-erh's gravity well.
“The first time someone introduced me to really high-quality old-tree material was when I saw that other teas just couldn't hang,” he says. Eventually he amassed more than he could drink in a lifetime and in 2011 started selling some of his stash to buy even more. In 2014, White2Tea became his full-time business. In 2015 he moved from Beijing to Guangzhou in part because he prefers the latter's climate for storing and aging pu-erh.
Twice a year, in spring and fall, Paul swaps home in Guangzhou for a flophouse in Menghai, a small city of 63,000 in Xishuangbanna that thanks to its proximity to a number of tea mountains has become one of Yunnan's major pu-erh trading centers. It's a big but concentrated business: Pu-erh only comes from Yunnan, and only from the big-leaf assamica variety of the tea plant processed in a particular way. While you can buy cakes of pu-erh all over China and across the internet, you never really know if you're getting what you think you're getting unless you buy the maocha yourself and watch over its production. And even then, farmers and middlemen may swap one lot for another right under your nose.
And like many dealers of intrigue, Paul prefers not to show his face on camera. He only agreed to take me around Yunnan on the condition that we keep him under wraps. Why the secrecy? “Maybe it's a Wisconsin thing,” he says. “But I feel like my face isn't the point. It's a conscious decision to keep me out of the brand.”
That choice reflects his broader frustration with the tea industry—both Chinese and Western—that privileges self-described experts, origin statements, and Orientalist exoticism over raw product quality, especially considering how many of those experts exaggerate the rareness of a tea or the age of the trees, or flat-out lie about where it really comes from.
“There are statements some companies make about their tea that if you spend any time here you know can't be true.” Paul's normally a pretty chill guy, but here his gentle Midwestern cadence turns to rancor. “They say these leaves are from 800-year-old trees or from that super-rare area. If you know the market prices for that material, it's obvious there's no way. But I can't say anything about it, because if you try to be truthful, there's a thousand vested interests rooting for you to fail.”
So where most tea descriptions are choked with tasting notes and questionable histories, Paul' are maddeningly spare. This year he hit peak obscurantism with a production he calls the Treachery of Storytelling Pt. 2, which costs $369 for just 200 grams and features a label scrawled with purple text shouting, Magritte style, this is not old arbor puer.
Stones compress steamed leaves into dense cakes.Palani Mohan
Published in 2013, Dr. Jinghong Zhang's book Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic is the definitive English-language text on the subject. Zhang's chief metaphor for describing the tea's complexities, controversies, and contradictions is jianghu, which translates literally as "rivers and lakes" but refers to a storied literary and cultural concept of a "non-governmental space…[with] its own chaos, full of dangers and contests" where martial artists and rogue knights converge and "bandits…declare their tough resistance to authority."
Those bandits are literal as well as metaphorical. In 2015, Chinese officials arrested five people for counterfeiting eight metric tons of tea under the famous Dayi brand, which they would have been able to sell for almost a million dollars, a roughly 40-fold profit margin. But for every fraudulent tea shipment caught by authorities, countless others slip through the cracks.
Compared with most teas, sold anonymously through layers of middlemen, it'd seem that understanding pu-erh—which has established brands and recognizable labels—should be more objective. If two people brew two separate pu-erh cakes from the same production, they should, in theory, be drinking the same thing. But it's that very presumption of authenticity that makes pu-erh so confounding and ambiguous. Separating a pu-erh from the stories built around it comes down to each and every drinker. Who do you believe, what can you believe, and how much can you trust your own senses about what's true?
It's strange to think that for all of pu-erh's history—its primordial heritage in Yunnan, the centuries of human life built around it—these modern cultural constructs and obsessions are only a few decades old. When I talked to Dr. Zhang by phone she told me, “Before the 2000s, the very definition of pu-erh wasn't clear to most people in Yunnan.” Even now, she said, “the so-called art of making pu-erh is still on the road of being invented.”
Paul's not interested in helping anyone understand what pu-erh is or what it really means. “I'd be thrilled for someone else to take that up,” he says. The innate vitality of the tea matters to him far more than the fluttering factual details we're trained to focus on as consumers. Drill too far down into that stuff, and soon “you're carrying around so much baggage that you're more focused on what something should be than what it actually is.
“I think people think about this stuff too much,” Paul goes on. “It's like trying to think about sex while you're having sex—can't you just enjoy the sex? If you ever try to describe a high to someone, the words always fall short.”
Some of Yunnan’s tea factories focus on smaller boutique clients, like Paul. On the other end of the spectrum is this enormous tea factory in Xishuangbanna, which can handle multiton pressings.Palani Mohan
A couple days later we're hanging out at Paul's office, a buddy's no-frills white-walled tea shop in Menghai.
The word shop suggests a place where you can actually buy tea, which is a bit of a misnomer in this case, as Paul's friend Ge already sold his entire season's harvest before it was finished being picked. Ge is from Lao Banzhang, a remote village on Bulang mountain in southern Xishuangbanna that produces some of the most sought-after—and counterfeited—pu-erh in Yunnan. So, while you can't buy tea at this Menghai storefront, it makes a nice place for friends and family to hang out and drink. Ge can spare the rent. Paul suspects his tea brings in half a million dollars a year.
Pu-erh from Lao Banzhang is prized less for its taste than for its strength of somatic character, what Paul calls "body feel" and some tea people refer to as qi, literally "breath" or "energy flow." When it comes to Chinese tea, especially high-end pu-erh, taste is only the beginning. A tea's qi hits you deeper than any flavor. It flows to your shoulders, your chest, your belly. It can creep between tight joints and turn your muscles into jelly and make your skull feel like it's being caressed under your skin. There's pleasant qi and unpleasant qi; this Lao Banzhang we're drinking delivers bombastic qi. A few sips in and I'm already sweating. A few more and my chest feels like a furnace. My knee pits are drenched—did you know knee pits could sweat?—which I only register by reaching down and touching them, because I can't feel my legs anymore.
When it comes to high-end pu-erh, taste is only the beginning—its energy flows to your shoulders, your chest, your belly.
I have to turn a fan on my face because the high is getting too intense. Everything is sunlight and the world tastes ecstatic and someone in the distance is saying something fascinating and I want to write it down but the pen keeps slipping out of my fingers.
Paul and his buddies are used to this kind of juice. I'm not. Very little genuine Lao Banzhang makes its way to the Western market. Even in China, most of the good stuff is scooped up fast by plutocrats with money to burn.
Fortunately a street vendor is passing by with rods of bamboo stuffed with sticky rice that he grills over a portable charcoal stove. We take a breather and eat for a while. The rush slows, but half an hour later the tea is still dancing in my throat. We move to another tea and carry on drinking time. The hours taste like minutes.
I know how all this sounds. There's a lot of dreamy language that makes its way into tea culture, but good pu-erh really is drugs. You do have to practice the high, though. Pay close attention to what's happening to your body. The effect is different for everyone, because you need to meet the tea halfway, open yourself up to what it's telling you. But when it hits you, you know. I've drunk pu-erh as soft and warm as a down comforter on a winter morning; another as exhilarating as that first deep breath of mountain air on a hike through the woods. One bad trip sent me spiraling into a panic so severe I had to pop a Xanax to calm down.
Wang Hong Ying savors a pu-erh processed by her brother, Hong Cai. Paul sells their tea in a Sister Brother set, so customers can compare the siblings' processing styles.Palani Mohan
Paul's friend Xiao Chen runs another tea shop in Menghai. Business has been slow this week, so he's agreed to drive Paul and me around to eat noodles and shop for water buffalo meat while pointing out all the edible fruits, plants, and bark you can find along the road. Today we're making a trip to visit his girlfriend's family in Ya Kou Lao Zhai on Nannuo mountain.
Tea has been good to Nannuo. An hour away from Menghai with decent roadways, it's one of the more accessible mountains in Xishuangbanna. The pu-erh grown here commands only a fraction of the price of Lao Banzhang's, but in Ya Kou Lao Zhai, the second highest village on Nannuo, the street is lined with solar-powered lamps and McMansions all built within the last decade. Xiao Chen's girlfriend Wang Hong Ying greets us by the door of one.
In the past, Hong Ying's family grew more corn than tea, but as the pu-erh boom took off, they, like many families, changed their priorities. Hong Ying is just 21 years old, but she brews tea with studied grace and precision. She, her brother, and her father are all practiced tea producers; the tea we're drinking now was processed by her brother, Hong Cai, who's all of 24 but already making impressive tea with a deep sweetness and calming energy. “What do you think of your brother's tea?” I ask. She smiles, demure. “It's…a little more aggressive than the way I make it. More masculine.” Hong Cai breaks a sheepish grin to take another sip. He's the tea maker who likes his pu-erh bitter first, then sweet; Hong Ying is after more softness and elegance. “We're each other's teacher,” he says.
For lunch, we move from the patio to a small wooden shelter on stilts connected to but dwarfed by the giant modern house. Up until a year ago, this creaking one-room dwelling was what three generations of Hong Ying's family called home. Five decades of soot and smoke are baked into the walls from the bonfire in the center of the floor. Hong Ying is cooking with her mother, Li A Zhen, a feast of greens from the mountain, sour preserved bamboo, and some especially delicious grubs fried as crisp as potato chips.
I ask Mom what she thinks of her kids getting into pu-erh. “I want them to make their own choices and do whatever makes them happy,” she says. Hong Cai admits he's young and that he doesn't know what the future holds for him yet. But even in his lifetime he's seen how much his village has to gain from the tea—as well as what it might lose. “We worry about the pollution from the cars,” he explains. Just a few generations ago, mules were still the dominant mode of transportation around here. Now there's a car in every driveway and more on the road from tourists looking to buy tea and hike through the forest. “The more money people here make, the more they drive.”
What's in a Label? Pu-erh labels often offer frustratingly little information, and what they do share is often inaccurate. There's no regulation about origins, age statements, even what brand produced a tea. You might see a sequence of four numbers on a cake, like 7542. Pu-erh people call these codes recipes, which refer to specific factory blends. The first two digits correspond to the year the blend was introduced (not the year the cake was pressed)—in this case, 1975. The third digit corresponds to the size of the leaves (graded 1–9). The fourth refers to the factory; 2 is the Menghai Tea Factory, and 7542 is their most prestigious recipe. But a recipe is far from a guarantee. Quality varies by year and season; it even depends on where the tea is aged. So the best way to read a label? Ignore it and taste the tea on its own terms.
We return to the patio after lunch to drink more tea and snack on cucumbers as fat as grapefruits and as sweet as melons. Then we spot Quezi, a relative of the family who's also in the tea business, ambling down the street with a bundle of greens under his arm.
Quezi doesn't like pu-erh that much, he says. He'd rather drink hot water. “And I like to have a smoke and some alcohol every day,” adds the 74-year-old. I ask him what's changed in the village since pu-erh took off. “Look around you,” he says, laughing and gesturing toward the road and the basketball hoop in the neighbor's driveway. “Everything. They repaired the roads and we make more money. But now we feel like what we have isn't enough, that we need to do better. The next generation can do better.”
On the other side of the table, Hong Ying is rinsing out her gaiwan—a 4-ounce lidded bowl—for the next batch of leaves. The idea is to brew the tea briefly with a lot of leaves, then re-brew the leaves again and again. The flavor and character evolves from the first to the fifth to the 10th brew. It's all part of an unceremonial but meticulous process that' not at all native to Yunnan. When buyers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere on the mainland came to the province to buy tea, they brought the style of brewing with them; now it's ubiquitous.
Quezi remembers a time when everyone was more casual about the whole thing. “We'd set a big kettle over the stove and throw in some tea leaves and let it all boil,” he says. “You didn't need to measure or anything. And after we drank the tea we'd add more water and boil it again, and do that at least five times. The more you do it, the sweeter the tea gets.”
Hong Ying pours water into the gaiwan, then decants the brew into a pitcher, then pours into thimble-size cups. At this point we've been drinking for well over an hour and I'm a little high again. Paul's sipping silently, looking out onto the road, and I'm chewing on the central contradiction of drinking pu-erh at its source: that as much as it is central to life here, the one thing you won't hear is any kind of dogma about what tea is or how it should be consumed.
One idea does persist. As Dr. Zhang, chronicler of pu-erh's allure and culture, puts it: “There's a sense that once you drink pu-erh, all other tea is useless.”
How Pu-Erh Becomes Pu-Erh
Depending on how you look at it, processing pu-erh from fresh leaves to finished tea takes as little as a day or as long as decades. Here's a cheat sheet to understanding the life of pu-erh, from tree to cup.
Muti - Folio Art
All tea is made from Camellia sinensis, but to be pu-erh, the leaves must be from the large-leaf C. sinensis var. assamica, grown in Yunnan Province, and processed to encourage oxidation and microbial fermentation.
You'll find pu-erh bushes densely packed on plantations, but many obsessives go after tea made from old-arbor trees in wild, spread-out forest groves. Ancient trees—some centuries old—draw more complex nutrients from the soil for a tea with richer character.
First, the leaves are picked by hand, then laid out on long beds indoors to wither.
The withered leaves are then tossed in massive woks by hand. This “kill green” step drives out moisture from the leaves and moderates enzymes that would cause excessive oxidation.
The leaves are then rolled and kneaded to develop flavor and aroma while driving off additional moisture. Finally, they're sun-dried.
Most pu-erh is then compressed into dense cakes with heavy stones or hydraulic presses. People originally pressed the tea to make it easier to transport over long distances. Now they continue the practice to facilitate better storage and aging.
The tea can be pressed into a number of shapes, and the degree of compression also impacts how the tea will age. The tighter a cake is compressed, the slower it ages.
Mushroom = jin cha
Cake = cha bing
Brick = cha zhuan
Bowl = tuo cha
Now the tea is ready for its journey across the world for drinking or aging. A pu-erh's storage climate influences how it ages: A cake stored for 10 years in Hong Kong will taste different from one in Seattle. Naturally, pu-erh nerds obsess about where and how their tea was stored as much as how it was grown.
WHAT THE HECK IS FAKE PUERH TEA?
DEFINING PUERH TEA AND WHAT IS CONSIDERED FAKE TEA
“Is my Puerh tea fake?” Frightened words uttered by more than a few tea drinkers. Fake Puerh tea has become an increasing concern for collectors worried about authenticity and safety in the past decade. Puerh tea’s rise from an inexpensive agricultural product to a widely sought after collectors item has also stoked the fires of the forgery community in China. With fake tea so prevalent in the marketplace, it is important for consumers to understand just what qualifies as fake Puerh tea and how to successfully avoid the fakes. By definition, Puerh tea must come from Yunnan province. One common way to fake Puerh tea is to use teas from another region, which are less expensive to purchase. Teas from neighboring countries and provinces such as Myanmar, Vietnam, Guangxi, and Laos are common substitutes. The lower priced teas from nearby mean an increased profit margin for the forger. A recent scandal in Guangdong used tea from Hunan as a forgery, earning a tidy profit for the crooks before local authorities nabbed them.
COMMON EXAMPLES OF FAKE PUERH TEA
Puerh tea can be faked is by forging fake wrappers and duping the unwitting consumer into thinking they are buying a famous brand. Famous brands have collectible value, whereas a knockoff has very little value. Knockoffs usually (but not always) use inferior quality tea. For tea drinkers interested in collecting famous productions, this can be a big hazard. Remember, teas with an illogical price tag are often fake. Tea is just like any good, you get what you pay for. Just like the $10 “Rolex” watches getting peddled on the street, if the prices are fishy, so are the goods.
AGED TEAS AND SEASONS
Inaccurate age or season representation is another way that Puerh tea can be faked. In some cases vendors will use less expensive tea from summer or fall and market it as spring tea, which commands a higher price and is usually higher quality. In addition to this, the age of Puerh tea is often misrepresented, both intentionally and unintentionally. With older productions of Puerh tea from the 1990’s and earlier completely lacking any date stamping, it can be very difficult to authenticate the exact production date of a given tea. Even for our White2tea collection, with certain teas it is nearly impossible to nail down the exact production date of some teas. Most aged teas have change hands many times by the time they are 15 years old, so authenticating the exact origin becomes like a game of telephone, asking what one vendor heard from another. To avoid confusion, focus on the quality of the tea rather than the date or season. It is better to buy a tea you enjoy for its character than a tea with a 30-year-old age claim.
TEA REGIONS AND FAMOUS VILLAGES
Regional terroir is highly sought after in Puerh tea. Certain regions like Laobanzhang or Bingdao (pictured below) command a high price for their soil and pedigree. However, villages such as Mansong or Bingdao have an extremely limited amount of material. For example, their old arbor tea is in such limited quantity that it rarely makes it to the open market. This lack of material and high brand recognition is a perfect storm for fake tea. Producers will use material from surrounding areas and claim it to be Bingdao old arbor, even though it is small tree tea from neighboring villages at best. For those unfamiliar with village names, it is as if someone claims their wine to be a French ordeaux but it is actually from Spain. Although the concerns over fake Puerh tea are real, the situation is not all doom and gloom. In fact, the overall Puerh market situation is still easy enough to navigate. Find a vendor with a good reputation. Purchase teas that are not the most famous productions. And purchase teas on their merits as an enjoyable tea, rather than promises of 30-year-old miracles for low prices. When in doubt, follow your own taste buds and wallet. Following prices and quality that fit your budget and expectations will never leave you disappointed.
Is Pu’er Cha Bing an Investment Tool?
by Leo Kwan https://www.teaguardian.com/what-is-tea/post-fermented-category/valuation-puer/
Zhongcha ( short for Zhongguo Chaye Gongsi, ie China Tea Trade Company ) had been basically the only tea factory in Yunnan a few years after the Communist takeover, until after the mid 1980’s when the tight control of the market is gradually relaxed. Therefore merchandize from that period abound. In the earlier days, theer was no production date on the label, people now just claim how old a product is. This one claims to be 50 years old, and fetching over a hundred thousand CNY. It comes complete with new cockroach bites and older moisture stains. I’d rather donate the money to a nursery home.
I have not seen Harry for over three years now, so it is okay to read my notes on the iPad waiting for him in the uncomfortable tiny chair of this pricy little cafe at the entrance to the basement theatre in this giant skyscraper that is one of the world’s most expensive property — the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong. The coffee is mediocre and the space is crammed. It is understandable; they must have a big rent to pay.
Pu’er cha bing: investment or just a toy?
Harry is the head of an investment advisory of an international financial company. His office is high, high above this cafe. It was a delight to catch up with him; those I maintain friendship with are all nice guys after all.
He asked me quite a bit about collecting pu’er discuses ( cha bing ). Like a lot other high income middle class males in Hong Kong, Harry aspires to collecting red wine and those compressed tea objects, thinking that they will rise in value in time and are good gastronomic products. Harry was certainly not the first friend to ask about such subject, and I believe a lot have been persuaded by the many seemingly harmless neighbourhood or hideaway teashops into stocking up at least a few.
If he were buying products that are a few hundred dollars a piece I would not be triggered to write about it, but he was talking about many tens of thousand USD a piece.
confronting the facts
If you have read my other writings about compressed pu’er products, you may remember that I do not have similar opinion as many others in the trade. I do not think that they are any higher gastronomic value than comparable loose leaf. What about investment value? Don’t they all appreciate in time?
Before you read on, please be warned that this article may offend tea consumers like Harry himself; or some tea merchant friends who rely on the speculation of pu’er cha bing to pay the rent or the accounting fees for their Panama account. All are welcome to comment below.
A pu’er cha bing that claims to be from Tong Chang Hao, a real old tea factory in Yunnan before the Communist regime. What would you do with such a thing even if it is genuine?
don’t all pu’er appreciate anyway?
They really do, overall speaking, but there are big details that you should know, if by any chance you are interested in buying some for your “investment”.
Before we go into these details, let’s revisit a few basic facts:
1. There are two distinct sub-categories of compressed pu’ers: shengcha and shu cha. Shengcha is said to continue to improve in taste value, while some believe shu cha reaches peak in less than 10 years. Because of that myth, shengcha is always fetching a higher price than shu cha even at the same chronological age. Shengcha is the type that takes up the majority of speculative trading.
2. It makes perfect sense to stock up a few pieces of cha bings for maturity and to save some money not having to buy from more expensive matured stocks, since pu’er does improve with time under the right conditions and matured ones always demand a higher price, as in wine. However, it is quite another matter to buy with the intention to invest. This article deals with this latter idea.
3. This article is not about normal trade to trade auction, which happens in many commodities, including matured cha bings. However, this is not to say there are no issues even in such auctions. Fakes, forgeries and other malpractices abound, but these are other topics.
4. Some cha bings may go for a few tens while some others could be hundreds of thousands USD. The stake can be much higher to certain people and the temptation to cheat equally high.
This is one of the thousands of products made to look like antique with a torn label of a shop name from the first half of the last century.
If you do not mind overpaying a few cups of tea, it is okay you buy by following your impulse. If you want real value for your money or look at it as investment, you have to know in the very beginning that whether you are already over paying for a decorative disc made of dried tealeaves. That brings us to point number 1:
no valuation standard in compressed pu’er
You may have seen a few pamphlets or magazines printed in simplified Chinese declaring the values of so and so grade of so and so year from so and so factory is worth this and that dollar ( or Chinese yuan ). The fact is, within Mainland China, where there is no freedom of press and no freedom of association, would there be any independent price report? Do you ever think that even any economic figures the Beijing government announced have been real? What do you think that helped fuel the pu’er price bubble in the beginning anyway? Unlike wine, there is no independent critic or valuation system for the commodity at all. As far as I know, there is not even a task force set out to do that or any institution intended for such development. The interest of too many parties are involved. Many are too dangerous to touch. The price tag on any particular high price cha bing is open for interpretation.
7 Responses
· Comments7
1. Leo Kwan 2016.04.14 at 12:07 pm
@Ming, maybe you should not drink that Laos shengcha pu’er if it is stored badly. Bad storage attracts the wrong group of fungi. Likely dust and germs as well. Your health is far more precious than any dried leaves.
2. chiguchi 2016.04.09 at 1:07 am
An investment in commodities need to have the following to considered. the initial value (by market price of trading at release). The intergrity of the warehousing. climate control as to humidity, temp and the effects of aging. and finally the final value at sales established by auction, qualified appraisers and the actual sale. The wine industry can be used as a guideline or the art world. The Pu’er tea market sound like no standards available yet for an investor to consider. Perhaps the reason to invest is his own belief that he has something exceptional and the ability to tell others of his great tea he has. I been told that the value of art is what the buyer wants to pay. Perhaps Pu’eris similar. Let the buyer be happy that he believes he has the best tea because he paid a ton of money. food for thought.
Leo Kwan 2016.04.10 at 11:35 am
That is exactly what I mean, and yet those who have been paying ridiculous amount of money for much lower value are professional investors or people who think they are finance savvy. I think their knowledge in tea needs to match up with their common sense in the money market, or they simply have an emotional hole there they need something else to fill.
Sam 2017.08.04 at 1:04 pm
I would classify pu erh as an ‘alternative investment asset’. In the financial world such assets are known to be less transparent, harder to value, and have less liquidity in transactions. Yet in such a situation, an investor with knowledge can outperform investors with less knowledge.
3. Ming 2016.04.08 at 3:31 am
Amazing, and so eye opening. I myself have connections in China, and before I though that the best is always ridiculously expensive, but it was all an illusion. But may I ask for a certain unit of puer tea, of which I have the intention to invest in, what is a good price range for something with the gastronomical effects? Which way do you suggest, how do you do it, if I may what is the “Leo way”. Price is but a number, but it is the skill to see through market flaws that will help me become a skilled collector
Leo Kwan 2016.04.10 at 11:41 am
@Ming, You are always welcome to send any info, sample, or photos of whatever you want to get to know better of. However, I have to be honest that there are literally hundreds of pu’er producers in Yunnan alone, if not thousands ( counting those that are outside of the book ), we cannot say we know even a fraction of them. We rely also on tasting, research and interviews to understand what is the physicality and backgrounds of any tea. We are always learning, and look forward to your input.
§ Ming 2016.04.10 at 11:46 am
Thank you! This year I’m trying to invest in both puer and zisha teapots….there are so many options in and out of China. A was given a Lao sheng pu tea brick last year and my friend said he had stored it for decades in Canada. But the storage seemed not as “organized” as yours and the leaf appearance was light brown and the liquor came out a little muddy, maybe I brewed it incorrectly. I’d hate to waste it,
Pu’er: Myth of Origin & Reality of Blending
by Leo Kwan
Open air yumcha “daipaidong” in the 1950’s. Such eateries played major role in the social fabric for the lower class in those days. Since a majority were refugees running away from communist rule, most people at that time were not rich. Notice the very dark colour tea in their tea cups.
differentiating facts from myths
The pu’er that I have grown up with in Hong Kong has never been a production purely from Yunnan, regardless of all the fabricated history about the tea that you may have read elsewhere.
“It is a fact that the craft of post-fermentation originated in Hong Kong…” expressed Zou Jia Ju, Chairman of the Yunnan Tea Association, in a conference on the Yunnan origin designation. That was because Hong Kong was the single key market for pu’er tea in the very beginning, and from there spreading to the rest of the world. It was the only market, and then the re-export center.
That is why people with some age and who grew up drinking the tea have an understanding of it very different from what recent marketing has been propagating. Even today, when Yunnan is fully capable of selling the tea to whoever they want on this planet, over 80% of pu’er produced in this gigantic southwestern province is sold to the other side of China in Guangdong, the province immediately north of Hong Kong (1).
Since the beginning, Guangdong has always been the support centre for pu’er supply to Hong Kong. The raw materials has logically been fetched from the vicinity. When Zou Bing Liang, the grand-daddy of modern pu’er began studying the post-fermentation process, he came to Guangdong and Hong Kong to do so.
how real is the claim of the origin?
“Starting from the 1950’s, Mainland China had practiced ‘planned economy’. Since there was no instruction for Yunnan to produce pu’er tea for export, and more because people in Yunnan did not drink this tea, so there was no production for this commodity. It was the Guangdong Tea Import and Export Company (a national institution in Guangdong province at that time) that organized the piled-fermentation technique to produce the tea to sell to Hong Kong. The raw materials came partly from Yunnan, where they were instructed to sell a portion of their sun-wilted raw tealeaves to Guangdong. Other sources came from Guangdong locally, and also from Vietnam. Since then, Guangxi, Hunan, Sichuan followed to use ‘small-leaf types’ for the pile-fermentation process to produce for export.”
— Yang Wei Ren, Rediscovering the Origin of the “Maturation Craft” of Yunnan Puer Tea, Kunming Tea Culture Development Council, downloaded May 12, 2009 ( translation by Tea Guardian )
There has never been a pu’er drinking culture in yunnan
Yunnan is planted more with other commodities than tea trees. As a matter of fact, for every acre of tea, there are more than 8 acres of tobacco (2), amongst other major commodities such as grains, sugarcanes, rubber and coffee. Contrast this with the situation in Fujian — another major tea production province, where fruit is a major commodity — for every 3 acres of any fruit, there is 1 acre of tea! (3)
There has never been a strong local pu’er drinking culture to give soul to its production in Yunnan. Tea has always been a thing for trading rather than part of life, unlike the neighbouring Sichuan, or far out east in Guangdong, Fujian or Zhejiang. In Yunnan, tea used to be those dark compressed tablets to trade with the other ethnic groups or foreigners in the old days, or black tea for export during the Second World War. (4) It is only in very recent years that one sees the popularity of pu’er tea surpassed that of green tea. That is because of the surge of new pu’er tea companies and then slowing down of national pu’er sales, they have infiltrated almost everywhere in the province to push for local business.
tealeaves are collected outside of yunnan
Although the wakening of the tea industry in Yunnan to the price potential of pu’er tea has attracted a lot more people to produce the raw materials for the last two decades and some, during the height of price speculation between 2005 to 2008, leaf collection agents were active in provinces as far east as Fujian, and as south as Laos and Vietnam. Obviously local production was not catching up with what seemed to be an ever expanding demand to make more compressed tea to wholesale to the tens of thousands of teashops old and new to stock up to the ceiling with them. In turn, they need to feed even more individual “collectors” believing in the myth that these cha bings ( tea “cakes”, so to speak ) would always appreciate in value.
Trans-region raw material collection activities made a great impact on other teas, throwing off the margins for some of the pre-orders and forcing up market price. The regions most affected by this have been Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong, and Fujian.
That is also why pu’ers produced between this period are to be more doubted with claims of pure origin, although whether the pu’er “cake” in your storage will appreciate in value depends on a lot more other things than this.
The few record setting prices in auction reports that perpetuate the internet were rare arrangements rather than recurring functions like that of a normal commodity market. As in the selling of art pieces, antiques, or newly constructed apartments in much manipulated market economy of China, eyebrow raising prices are arranged performances intended to set the momentum for price surges to the benefits of the commodity producers, wholesalers, and as in many commodities, money launders. Pu’er cha bing is no exception. For a market whose access to information is restricted and alternative voices punished severely, puppeteering of anything is relatively much easier than in the West. The privileged few who live above the laws ( until standing on the wrong side of the power ) are always the benefactors.
The diamond index has been rising steadily through the past 55 years with an average annual increase of about 14%.
John Henry Belter (1804-1863) is synonymous with American Rococo Revival furniture. One such piece in excellent condition can be obtained at around 5000USD, i.e. 30K CNY. The price has risen only very slightly since 2005. That is understandable for the economy of US.
In 2005, similar blue china from imperial kiln commanded 2~5M CNY a piece. In 2016, they have appreciate 10 times in almost all auctions worldwide. The general over valuation of commodities is fanned by the urge of a huge population of eager investors.
Two red label “Zhongcha” brand pu’er chabings, claiming to be over 50 years old. In 2005 they can be demanding 500K to 2M CNY a piece. In 2016, most have fallen to tens of thousand.
We compare three other collectible categories against pu’er cha bings. Which one, for the past ten years, do you think has risen the most in value and which the least?
Little actual value
Point 2: Unlike Ming vases or two-room apartments, where there have been established institutions and mechanisms to set the tangible values of, pu’er cha bings that are actually a hundred years old are fetching prices that are much higher than any other non-perishable antique items of the same period, yet it is not providing any corresponding value of historical, artistic, or detail material reference of the time. Needless to say, a mouldy lump of dried leaves kept under questionable packaging materials for over a century or even 50 years do not have the utilitarian values of any realty estate of comparable price in Mainland China, nor the basic functions of tea neither.
The only means of valuation would be its resale potential in a speculative market basing on who is the next person in need of throwing out a lot of CNY for something which does not have much innate values.
While there is a market for a diamond with the relevant certification, or a porcelain piece from a certain kiln of a certain craftsmanship or certain purpose, a cha bing that is a hundred years old should not be of more value than a Victorian chair from a reputable craftsman and it should not be fetching any higher price than it, even if we accept the fact that the bourgeoising market of China is making everything more expensive. Even the over valuation of many of the share-stocks there is child’s play compared to the science fictional price of speculative pu’er cha bing.
Where there is still an adulterated audited annual report for the inflated value of a company share, there is next to nothing to reference an old cha bing. Labels and packing materials, if traceable at all, are coarsely made and easily re-manufactured. Documentations are broken at best, and infiltrated with myths wrapped in fictional authenticity.
A faked antique pu’er chabing claiming to be from the late Qing Dynasty. The “Yi Zhao Feng” shop name on the label was actually a dimsum teahouse in Eastern China. The forgers did not even care to re-create a label more appropriate for pu’er tea and simply used a found old printing block for flyers for that old teahouse for a chabing label and claimed it was from Yunnan. It is not known how many people have been cheated, but reminent publicity materials claim a discus is worth a few hundred thousand Chinese yuan. Compressed tea products in various forms using this similar label are still available in a large number of auction sites and online shops at the time of this writing, though the scam had been busted two times in the past 10 years.
Imitation abounds
That brings us to a crucial point (3): quite a number of producers would not just sit there to watch the big brothers making all the money with basically the same thing that they are fully capable of producing or better. One way they fight back is to make imitations. Frankly speaking, ANY person with access to a compressing set up and a bit of printing resources is fully capable of producing a look-alike of a disc of dried leaves the big brothers are selling for the price of an apartment. And imitations for any products or commodities in Mainland China is no news. The problem here is multi-fold:
Firstly the price of a commodity, genuine or faked, is dependent on its quantity. Imitations that may even fool the reseller put a big unknown on this element.
Secondly, if even jade and master painting on rice paper can be faked, an imitation 50-year-old cha bing with scanty traces of authenticity is no challenge to the great pool of talents of Chinese forgers and myth propagators. The thousands of tea sites and bloggers hungry for eye-catching contents simply eagerly copy and paste the initial myths with the innocent purpose of increasing site traffic, but in effect becoming accomplices of the scam. Where reality can be manipulated, fiction can appear more real than real — a faked old cha bing can fetch a price higher than a genuine one.
Some high-profile cheats may have been busted, but the same phony products are still covering the walls and pages of auction sites and pu’er shops. Disguises of all fashions trying to sell you a cha bing with certain history at a pricetag far lower than its supposedly high appraisement. Greed is such an easy yet effective bait. A population who is conditioned to conform and follow brain-washing information is prone to deceit.
The sign reads: “…Product Qizi Cha Bing, each $88 ( HKD; 88 HKD is about 11 USD or 73 CNY )… store it well to turn it into treasure.” This store keeper scattered the products in an open plexiglass tray facing a busy street adjacent to some garages.
Point 4: no standards in storage, packaging and handling hygiene
While in wine, requirements are detailed for all elements involved that would affect the quality of a vintage, none such exist for pu’er. It is all dependent on the practice or malpractice of the producer and the collector. Temperature, humidity, light, the effect of the tea’s immediate packing material and even the surface hygiene of the tea and the duration of storage all work together with the initial quality of the tealeaves to form the final gastronomic value of the tea. Negating a standard for such requirements is like saying no standard is needed for the production processing of any other tea. Yet different producers, resellers and collectors all have their own ideas of the ideal conditions.
The pu’er tea annual throughput in Yunnan was 130K tons in 2015, a 13% increase year to year. It is unknown how much has been sold as loose tea and how much as cha bings and other compressed tea forms, but the latter is a significant percentage in most pu’er factories. The rate has been increasing at such speed since the early 2000’s.
Each “small” bamboo wrap here contains 28 pu’er tea discuses, in the traditional 7×4 configuration.
Suppose the original factory does make the best quality, who is there to judge if that quality is upkept through storing a rice paper wrap tea through, say 20 years? And at that point of time, how does this original product compare to an imitation? This brings us to a major issue about the whole subcategory of pu’er: Quality of storage, packaging and handling hygiene.
Since such standards do not exist, not to mention a way of monitoring claims of compliance to a standard, there is NO means to understand the quality of any piece of tea discus but to trust whatever the seller claims.
Another angle to look at it is that the people who are paying for it do not care about the taste quality of the discus. The piece is just an artefact like any other antique. This brings us back to point two.
Bidders during a pu’er auction
The auction market for pu’er in China is heavily manipulated. Auction records help to set trends for retail and private sales of the commodity. Someone is benefiting from such records.
Caution: Category Killers on the Loose
Some Mainland Chinese business person with certain connections might now have been shown the translation of this writing and wittedly create some kind of fancy looking certificate to sell to sellers such that the products would seem to comply with some funny name standards by such and such authority. However, the foundation to any trusted quality system and reliability of certification is a respected legal system enforced by uncorrupted and effective regulatory bodies.
Before the government of China is developed in such aspects, which would take quite some time, associations or other bodies concerned should be taking up the lead to study and layout plans to design such standards and the ways to implement them, rather than impulsively drawing up another unrealistic move such as the IGPRPC designation of origin, which has become just another laser label that one can buy from one of the shops in the wholesale market to put on anything.
We feel obliged to tell the facts and reality because we think that the trade needs to correct itself from harming its own long-term development, and from discouraging the popularization of real tea. It is only through empowering the mass with knowledge that they can make intelligent decisions for themselves; that any culture, be it tea or any other culinary category, or any other human activities, arts, technologies, etc for that matter, can prosper.
Cha bing is a form of tea. It is not a commodity for speculation. One may collect them much like wine with the intention for consumption, and save a percentage of the value appreciation. Turning this tea product into financial trading is dangerous for the trade, stupid for followers, and evil of the defrauder.
Like wine, pu’er does mature when properly packaged and stored. Well matured pu’er is worth better. However, see it as just another bottle of Château Lafite at best. Most products are not.
Pu’er cha bings in columns of seven discuses each, wrapped in bamboo bark, as in the old way
footnotes
1. Liu Min (reporter), A Future Quality Standard for Puer Tea, Sina Finance 2006-03-01
2. Perhaps due to the sensitivity of the issue under strong anti-smoking sentiments, the latest figure searchable for tobacco in Yunnan is 42 million acres in 1997. While in 2009, when Chinese officers announced that tea production had recovered, the area for tea was 5.2 million acres. Tea data obtained from Yunnan Tea Trade Association, writer Ding Qiang. Tobacco figure from the Agricultural Department, PRC.
3. Fujian is a much smaller province than Yunnan and the most important “garden” crop (i.e. agricultural products from the slopes) is fruit, so it is used to compare with tea rather than tobacco, which is much smaller in the province. Data obtained from the Ministry of Land and Resources of the People’s Republic of China: Land Use General Planning for Fujian Province (1997~2010). Both Fujian and Yunnan are considered major tea provinces.
4. Read more about the origin of dark tea in this chapter: Dark Tea: Origin; more about the history of black tea in Yunnan in this chapter: Black Tea: Dianhong
pu’er: where do the tealeaves come from?
Even today, 9 years after the Chinese government formally declared Yunnan as the designation of origin (IGPRPC) for pu’er tea (5), a proportion of pu’er, in particular compressed ones, are produced from a mix of raw materials from everywhere, but the claim is always such and such famous tea mountain in Yunnan. We have a list of companies doing this, but cannot have the names published here.
Collection agents in different provinces or outside of the Chinese border may not be as aggressive as before — not that they are conforming to the origin designation declaration or claims by their Yunnan tea factory clients, but because of the dramatic shrinking of the market since the price crash in 2008. Collection activities outside of Yunnan is still going on — Pu’er today is still a few times the price before the rush.
At the same time, tea growing has already been given up in some farms in Yunnan. Yet the number of pu’er tea brands and tea factories is still on the rise. Why don’t the tea factories just buy from these farms closer to home, but have to spend the extra cash for leaves elsewhere?
xishuangbana: more rubber trees than tea
Between shengcha and shu cha pu’ers, shengcha has been demanding a higher price. Shengcha, some refer to it as raw pu’er, has been the one that is driving the myth and the speculation ( and higher profit margin ). People believe that those made from what the market calls “large leaf” (6) varieties would increase in price perpetually.
Though the leaves of many tea cultivars grow large anyway, only certain local cultivars grow large young leaves for acceptable visual quality in the final shengcha products. They are stronger in taste to survive the years of maturation that will impose on them. A small proportion possesses good taste quality.
Tea tree in Pasha, Yunnan, marked with annual yield
Translation: Single bush number 3, annual yield ( dry tealeaves ) 6 to 10 kg, first flush ( green leaves ): 6 – 8 kg, — contact details —
Note: 6 – 8 kg of green leaves makes about 1 kg of dry leaves
However, there were not enough of these indigenous tea trees — those that are called “large leaf” varieties — left in Yunnan: extensive areas of older forests and old tea gardens had been cleared since the 1950’s (and only recently slowed down) to grow rubber. Unluckily that has been happening in the most famous pu’er regions in the Xishuangbana area (7).
old tea farms
Tea farms from centuries ago, deserted because of wars, famine and the changing needs in the tea market, and therefore left alone to grow freely, are the prime sources for original quality Yunnan shengcha pu’er. Yet there are not enough of these to supply the hundreds of brands that are still crazily churning out thousands of various forms of compressed tea each day. The better ones have been either the monopoly or the cartel of a small number of top brands. So where do the others get their raw materials outside of the shrinking local supplies.
new tea farms
When the price of leaves of indigenous tea trees began to rise, there seemed to be an insatiable demand for such raw materials. People jumped in to expand or setup new tea farms. Some chopped up small leaf bushes to make room for large leaf trees. Yet old tea trees couldn’t be replicated in a few years. The over expansion upon the speculative trend and then the sudden price drop meant negative returns for the new growers, who were at the lowest pecking order in the production chain and therefore the hardest hit. They could not repay loans. The bankrupted growers had to sell the land and get jobs elsewhere, or switch to other crops that yield workable returns.
Daba, the lovely local tea leaf collection manager stood under her beloved old tea tree in her “backyard”. Daba is happy because she is fully covered by a major puer company. Many have to rely on their own.
surviving in between the privileged and the powerful
Older farms, which are spinoffs from the few that produced black teas back in the late 1930’s, are more diversified with a range of cultivars and productions. They survive. Their connections with long-established factories are vital. Those who have access to older tea trees in famous regions prosper. With less competitors and an established market needs, they are now asking for a higher price than even before the crash.
On the other hand, to differentiate their “shengcha” discuses as being different from those that were made from the more usual tea trees, tea compressing factories (the so-called brands) needed to find materials at acceptable quality. The increase in new pu’er brands means a rise in demand for such leaves. That raises the price only to the better regions to access to which has since been monopolised by a few leading brands and those with privileges. Other factories need to find supply elsewhere.
One obvious candidate is leaves from the Dabai group of cultivars, which have large showy apical buds with downy silvery hairs. They originated in the eastern coastal province that is Fujian, all the way across the other end of China from Yunnan. As early as in the late 1980’s people have crossed these cultivars with local assamica varieties. Though they look good and taste sweet, but they are not strong and pungent enough as shengcha. Nevertheless, the demand during the height of the speculation craze was so great that much leaves were trucked to Yunnan. Sourcing from Fujian ceased only after the peaking of the trend.
footnotes
5. The Mainland Chinese issue of L’indication géographique protégée de la République populaire de Chine (IGPRPC), much like the French Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC, i.e. “controlled designation of origin”), or EU’s protected designation of origin (PDO), is a certification granted to certain Chinese geographical indications for teas, herbs, fruits, wines and other agricultural products.
6. Read side bar “Large Leaf? Small Leaf?”
7. Charles Mann, Addicted to Rubber, Science Magazine, July 2009, and also in Jefferson Fox, Crossing Borders, Changing Landscapes: Land Use Dynamics in the Golden Triangle, Analysis from East-West Center (US) No.92 December 2009
Pu’er: Myth of Origin & Reality of Blending
by Leo Kwan
High quality maocha from Laos, quite immediately south of the border of Yunnan
alternative sources
Older tea trees of similar indigenous cultivars of the assamica variety as in Yunnan live well across the southern borders in Vietnam, Laos and Burma (Myanmar). Tea has been in existence in these geographic neighbours for as long as recorded history. Yet they do not yet have an economic structure for better use of the plant, at least not as good as that in China. In addition to the lower cost index in these nations, collecting from these places are therefore quite viable, when one knows where to go, and who to go to.
The same reason that renders these places as lower cost sources is also why they do not have good consistency in quality. People there are still quite new to tea production. Even the most basic know-hows in plucking and drying are rudimentary, if not lacking.
That is why Yunnan collection agents have been there to spread the skills. Some are still here. Most of the leaves collected from the Southeast Asian countries are used as ingredients for the surface layer of the compressed products, for their better look.
Some others are sold as new label loose leaf shengcha varieties, such as Moon Light White, which are in effect lightly oxidized teas, as in Silver Needle or White Peony, the white teas.
Nevertheless, dollar for dollar, raw materials from these origins, if properly processed, can deliver better taste quality than that from Yunnan, where competition has forced up the price.
Fuding Baihao Yinzhen, Silver Needle Wild tea tree Maocha, Laos
Two ingredients often used by less reliable puer brands to produce tippy pu’er shengcha pu’er: impure origin because of the need for blending
Other than the look, taste is also a reason for blending. While some cultivars of the sinensis variety yield higher polysaccharide contents for the enduring sweetness of finer pu’ers, the pungent sharpness and strength of cultivars from the assamica strand is needed when the tea is intended for maturing for an extended amount of time, during when softer tasting teas will lose too much of their pitch. The assamica strand is what is native in this Yunnan-Southeast Asian area.
pu’er: the need for honest labelling
There are genuine single cultivar, individual batch, authentic origin productions for both sheng and shu cha varieties of pu’er, but simply not as many as the retail market would want you to believe. A huge percentage of what you see in the market are made from raw materials from different origins. Blended, in another word. The mountain names, such and such labels, old factory names etc are more about higher profit margins and market share battle than about authenticity.
Blending — the process of mixing tea productions from different origins and/or harvests — is a long time tradition in pu’er anyway. Traditional factories label their shengcha and shu cha products with 4 digit numbers, such as 7262, 7532, etc, that denote the blend formulae.
Some pu’er formulae can be made up of over 30 selections
Only very few producers are honest about their labels, and even so, that is practiced only in some products, especially that with declared single batch.
The purity of origin of pu’er in Yunnan is overall more a myth than a practice respected by the producers themselves. Since the beginning, pu’er tea has never been a pure Yunnan production. From the 50’s till 70’s, a lot of the materials come from around Guangdong, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Guizhou etc, and now even from Laos and Fujian. It is a reality that the origin designation cannot hide.
Having expressed all these points, however, I do not mean to tell pu’er is a lesser tea. On the contrary, I think what really makes a good tea is its gastronomic values, uniqueness and honesty to its own nature. I think it is unrealistic to declare the IGPRPC designation. Shu cha pu’er is the name of a tea more defined by the leaf quality and post-fermentation process rather than by its origin. While some are single estate, most aren’t. Shengcha is rather like a white tea, except never as soft and sweet as the original ones from Fujian and most would mature to a different tasting product. I think they should have the real origin and cultivar type stated as in other white teas. To liberate the definition of these tea subcategories from the meaningless tie with the town of Pu’er, more and better choices, better values, and much friendlier trading and producing environment will come about. This will be to the benefits of both the trade and the consumer.
qualifying standards for the future of pu’er
Before a realistic and practicable valuation system for pu’er tea is setup, rather like that for fine wine, we have to confront the facts and realities of what is going on in the market before the conceptual structure of that system is even formed. Otherwise, it is only a bubble within a bubble. It would be extremely unfair for traders and consumers alike to see a great tea category being messed up by some people who are in certain positions powerful enough to make decisions all by themselves, and yet so completely detached from reality and the need of the market. It maybe just a few more bubbles that they burst and they can shrug their shoulders and walk away, but this may kill a category, or the growth potential of a great commodity, and, most importantly, the livelihood of the many, many people who have so much stake in it.
Why Tea Addicts Go Crazy for Pu-Erh
by Max Falkowitz
Updated Oct. 31, 2019
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Photographs: Vicky WasikIn the war on rot, aging food is a tactical retreat. We can't beat nature at its own game, so we join it, and let microbes have their way with meat or cheese in the hopes of developing deeper, more complex flavors than the fresh versions can offer.
There's less rot involved when we age drinks like wine, beer, and whiskey, but it's still a testy alliance with nature—giving up the fresh, fiery tastes of youth for something deeper, layered, and more mature. Age, though it manifests in many forms, has a character all its own. You know it when you taste it; you're drinking time.
The Western world's long been keen on aging all kinds of drinks, but up until the last couple decades or so, the idea of applying the same principles to tea was largely unknown. Head over to China, though, and you quickly see that aged tea is as much a part of life as 21-year-old whiskey and prized vintages of Champagne.
Why age tea at all? Most tea doesn't so much age as turn stale and dead. But with the right environment, and the right tea, you get something utterly unique: a drink that slinks down your throat and hugs your belly, relaxes your muscles and calms your mind. The best aged tea is medicine you want to gulp, full of bitter chocolate or stonefruit or wet, sweet soil. And for the complexity of what you're drinking, it can cost way, way less per serving than that bottle of old Scotch.
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While you can age many kinds of tea (I'm sitting on some lovely oolong almost as old as my parents), none is more lusted after than the pride of Yunnan Province, a tea hundreds—if not thousands—of years in the making: pu-erh.
Pu-erh, which is processed in a special way to encourage microbial fermentation after the leaves are dried, ages more dynamically than any tea out there. It does not have fans. It has junkies who buy kilos of the stuff at a time to bliss out on days-long brewing sessions, only dropping out of their highs long enough to argue over the best pu-erh blends, growing regions, and storage methods. There are grasping amateurs who buy, gift, and drink the tea to gain social status among Chinese elite. And there are pu-erh investors, too, gambling on a particular tea's aging potential, who build booming futures markets and, in the case of a major bust in 2007, crash them.
Over in the West, pu-erh is a niche market within a niche market. But its devotees are growing. And if there's a tea that's ready for the big time outside Asia, this is it.
A Tea Like No Other
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For a tea to be called pu-erh, it must be made from the large-leaf subspecies Camellia sinensis var. assamica and grown in Yunnan Province in China's southwest, where Han Chinese as well as many ethnic minorities share borders with Burma and Laos. It's one of the few teas to be designated a protected origin product by the Chinese government, a rarity in an industry run wild with loose, unregulated terms and limited oversight.*
*Not that these regulations are all that effective; knock-off pu-erh is an enormous problem, just like in other famous tea-growing regions.
Those factors restrict the tea's general character and terroir to a set of parameters, but the real trick to pu-erh is what happens after it's picked. Fresh leaves get tossed by hand in giant woks long enough to halt the tea's oxidation, but not so long as to drive off all moisture and kill natural bacteria. The tea is then left to dry in the sun, but the bacteria live on, and over years and decades, they'll help completely transform the tea from a fresh, bitter green into something more dark, mellow, and rich.
Most tea farmers sell their dried tea directly to vendors or wholesalers, but with pu-erh there's usually a middle step. Farmers sell their finished loose leaves (called maocha) to processors who often blend leaves from several sources, steam them, then compress them under heavy weights into a variety of shapes, such as frisbee-like cakes, square bricks, and small concave nests. This Ming Dynasty-era practice was originally developed to make tea easier to transport over long distances, but these days is reserved for teas designed for aging; the compressed form makes for a more stable and portable aging environment as time does its thing.
A cake of pu-erh is in a constant state of change, and as you chip away leaves to drink over the months and years, no two brews will taste the same. Some pu-erh is delicious to drink when fresh: it's vegetal and fragrant with gentle bitterness and a tickling sun-dried pungency. Other pu-erh needs years of aging for profound bitterness or harsh, smoky flavors to mellow out into something smooth, sweet, and dignified. Half the fun of drinking the stuff is watching your tea grow and change as you do.
Drinking Time
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Left to right: ripe pu-erh, aged raw pu-erh, and fresh raw pu-erh.Though pu-erh is one style of tea from one province, it's tricky to make generalizations about how it tastes. Regional variations in terroir, processing styles, and age all come into play, and the world of pu-erh is maddeningly complex, even by fine tea standards. As Jinghong Zhang puts it in her excellent Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic, an elucidating academic treatment of the tea's socio-political-economic history, "Pu-erh tea has been packaged by multiple actors into a fashionable drink with multiple authenticities." But to paint with the broadest of all possible brushes, here's a very rough breakdown of the three major pu-erh categories:
Young 'Raw': This looks like green tea more than anything else, and it's either brand new or not old enough (under, say, two to three years) to develop any of the aged characteristics of more mature pu-erh. It can be floral and sweet or as bitter as amaro, but there's an undeniable youth and grassy freshness to the brew. Some pu-erh people hate the taste of bitter young sheng, but others specifically seek it out for those bitter qualities. And some of the best young sheng out there should be drank fast, like green tea; not all pu-erh ages well, and time can just flatten out its snappy, vegetal flavor without adding anything new.
Aged 'Raw': There are many schools on how to age pu-erh, but all involve controlled heat and humidity to smooth out the tea's rough edges and make for a darker, deeper brew that tends to register lower in your throat and body. Aged pu-erh raw usually has some woodsy, earthy qualities and camphor or dark fruit notes, but rather than specific flavors, the important thing here is the depth and body the tea develops. There's enormous range in how that character manifests; a seven-year-old pu-erh likely won't be as murky and moody as a 30-year-old one. So the only way to get a sense of how aging affects pu-erh is to drink a lot of it.
'Ripe': The deep, dark, basementy pu-erh favored by the likes of Hong Kong drinkers takes decades to mature, which is why in the 1970s, tea processors developed a shortcut: shou ('ripe,' as opposed to 'raw' sheng) pu-erh, in which dried pu-erh leaves are piled in rooms and left to effectively compost for months in the heat and humidity from their own biomass. The process cuts maturation time down from decades to months, though shou pu-erh usually winds up tasting less complex than good aged sheng, and it's typically made with lower grade leaves. But a good shou pu-erh can be thick and luscious as a latte with a rich, mushroomy sweetness that sinks to your belly, and it's usually cheaper than comparable quality aged sheng pu-erh. Note that you can age shou pu-erh just like sheng, but since it's already been 'pre-aged' in processing, its character will evolve far less over time.
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Fortunately, no matter what kind of pu-erh you have, brewing it is relatively straightforward. Like other fine Chinese teas, it benefits from using a lot of leaf in small pots, brewing for short times (15 to 60 seconds) over a series of as many as two dozen infusions with boiling or near-boiling water, adjusting as you go. (More on this kind of brewing right this way.) More than most tea, pu-erh is built for change, not just over months and years, but over a single brew session.
You can use a scale to weigh out your leaves to the gram, but I usually break off a six- to 10-gram chunk with a butter knife for a 100-milliliter gaiwan or clay teapot.* Even relatively simple fresh, young sheng pu-erh will develop in your pot as you keep re-steeping, and more mature aged teas can travel from dank and mushroomy to spicy-sweet to grapey-floral.
Buy it With Care
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Buying quality tea is always tricky business, but this is especially the case with pu-erh. The most challenging part of buying good pu-erh is knowing who to trust. Since it's such a trendy tea in tea circles, and vendors typically buy from other sellers or middlemen processors and factories rather than farmers directly (remember, those processors are the ones who press the tea into its final form), there's a lot of opportunity for someone to lie along the way and either upsell their goods or completely misrepresent what they're selling.
Do a little reading about pu-erh and you'll see some vaunted names come up again, such as famous teas like Menghai Factory's 7542 cakes or lusted-after antique 88 qingbings, or noteworthy growing regions like Yiwu and Laobanzhang. All justly celebrated, but without much regulation, there's no guarantee that the $300 aged cake you just bought is actually the tea being advertised. Even pu-erh experts can get fooled by fakes, a rampant problem in the industry.
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Pu-erh can get expensive. Since the tea is formed into a compressed shape, you have to buy it in fixed amounts. Small nest-shaped tuo forms are usually 100 or 250 grams, and cakes, the most common form, are over three quarters of a pound. While many vendors offer smaller samples of their pu-erhs, those samples come with a substantial markup. Oh, and those big name teas? Some of them can command astronomical prices: four or five figures for less than a pound of tea.
The good news, though, is that quality pu-erh costs less per-gram than many other quality teas that a) can't age well, so you have to drink them fast, and b) don't last nearly as many re-steeps as pu-erh, so while you may pay a higher upfront cost, even pricey pu-erh can come out cheaper per cup than some other celebrated tea styles.
So it's worth buying your pu-erh with care, which is why I typically do so from vendors who specialize in it and who either press their own cakes or have long-established relationships that have a proven track record of quality. To get you started, here are five reliable sources to seek out. If you're brand new to pu-erh, don't get too hung up on the terminologies and labels you'll find as you start shopping. Instead, set a budget, order some samples and maybe a couple cheap cakes to start, and drink with an open mind. The attachment comes later.
Pu-Erh Sources to Seek Out
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White2Tea's four-cake starter set.Crimson Lotus: Reasonably priced quality aged and fresh raw pu-erh as well as some good affordable ripe styles. The 2005 Changtai Top of the Clouds is a solid introduction to the complexities of aged pu-erh, as is the 2008 Bulang for deep, sweet ripe. Crimson Lotus also presses their own raw pu-erh for aging or drinking right now; the 2015 Hidden Song is a tasty fresh tea that will appeal to green tea fans, while the already enticing 2015 Slumbering Dragon will only get better with time.
White2Tea: Another boutique shop with a wide (but carefully selected) range of pu-erh: just-pressed and decades old, raw and ripe, budget-friendly and "second mortgage on the house" pricey. Many of the house pressings are great (the 2015 Tuhao as Fuck in particular; White2Tea also has the best pu-erh names in the business), and most interesting for pu-erh beginners will be the company's four-cake starter set, which at $40 for 400 grams of tea is an especially affordable way to get a sense of how picking season, age, and leaf grade all affect a tea.
Chawangshop: Wide, wide selection and some very friendly prices mean it's easy to go overboard at this China-based vendor, which also carries a good selection of other fermented aged tea to try beyond pu-erh. Not all the offerings are equally good—there's a $4 brick of tea that unsurprisingly brews up like horse food—but the house Chawangpu pressings are rather nice budget offerings to swig on a daily basis, such as the 2015 Hekai Gushu or the 2005 Bulang.
Yunnan Sourcing: With literally hundreds of pu-erhs available, Yunnan Sourcing sells more pu-erh than just about any Western-facing vendor. This is a good place to get a sense of just how varied the world of pu-erh is, from big factory pressings by Menghai and Xiaguan to more obscure regions to the company's own label. Learning about pu-erh means paying some tuition, and a comprehensive site like Yunnan Sourcing can help you see what's out there.
Tea Classico: On the more high-end side, with some 1980s and '90s pu-erh that's aged into remarkable maturity (and worth ordering samples of for a couple brews of deep tea education). The budget offerings, such as the 2013 Zhangjia, are worth looking into as well, good reminders that a pu-erh doesn't have to be expensive to be delicious.
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