A Tempest in the Teapot: Pu'er Tea Makes a Splash

Have you drunk Pu'er tea? Its deep brown brew gives off a slightly musty flavor as it touches the tongue. It's enough to make those drinking it for the first time wrinkle their brows and ask, "Has this tea gone bad?"

It's true, Pu'er was in days past known in Taiwan as "the smelly, musty tea." And the ignorant have been known to toss it out as having gone bad. But in recent years, opinion about it in Taiwan, Hongkong and mainland China have converged. Pu'er's charms have suddenly been revealed and reveled in. From a musty, smelly tea to an organic antique, it has made quite a splash in Taiwan's and Hongkong's tea pots.

How's that?

Chou Yu, an expert on Pu'er tea who owns the Wisteria Tea House, says Pu'er's unique "stale" flavor made it originally unpopular in Taiwan. When a Pu'er "cake" has just been made, it can be considered a "green cake," he explains, because it has not yet been fermented. At this stage, the tea is, in Chinese medical terms, extremely "cold." It can cut at the stomach and harm one's health and is unsuitable for drinking every day. But because Pu'er tea cakes naturally undergo "after-fermentation," the tea keeps for a long time, turning by itself from "cold" to "warm" as its flavor mellows from bitter and tongue numbing to smooth and moldy. While a fondness for it may be an acquired taste, the connoisseurs can't get enough of the properly aged stuff.

It's a time-consuming process. The rrle of thumb is, "It tastes bad before 20 years, and it's only top grade after 40."

But in earlier years, the Pu'er produced in Yunnan was not aged enough, its taste wasn't smooth, and its grade wasn't high. Most people didn't know that Pu'er, unlike the teas grown in Taiwan, doesn't like to be sealed up and should from time to time be brought out and aired. Otherwise, in a hot and humid climate, it easily molds and rots, making it quite literally a "stinky, moldy tea." No wonder there was a lack of interest.

Six years ago, when travel to the mainland to visit relatives was first allowed, Taiwan tourists and businessmen began coming through Hongkong in droves, and the Hong kongese love of Pu'er tea left its mark on the visitors. Gradually, Taiwanese tea drinkers got wise to the ways of Pu'er, learning in recent years to distinguish between the normal "old" flavor, the "stored" flavor of leaves that could use some airing out, and the "moldy" flavor of truly rotten leaves.

And because Taiwan abounds in tea leaves and has inherited the tea-drinking traditions of Southern Fukien, interest in tea here runs wide and deep. The Taiwanese connoisseur is quite sniffy about his cup of tea. As the growing use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides has caused the local stuff to fall from favor, Pu'er tea, by satisfying a yearning for the new, has suddenly become all the rage.

During one long stretch, Hongkong's supply of Pu'er teas from Yunnan was cut off. Meanwhile, as an industrial-commercial society emerged in Hong Kong, the once-thriving tea houses which stocked all varieties of tea closed up shop one after another. Tea in Hong Kong was in a sorry state.

And so, while Pu'er tea is the Hongkongese favorite, the city's residents are not very particular about how they drink it. Many mix it with chrysanthemum tea, and so what is often ordered there while eating dimsum is Pu'er-chrysanthemum tea.

drawing by Lee Su-ling）

One cake of old tea worth NT$20,000!

Because 1997 looms near for Hongkong, a few old tea houses that had long ago closed up shop but had not sold their stocks are hurrying to sell what remains before 1997. As these stocks have hit the market one after another, large amounts of old Pu'er tea have once again been seeing the light of day.

These warehouse clearances started selling off this Pu'er tea at rock bottom prices. Ironically, when his old Pu'er tea hit the market, the Hongkongese didn't seem much interested, but the Taiwanese tea connoisseurs regarded it as "the second coming." They were finally able to taste that gentle, pure and sweet flavor of an "organic antique," and they were hooked. As news of the real stuff spread by word of mouth, the supply couldn't meet the demand, and the price of old Pu'er skyrocketed.

Chou Yu points out that the price for a 9 tael cake of a 40-year-old red-mark Pu'er jumped from about NT$3,000 two years ago to about NT$6,000 today. For still older tea, say a seventy-year-old cake from a private producer like Ching Chang, Tong Ching, Chiang Cheng or Song Pin, NT$10,000 or NT$20,000 might not be enough. Suddenly, the "tea mice" scurrying back and forth between Taiwan and Hongkong were making a killing.

What is rare is expensive. As sales of old Pu'er picked up, the Taiwan tea dealers started coming to Hongkong themselves. If unable to shell out NT$7 or 8 million for old stocks, they could still at least negotiate directly with the big Hongkong dealers and rid themselves of middle men. In their quest to become authorities on the tea, some even charged off to Yunnan to get knowledge first-hand at the Tea King Festival there.

And a few tea-loving entrepreneurs looked at this "organic antique" and saw that this sudden swelling of supply couldn't last long. Making use of abundant financial resources, they bought up large stocks of old Pu'er and turned a quick profit. To put it another way, Hongkong provided the supply and Taiwan the demand. Together they made Pu'er tea a hot commodity.

Arguments have accompanied the feverish buying. Because the age of the tea and the method used for making and storing it all affect quality, there are many difficulties in judging the authenticity and quality of a cake of Pu’er.

Man mucks up a good thing:

Wang Chiehfu, the owner of the Kweiyang Quality Tea House, who has over ten years of experience in buying and selling Pu'er tea, says that Pu'er of the highest grade should have been produced on Yunnan's unspoiled mountain slopes. After being picked, it should have been sun dried, steam-softened and rolled into cakes before being stored in a dry and well ventilated place as the tea naturally ferments.

But the time needed for this natural fermentation is great. Most tea dealers can't set aside their purchased inventories for decades. Customers likewise want to drink the tea soon after they've bought it. The techniques of "ripening cakes" and "wet storage" were created to induce an artificially aged flavor and mellow the tea so it doesn't eat at the stomach and damage the health.

Ripened cakes are blanched but unfermented tea cakes ("raw cakes") that have been sprinkled with water and covered with a cloth in order to create hot and wet conditions that will speed up the fermentation of the leaves. In wet storage, on the other hand, after a tea dealer buys a large stock of tea leaves, the tea leaves are sprinkled with water and stacked up in sealed storage. By so doing, the leaves are prodded to come of age after only two or three years. Cakes processed this way are also called ripened cakes.

"The flavor of these ripened cakes isn't necessarily inferior," says Wang Chieh-fu. "It"s just a fresh cake will continually be changing as a result of the natural fermentation. It smells sweeter with age. The ripened cake only gets to a certain point, and then it just won't get any better."

Having been stored in different conditions of heat and humidity, two raw cakes will taste differently after 40 or 50 years of natural fermentation. What's even more interesting, Chou Yu notes, is that many old teas don't taste good just after they've been pulled out of storage. It's only after a few weeks of having been exposed to the fresh air that they suddenly and unexpectedly become pleasing to the palate. The great variety of changes possible over decades makes it very difficult to grade Pu'er tea with any certainty. What's even worse is that grifters lurk everywhere trying to fake high quality.

For example, there are people who pass off second-rate Thai tea as the real McCoy. Others give customers a taste of the good stuff, and then when it's time to pay the bill, the price will rise or the tea will be switched on them. And as the old tea houses of Hong kong have one after another cleared out their stocks, it has been like digging up ancient artifacts from the ground. Who knows what will be unearthed? And so when coming across old tea, dealers are inclined to jump at the chance to buy. Still, they fear that if more of this good quality stuff keeps hitting the market, the price will plummet.

Pointing to a can of "Red Label" Pu'er tea, Chou Yu describes its long history.

The empress dowager's cup of tea:

And the non-investors, those who simply love a good cup of tea, worry that they may later be unable to obtain top-grade Pu'er after having grown accustomed to it. Quite a few have been stockpiling old Pu'er themselves, while asking others about who has how much of what. Those with tea try to prevent others from coming and drinking theirs, while secretly calculating how many years they can drink the tea they have on hand. Drinking tea--what was so simple and beautiful--has become quite complicated.

The truth is that only a few tea lovers have bought old Pu'er to make an investment. "Because it's good for the health" is the reason for buying it given by most of these tea connoisseurs, who are largely elderly gentlemen with time and money.

"Modern people have too much pressure on the job," says Su Tsung-po, who works in the sales department of the Nanmen branch of the First Commercial Bank and at set times has tea-loving friends over to drink tea and chat. "They need to unwind, and drinking tea is a catalyst for doing just that." Su's house has an elegant meditation room, where Pu'er tea is called "meditation tea."

Chen Che-san, the vice general manager of Yuen Foong Yu Paper, who has been a serious tea drinker for ten years and now collects Pu'er tea, believes that Pu'er has the good qualities of normal teas and more. Naturally fermenting over time, the tea mellows so it won't hurt an empty stomach. If you drink a lot you won't be making bee lines for the bathroom and you won't be finding it difficult to fall asleep. And so, he says. one can drink without misgivings.

"It's said that at the end of her days," explains Chou Yu, "the Empress Dowager Tsu Hsi only drank Pu'er. It makes sense."

Pu'er tea's nutritive functions have made it popular in Europe and America in recent years. On the heels of economic reform, the mainland has been pushing hard to increase its foreign exchange, and so the Pu'er tea grown in Yunnan, where most production is centered, has gradually become familiar to Westerners. Tuo tea, a variety of Pu'er whose cakes are shaped like bowls, won gold medals two years running in contests held in Spain and Germany.

At the same time, most of Yunnan's tea bushes have big leaves (whereas most green teas have small leaves). The big-leaved varieties have fatter buds that make for a stronger tea. Recent studies have revealed that Pu'er has more theine than most teas, allowing it to reduce cholesterol and uric acid in the blood, whereas most teas only repress them. In many European drug stores, there are diet teas, beauty teas and longevity teas that are Pu'er tea one and all.

While the recent rage for Pu'er tea has not made it as famous here as such Taiwan teas as Oolung and pouchong, its fans are growing by the day.

Green gold grows on money trees:

In ancient China, Pu'er tea had a glorious reputation. The Song Dynasty poet Wang Yu sang the praises of Pu'er in verse, describing how he was reluctant to drink it, wanting to leave it for his parents to drink to extend their lives Surprisingly, this is remarkably similar to what many modern tea lovers say today!

It is said in the 1930s one canister with seven cakes of top grade Pu'er would go for 50 silver dollars in Hongkong, an average worker's salary for about a year and a half. Comparatively speaking, the current price in Taiwan is nothing special.

But in the past, if you finished the last of your Pu'er, you always had the possibility of buying some more. Today's old Pu'er stocks are really "the last of their kind." This is what makes tea lovers so worried.

Describing these stocks as the last of their kind is not hyperbole. After Pu'er tea plantations came under the control of the communists on the mainland, there was a period when production ceased. Being consumed but not produced, supplies dwindled. Even though the Yunnan tea industry started up again later, because of a decline in the use of traditional methods and climatic and soil changes to the Yunnan mountain forests, it's hard for the Pu'er tea produced recently in Yunnan to compare with the older stuff.

Chou Yu points out that over the last decade, in order to export and gain foreign exchange, the mainland has been regarding Yunnan tea as "green gold," pushing sales. The old plantations that used to plant their tea mixed in with other species and pick only once a year have one by one changed their methods of production, becoming high-density, high-production, new-style tea plantations. The tea bushes have become shorter, and no other species are mixed in with them. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used in excess, and production has been mechanized. At the same time, so that the Pu'er can be quickly sold and drunk, most of it is turned into "ripened cakes," moistened to speed up fermentation.

All over Yunnan, they compete with each other holding various kinds of tea festivals, where they tell stories about making it rich and talk with great relish about "the improvements of recent years." Taiwan tea lovers, who have seen the collapse of tea industry on the Taiwan plains and the looming environmental crises for the mountain tea growers. can't help but worry for them.

Su Tsung-po describes Pu'er as "meditation tea." At regular times, he invites over a group of tea-mad businessmen to brew up a good pot, chat and relax.

Rice stalks?

Wang Yung-he, who has drunk Pu'er for more than 10 years, points out that because the tea leaves are extremely susceptible to all kinds of odors in the air, the tea picked today, which after picking is hauled by fuel-burning vehicles, can't compete with the teas of yesteryear, which were carried by people.

Chou Yu points out that trees can gather fog. Now that many of Yunnan's forests have been cut down for new tea plantations, there it less fog, and tea leaves, which love moisture, tend to become too fibrous. The lack of intermingled camphor trees, which gave the tea that beloved camphor smell, is an even greater loss.

If tea bushes are intermingled with camphors in the traditional way, two serious pests of tea leaves--the scale insect and the leafhopper -- are kept in check by natural enemies. Now, with no other tree species intermingled with the tea, it is without natural allies against these pests. This has indirectly lead to the need for increased use of pesticides. And pesticides and chemical fertilizers (particularly nitrogenous fertilizers) are the biggest culprits in the decline of teas grown in Taiwan, where each generation of teas is worse than its predecessor.

Regrettably, by advocating that teas be natural and fresh, Taiwan, in attitude and stance, is worlds apart from Yunnan, which is anxious to produce as much as it can to earn foreign exchange.

Chou Yu has personal experience in this regard. "When the local cadres are boasting that their tea production has already been mechanized and refined, Taiwan tea lovers go over there and are disappointed when they can't find rice stalks or other evidence of natural sun drying. Those who made the changes over there are surprised."

Most of those who plant tea in Yunnan are members of ethnic minorities. In the photo, a factory is buying fresh chingmao tea leaves from Dai farmers. （photo by Chien Yung-pin）

You'll regret you didn't tomorrow:

Even if you look at it from a business perspective, although this fever for old Pu'er tea in Hongkong and Taiwan has shot some life into the market and has been quite profitable, old Pu'er tea is not in fact an antique. It's supposed to be drunk. With the standard rate of one person going through one cake a month, there simply won't be any left to trade in the not-so-distant future.

"When there is nothing left to sell, business ends too. What's the point of heating up the market any more?" asks Chou Yu. If Yunnan can't produce and store the good stuff anymore, then where will the high-quality old Pu'er come from fifty years down the road? About such matters, if you don't act today, you'll regret it tomorrow. In Taiwan a few tea lovers have noticed this problem, presenting papers calling attention to it at the Pu'er International Research Symposium.

This rage for Pu'er may well be just a tempest in a teapot, but it sure tastes good--doesn't it?

[Picture Caption]

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(drawing by Lee Su-ling)

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Pointing to a can of "Red Label" Pu'er tea, Chou Yu describes its long history.

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While the recent rage for Pu'er tea has not made it as famous here as such Taiwan teas as Oolung and pouchong, its fans are growing by the day.

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Su Tsung-po describes Pu'er as "meditation tea." At regular times, he invites over a group of tea-mad businessmen to brew up a good pot, chat and relax.

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Most of those who plant tea in Yunnan are members of ethnic minorities. In the photo, a factory is buying fresh chingmao tea leaves from Dai farmers. (photo by Chien Yung-pin)

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Pu'er is produced in Xishuangbanna of Yunnan Province. The photo shows ethnic minorities at a market. (photo by Chien Yung-pin)