A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Information’

Deadly black tea

June 15, 2026 · Leave a Comment

Taiwan produces black tea today, but much of the stock of assamica varietal trees in Taiwan actually were imported during the 1920s and 30s by the Japanese authorities. Back then, the hope was to create a Taiwanese black tea industry that could compete with the rest of the world. Up until that point, Taiwan mainly exported oolong and baozhong (baozhong back in the day was scented, like jasmine tea). Oolongs went to North America mostly, while baozhong were sold to SE Asia. Black tea, however, had worldwide appeal, and if only their colony could compete!

So, at the government’s expense they imported a bunch of trees from South Asia, as well as modern machinery that were designed to make black tea en masse. This tea was mostly produced by Japanese owned companies – chief among them Mitsui, which still exists today as a going concern. Mitsui was heavily involved in the Japanese colonial enterprise and had their hands in everything. Tea was merely one of the many, many products they sold.

Here’s another wrinkle though – it was not legal for most people to export tea directly. To export you had to have a license, and to get that license required you to pass certain capital and technical thresholds which normal tea farmers would never dream of making. This also was way back in the day, when traveling from the mountains to the big city already took a long time. The tea industry was quite different, where logistics reared its ugly head all over the place. In this way, big companies dominated.

This is especially true at the final export stage, where the sales overseas were controlled mainly by a handful of foreign-owned firms. Jardine Matheson was one of them, but they were not the biggest. Among their competitors was Tait & Co, Carter, Macy & Co, Anglo-American Direct Tea Trading Co., Boyd & Co, and of course Mitsui. Quite a few of these have been in the tea business for almost a hundred years by the 1930s. Among these only Jardine Matheson, Mitsui, and Tait & Co still survive at least in name only. Anglo-American is, in a way, still sort of alive as a former subsidiary of Finlay’s.

Thing is, these export companies traditionally did not involve themselves too much in the production side of things – it’s too complicated dealing with all the farmers up country. Instead, it’s better to just have some operation where you buy raw leaves, or you can buy maocha or done leaves from the farmers and then blend/finish yourself and then export. There were lots of middlemen in the business, but that was part of the deal.

Given this, you can sort of see how Mitsui occupies a unique position because all of a sudden you have the first true vertical conglomerate. They wanted to monopolize their position as the biggest (but not only) black tea producer in Taiwan. So, they forbade their factories from selling black tea to their competitors, and tried to offer Taiwanese black tea for a more competitive price on the world market. Other firms who wanted in on the action had to buy from other suppliers, but those alternative suppliers usually didn’t have the technology or skills, so their teas were less good. You can still compete on price, but it’s tough work.

Up until around 1932, Jardine Matheson’s operations in Taiwan was run by a man called Hugh Lachlan. He had been at the company for thirty years, focusing on the tea business, but by this point he was sort of a broken man – in poor health, low in energy, and the decade plus he spent in Taipei had sapped him. Taipei back then was seen as a true backwater, especially when compared with the cosmopolitan cities of East Asia like Shanghai, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. According to J.J. Paterson, future Taipan of Jardine: “Remember that Taipeh is a hell of a place for a white man to live, and it is only fair to allow them to get away for the sake of sanity, health and morale.”

Lachlan retired at the end of 1932, and was replaced by a man called C. S. Hayley. He was coming from the Shanghai tea department, which was the center of operations for all tea businesses in East Asia at the time for Jardine – they bought mostly green teas there for export. Hayley was much younger, single, and seemingly quite energetic. The Taipei branch had been losing money for years at this point, with HQ wondering if they should shut it down for good despite doing decent amounts of business. Hayley’s job was to increase sales and so to pull the division into profit.

The first year there Hayley did seem to succeed – the division made a profit for the first time in years, and successfully exported some black tea from Taiwan, which was a first, because up till that point only oolongs were sold. Generally speaking, Jardine was quite conservative in how they operated, and only bought tea to export when they have an order coming in from an overseas client. They almost never exported teas “on company account” meaning that there was never any real financial risk of selling the tea – it was a volume business. They were merely acting as agents and earning a commission on every trade. It was a safe but slow business.

Hayley tried something new, which was something that hadn’t been attempted in years. He tried to export some black tea on company risk to Australia, attempting to open a new market. Those 100 packets of tea sold pretty quickly, at a modest profit. That worked! Next year, in 1934, Hayley got ambitious. He had pre-ordered 7000 packets of black tea from Chinese producers not associated with Mitsui, with the Australians agreeing to buy 5000 of them and the rest planning to be shipped to the US. While these were not as good as the Mitsui ones, he was confident he can beat them on price. Besides, all the farmers were switching to black tea production because the market was doing well, so he was confident it would work.

Well… it didn’t. The producers he contracted with couldn’t come up with enough packets of tea for him to sell, so Hayley was forced to buy on the open market, but because of that, he had to pay market price, which was substantially higher than the price he had contracted to sell to his customers. In other words, he had to cover his own order at a loss-making price. It was going to lose him tens of thousands of yen – multiples of what the Taipei branch made the previous year (it made a modest profit of something like 15k yen the year prior). This would’ve wiped out all the profits and then some, and would represent a substantial loss. Keep in mind this is still a world economy reeling from the Great Depression. Things were not looking great.

Hayley panicked and wrote a few letters plus telegrams to Hong Kong asking for help. J.J. Paterson, the boss, sent a man named Pollack to go to Taipei to see what they can do. Pollack was an experienced tea man based in Hong Kong, and helped at least sort out the basic crisis at hand, fulfilling orders as possible and comforting Hayley in the fact that the firm will lose some money – but it can easily withstand it. After all, Jardine was one of the premier trading firms with over a hundred years of history by then, and some losses over some Taiwanese tea wasn’t going to put it under.

Hayley cheered up and Pollack, after having finished the business in Taipei, decided to go take a look at Kaohsiung at Hayley’s urging. He went down south on the night train, spent the day, and took the next night train back up to Taipei, and upon his return, he found Hayley had shot himself in the head after downing a whole bottle of whisky. He had written a few letters in his very drunken state, one to Pollack. I’ll quote a little bit of it here:

“I’m getting rather drunk but I’m trying to state that its my own fault that I’ve got myself into the present jam. You have been awfully decent in telling me that the firm didn’t care a bit about losing money (this isn’t strictly true) but my brain is kinked and I can’t think already.

Cheerio Pollack and this will be a new and interesting experience for you.”

In the end, the firm’s trading losses weren’t nearly as much as initially feared, and customers, while they received teas inferior to what was promised, were able to make do with the goods and made smaller claims on the price paid. There were still losses, but it was entirely manageable.

Categories: Information
Tagged: , ,

Gold leaf, garlic powder

June 13, 2026 · Leave a Comment

About four years ago there was this TV show in Taiwan called Gold Leaf. Some of you have probably heard of it, as it became somewhat popular for a while. The story revolves around a fictionalized character based on the tea producer Khiong A-sin (I’m romanizing it this way because that’s what my sources called him), a Hakka based in Beipu. The show itself wasn’t very good – I watched maybe 3-4 episodes before deciding it wasn’t worth pursuing any further, partly because the tea parts of the show was nonsensical.

However, for the past week or so I have been here at Cambridge looking at archival documents from Jardine Matheson & Co. Jardine, as many of you probably know, is the trading firm that got its start smuggling opium into China. A big part of their trade, however, was tea. They traded teas of all sorts – Chinese, chiefly, but also teas from Taiwan. Since I’m working on a history of the tea industry in Taiwan, I came here to look at what they were doing.

The TV show also alludes to this a bit, but starting around 1950 Jardine and Khiong entered into a partnership of sorts, where Khiong produced quite significant quantities of tea for Jardine to sell overseas. Tea in Taiwan during this period was still largely for export – over 90% of it was sold overseas, with very little retained for local consumption. Khiong produced both black tea and green tea for Jardine, depending on the year and the orders. The black tea, later branded as Hoppo tea, was fairly successful, and seemed to have found a market footing.

What’s interesting though is that Khiong, for reasons unclear from the Jardine files, was not a very capable businessman. Year after year, he asked Jardine to front money for his operations so that he could enter into production for the firm, presumably because he did not have enough cash on hand to pay the farmers and the workers for their work. More seriously, when it came time to deliver teas, he was frequently late and not delivering quantities sufficient to fulfill the original orders. Jardine was frustrated by this – they had, after all, invested quite a bit into this relationship and propped up Khiong’s firm (Yung Kuang). Somehow, though, he was not quite holding up his end of the bargain.

Now, Jardine certainly was not running a charity here, but it was also an interesting case because over the years, their tea business in Taiwan really achieved very little. Although the numbers are scarce, from what I can gather in the archives the tea department in Taiwan post WW2 never made any money, consistently losing money instead. Even in the pre-war years, profits were slim. The Taiwan operation for tea was justified as part of a portfolio of service they provided to customers overseas who want some access to these teas when necessary. Also, it was run as a pretty lean operation, with only a half dozen or so employees, usually consisting of one British man in charge, a Chinese buyer, and then some lower level staff. They were hoping to cultivate Khiong as a stable production partner (since Jardine really didn’t want to get involved directly in dealing with farmers and production, which was a whole complicated mess). Khiong, however, didn’t quite deliver.

It all started seriously cracking in 1964 – over a dozen years after they first started their relationship. Mid-year, Khiong told Jardine that he was having some liquidity issues, and instead of paying down his debt with cash or even tea, he would give them…. garlic powder, 27 tons of it in fact. The Jardine side realized they didn’t really have much leverage, and aside from getting his factory and other assets as collateral for his loans, they took the garlic delivery. So, a company that never sold any garlic before all of a sudden is saddled with a lot of garlic powder sitting in their godown, trying to figure out how to move this stuff. Their taipan in Hong Kong complained about how things got to be this way – and asked his staff to please avoid running into situations like this in the future.

Unfortunately for Khiong, he ran out of runway. Within a year, his company declared bankruptcy and the factory was wound down. This wasn’t an easy time for a lot of producers – Taiwanese tea was in a very awkward phase, competing on price against other producers but still far too expensive. The tea men at Jardine were actually quite astute, commenting that they think the future for their business (if not the industry) was going higher price, high quality oolong teas. In about ten years time, that was indeed what would happen, but in the meantime, businesses like Yung Kuang died.

Today the Khiong mansion is still standing, and open to the public as a tourist destination. Descendants of Khiong A-sin bought the house back, and now you can see it after making a booking online.

Categories: Information
Tagged: , , ,

Blending, again

April 7, 2025 · 2 Comments

Over the years I’ve had some changes in what I believed in. I googled blending on this blog and it seems like last time I talked about it extensively was some (many) years ago. It’s probably time to update that view. I think I was wrong.

Traditionally, and still very much practiced today, is the art of blending tea. Why do tea sellers blend tea? It’s simple – to control for quality and cost. The first thing one needs to remember is that the kind of people who would come back to this URL and read this blog constitute an exceedingly small minority of the tea market. The vast majority of tea drinkers have no interests in the topics raised here, and do not care for such things such as which village a tea was harvested in or what season it came from. They just want the medium grade TGY or Assam from their local shop, go home, brew it like they always do, and have the same taste that they have come to expect. Blending is for that, which is the vast, vast majority of the market.

It’s also for businesses. If you’re a tea seller, and your supplier from the tea factory keeps sending you stuff that vary sufficiently in quality that you can’t be sure it will be the same, then how are you going to do business? How do you supply the restaurants, the regulars, etc? You can’t. It is the job of the producer/wholesaler to make sure they have a steady supply of the same tea, day in, day out. So, blends.

For teas like oolong, the process of blending also comes in additionally with the process of roasting, which levels the tea into a uniform taste, and also helps preserve it for the journey ahead for export. But even things like green teas are blended, for the most part. Japanese sencha, for example, are rarely single origin. They’re blends of different kinds, sold at levels that the shop deems appropriate – with fancy names for easy identification, but the names tell you nothing about where the leaves are from or what season it is from, other than when they advertise it as shincha, or new tea. Look at Ippodo for example – a bunch of cute names that are really just “top grade” “medium grade” etc in disguise. That’s how teashops used to, and still mostly, operate.

The internet, for the most part, changed that, along with changes in the structure of the market. Farmers now have the ability to sell direct to consumers, although depending on local regulations and conditions, that may or may not be doable. Japanese tea farmers, for example, still overwhelmingly only grow tea, and the processing/production is done by someone else who then sells the teas. Taiwan is a free for all where everything is possible, from big operators to tiny farm-to-market sellers, and China is similar. There’s precious little direct to market stuff from places like Thailand and Vietnam, where the tea is mostly for commercial use. South Asia I’m less familiar with, but with big estates I think they’re not really comparable anyway to the smallholding farmers you see in East Asia.

The direct-to-market sellers can cater to the crowd who read this blog – people who don’t mind, and might even celebrate, variety in their supply. All of a sudden, drinking TGY that taste wildly different year to year is not a problem, it’s actually a benefit. Sellers can tell you that this year, because of less rainfall, the teas grew slower but are therefore more concentrated in taste, but production volume is lower so prices have to go up etc etc. For the most part, the buyers have no real way to verify that information – you just have to trust the seller. It does taste different, sure, but is it better than last year? Well, you still have some tea from last year, but it tastes kinda similar, maybe a bit different, but that’s probably because it’s now a year old tea, right? RIGHT?

Let’s be honest for a second – unless you’re in the business and are tasting hundreds of teas a month from the same genre, over a number of years, chances are your ability to distinguish this level of difference is not high. When presented with teas that are from the same general region, using the same leaves and produced roughly the same way, telling which one is better and which one is worse is skilled work. I can usually tell apart stuff that are from different altitudes, etc, but if they’re similar, it’s not that easy.

Which, again, is where blending comes in – maintaining stability of product – because it is a product. It is only for the select few of us who spend too much time thinking about tea where seasons, locations, etc matter. It’s like single barrel whisky – most whisky drinkers are happy drinking factory bottlings at 43% abv, blended to maintain stability so that the Lagavulin 16 you buy now tastes roughly the same as it did ten years ago when you celebrated your graduation with a bottle. But aficionados seek out the new, the exotic, the variety – it does not, however, make the product better.

One recent way to explain blending I heard from an experienced tea man here in Taiwan makes sense to me – let’s say there are ten points to a tea, one for each aspect (body, smell, smoothness, and so on). If on aspect is bad, you take off a point, because it’s really obvious when it happens. But, if you blend ten teas together, and they each have one point off but all for different reasons, then while your tea’s total score might still just be 9/10 if you add them all up, you no longer have that one big obvious flaw that everyone can taste – instead of 0 points for one aspect and full point for everything else, each aspect is now at 0.9. For the average consumer, that change is no longer obvious because you no longer have one glaring flaw, so overall, your tea is better as a result.

It might seem pedantic, but there’s a reason why blends exist – and why traditionally shops have blended teas for generations. Many older shops still do that. In the hands of a skilled blender, they will be able to combine a number of less-than-great teas and make something great at a reasonable cost. Just because something is directly from a farm does not automatically make it better, at least when we are talking about tea.

Categories: Information
Tagged: ,

The Authentic Taste of Puer Tea and Transnational Interests

May 15, 2020 · 10 Comments

The title of this post is the title of the paper that I’m linking to. Written by Yu Shuenn-Der, the deputy director of the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the paper is basically a very good critical summary of the recent history of the puerh fad. If you’ve read this blog with any regularity in the past, it should be of great interest to you.

You can find the rest of the issue for the journal here, which includes two other papers on contemporary tea culture.

Categories: Information
Tagged: , ,

Becoming Healthy

November 12, 2019 · 3 Comments

As you may be aware, I’ve been working on a research project on tea the past few years. A paper just came out recently in the edited volume Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia, from the University of Hawaii Press. I have a chapter in there titled “Becoming Healthy: Changing Perception of Tea’s Effects on the Body.” It’s about how our idea of whether tea is healthy or not has shifted over time. Alas, I don’t have a PDF for you to read, but if you have access to a library that has (or will buy) this book, and find it interesting, do take a look.

Categories: Information
Tagged:

Drinking up teas

September 24, 2017 · 18 Comments

There are a few reasons I haven’t been updating much on my blog recently. The most basic one is I moved recently, so a lot of stuff got moved and many of my teas got moved offsite, because it’s easier to manage that way. The more important one is because of the big Photobucket blackmail issue. I have been slowly converting all my old Photobucket links to instead hosting the photos on my own blog, which is a slow process unfortunately.

However, the biggest reason is because I just don’t have a lot of very interesting things to say these days about tea. I mean, what haven’t I already covered in the 10+ years that this blog has been alive? Sure, I can update on some topics, and there are new things that happen all the time, but really, most of them are quite similar to what have come before. There are very few genuinely new things that I encounter these days with regards to tea (there’s one new black tea that I got a hold of recently that I will talk about at some point).

I also haven’t been drinking much new tea. After all, there’s only so much tea one can drink, and there’s plenty of older teas now that I have bought years back that are now at least drinkable. I’ve reached the point where I’m not really in the market for much new tea anymore – there’s really just no need. Why should I sample a whole bunch of new tea when I’m not interesting in buying almost any of them? It’s always interesting, of course, to do so, but that interest is tempered by the fact that many of them are usually terrible, or at least not great. When I can drink something that is great now, versus the high chance of having something that really isn’t very good (and often overpriced) …. the choice is obvious.

So I suppose that’s a pretty unsatisfactory explanation. I know if I were living in a city with a more interesting tea scene, I may be out drinking tea more, but then, having two kids will always crimp your style that way. The way the current market is though with tea, I just don’t see myself being that interested in buying anything much – and the few things I do buy, you can’t get easily online, making it a bit of a difficult thing to talk about where I’m basically talking about a pie in the sky.

In case you’re worried though, I do intend to keep this blog around, even if it costs me in hosting fees and what not. A lot of discussion of tea related things have moved from things like personal blogs to social media of various sorts, with some facebook groups being particularly active, and at least a few slack groups that I know of. There’s a problem with all those conversations though – they’re fleeting. Once done, trying to find it again is next to impossible, even if you yourself participated in it. Quite often people would tell me that they recently discovered my blog and have gone through a lot of my older posts, and have found them useful. You can’t do that with social media posts, not really anyway, and there’s almost no way to actually save any of those conversations unless you do some serious work to keep an archive of them, which is very unsatisfactory. This blog is by no means an authority on anything, but I do think some 10 years of tea writing is worth something. That’s the reason why I will bother to go through all my old posts to migrate the photos over, even though many of them are of tea reviews years ago for teas that nobody can find anymore, and for which my opinion is probably largely outdated if not completely invalid at this point. I guess that’s me being a historian, but I will at least try to keep the record straight.

I do, however, need to continue documenting my teapots, and have been lazy about it after the move even though it did give me a pretty good idea of exactly how many I have. So, in the absence of more interesting posts about tea, you can probably expect to see more teaware in the near future.

Categories: Information
Tagged: ,

A Foreign Infusion

March 24, 2016 · 27 Comments

As some of you know, doing research in history is my day job. I am happy to announce that a research article of mine, on the history of gongfucha (as a ceremony of sorts) is out in the current issue of the journal Gastronomica. The table of contents for this issue is here. I’m not sure if the print issue is available anywhere yet – the electronic version is on a 6 month delay at ProQuest and I think a 3 year embargo at JSTOR (to sell more physical copies). If you are interested, please check it out.

I am able to provide a low-resolution version of the article here. The full citation for the article is:

Zhang, Lawrence. “A Foreign Infusion: The Forgotten Legacy of Japanese Chadō on Modern Chinese Tea Arts.” Gastronomica 16:1 (Spring 2016), 53-62.

The YYX tastings are ongoing – will report on those soon.

Categories: Information
Tagged: ,

Guide to buying tea in China: Part I – where to go

July 2, 2014 · 3 Comments

Traveling to China soon? Want to buy some tea for yourself or someone else? I thought I should do a guide on what to do when you’re in China and looking for tea. Note: things I say here do NOT apply to Hong Kong or Taiwan. China’s commercial landscape for tea is pretty different from these two places and so they operate under separate rules.

First of all, we should start with the question of where to go to buy said tea. Now, if you can answer a few quick questions

1) Do you speak any Mandarin?

2) Are you buying for yourself?

3) Do you have a lot of time this trip?

If the answer to any of these three questions is a “no,” especially if you answer “no” more than once, then the answer is easy – you should go shop at one of the big chain stores for tea, such as Wuyutai (state run) or Tianfu (Taiwanese owned tea conglomerate). Buy whatever suits your fancy there, and move on to do your tourist thingy.

Before you say this is mercenary or too ismple – let me explain. If you don’t speak any Chinese, your likelihood of landing good tea at a local shop is pretty low. There might be some local specialty tea store that can deal with you in English, but your run of the mill tea shop on the street corner probably can’t. You may be able to get away with some sign language, but you need some luck and goodwill from the store owner to not get screwed in the process. Granted, even if you don’t speak Mandarin you can still go to see a tea market, just don’t expect any great bargains or a guaranteed positive experience doing it.

If you’re not buying for yourself – it’s hard buying tea for friends. If your friend is so unkind as to stick you with a tea buying mission while you’re on your trip to China, especially if you yourself are not too keen on buying tea on the trip, well, they pretty much deserve whatever you find convenient. Also, places like Wuyutai or Tianfu won’t screw you with fake tea – they’ll just screw you with higher prices. Lastly, the tea they sell will come in decent packaging, relatively speaking. This may be important if you’re buying a gift or for the unwashed who judge teas by their packaging materials.

If you’re on a short trip and barely have time to fit in a visit to the Forbidden City, then wasting half a day just to get to a tea market is probably not the best idea. You can buy tea online from your own home, but you can’t visit sites online (not really anyway). Go do your touristy thing and ignore the tea.

Now, if your answers to all three questions are “yes”, or if you feel adventurous enough and seeing a tea market is your idea of fun, then you should try to investigate what your city’s local tea mall is (there’s one in a lot of major cities). Some are pretty far from city center, while others are right inside the city. Big cities often have multiple markets. In Shanghai, for example, there’s the Tianshan tea market, which is not huge or great by Chinese standard, but it’s certainly more teashops than any visitor would’ve seen in person, and it’s very close to a subway station.

There are also a lot of small, local teashops. These fall into two categories. One is the run-of-the-mill kind, which are basically your neighbourhood tea shop. They will sell regular stuff – often lower end. Prices are probably not bad here, although if you look like a foreigner it’s quite possible that they will give you a “foreigner special” and screw you in the process. If you just need some basic, no name tea, and if you don’t care about packaging or what not, these might not be bad options. These stores look grubby, basic, usually sparsely decorated, maybe just with some tea canisters on the sides, and not much else. The owner likely lives in the store as well with his family.

There are now another kind of teashops – these are the high end stuff, and you’ll know it if you see it. They have nice decor, pretty sales girls, good looking teaware, and generally are trying to sell you “art” instead of “tea”. I’d personally stay away from all of these. They do sometimes offer nice tea, but they will never be a bargain. There is also a high likelihood that they’re merely dressing up very average tea as good and exclusive, and so you’re really no better off than just buying online.

The decision to go to a tea market is a little more complicated than that. If you hate green tea, only drink puerh, and you’re in Shanghai, you are probably better off trying to see if Eugene of Tea Urchin wants to meet up with you instead.  The thing is, puerh isn’t that popular in Shanghai, and while they will certainly have some at the tea markets, the selection will not be great, and prices may not be good either. If you are looking for green tea, you’ll have an endless supply there. If you want something not popular at the area you’re at, then it’s more of a crapshoot.

If you go to a tea market though, there’s a secondary level of “where to go” that now enters the equation. You will be confronted by rows and rows of teashops. You only have a day, or half a day, or whatever. Where should you go? Which shop should you enter to spend your precious tea shopping time at?

Obviously if you have something specific in mind, like a specialty store you read about, or a contact you made, then by all means go there. But if you are just visiting for the first time with no reference, then you should first consider what kind of tea you are interested in. You should almost always head into a store that only sells one kind of tea – if you want tieguanyin, look for a tieguanyin store. If you want white tea, try to find a white tea specialist. While this is by no means a guarantee that you’ll find great tea, it’s better than heading into one of the many generic stores that sell everything under the sun. To this end, learning what the characters for your favourite tea looks like could be useful, especially when you’re not looking for puerh. If you’re looking for puerh, stores that sell only one brand tend to have better stuff than stores that sell a hodgepodge of brands. However, stores that sell a hodgepodge are more likely to have bargains, provided you have time to find them and know what you’re doing. This usually require repeated visits. There is the same divide between high end store and grubby store at many tea markets. It is directly related to what your shopping experience will be like – whether it will be pleasant or not. This is hardly a good guage for quality though – grubby stores often can have very good tea, while a high end looking one can actually be selling inflated crap. So for these cases it’s really a matter of you being able to taste the difference.

These are basically your options for buying tea in China. There’s never really any reason to buy from a department store or anything like that. I will cover what you do once you enter a store in another post.

Categories: Information
Tagged: , ,

Price dislocation

June 25, 2014 · 15 Comments

I remember when I first started drinking puerh seriously almost ten years ago, a common argument that you see around the internet (Chinese, mainly) and among drinkers is that it’s cheap, so it’s worth bothering with. Oftentimes the comparison was with longjing – one jin of longjing was probably somewhere in the ballpark of 1200-2000 RMB back in the day, whereas the equivalent of good quality puerh was only a few hundred RMB. It was simply a lot cheaper to drink puerh, and so even if you have no intention of aging the tea, of dabbling in the aged tea market, of wanting to drink that taste, you can still enjoy good quality tea for a lot less money.

Fast forward ten years, the price for longjing has probably doubled in this period. At the same time, however, the price for newly made, good quality raw puerh has probably risen by about tenfold. Old tree teas from famous areas harvested during the spring now routinely command 2000+ RMB (and often much higher) per 357g cake. The value argument for buying new puerh to drink compared to other types of teas in the market has simply vanished in the past ten years. Yes, there are much cheaper cakes out there. You can still find, albeit with some difficulty now, cakes that sell for under 100 RMB a piece, but those appear far less frequently than before, and you can rest assured that the chances of finding quality tea among that pile of nameless and faceless cakes is quite low, much worse than before.

The interesting thing here is that prices for teas you can buy off websites that sell teas in English have risen by much, much less than what you can find in the markets here. Prices for some vendors have edged up a bit compared to previous years, and they have, just as mainland vendors have done, used tricks like making smaller cakes to make the sticker-shock less shocking. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a sort of glass ceiling for prices for new make puerh that is somewhere in the ballpark of $150 USD a cake. You almost never see that price point breached. Even for older teas, I very rarely see things that cost much more than about $200 a cake, which severely limits the options of what can be sold. In casual conversations with a few vendors about this, it’s pretty apparent that the market simply isn’t really ready to pay this kind of prices for tea, and when they do, it’s overwhelmingly in samples sales only, which doesn’t amount to much.

When you think about it, this necessarily means that something is going on with the quality of the leaves going into the cakes. One would be to lower the cost basis by using leaves from cheaper regions, but by and large, cheaper regions are cheaper for a reason. Laoman’e is cheaper not just because it’s less famous, but it’s seen as less age-worthy because it’s bitter. Vendors can also mitigate the rise in cost by using leaves from lesser trees from the same region. Whereas gushu teas are very expensive, you can often find leaves from younger trees (50-100 years old ones, or even younger) that cost a lot less.

It’s not just the price of raw materials that went up. Labour costs for everything in China has gone up. When I stayed in Beijing in 2006 for a year, the going rate for a teashop girl (and they’re almost all girls) was about 600-700 RMB a month, plus room and board. These days you’d be lucky to find someone for much below 2000. So while it is most certainly the case that the raw materials of the tea going into the cakes have gone up in prices, everything else has adjusted up too. You also have to remember that whereas in 2006 one USD was worth about 8 RMB, these days it’s only 6.24 RMB, which means everything, automatically, has gone up by about 25% before you even lift a finger.

The situation is definitely worse in the cases of vendors who have high cost structures – the need to maintain a brick and mortar shop, the need to buy long haul international plane tickets (and shipping the tea back to their home base), so on so forth. If the price for the tea they can sell hasn’t gone up much, and if the cost of any of these other things haven’t gone down much (they haven’t) then the only place they can squeeze out a profit is to lower their cost by using cheaper raw materials.

This kind of inflation is of course a direct consequence of China’s rapid economic development. There are very few things in our normal day to day life that has price rises of this sort – the only thing that we normally buy that goes through severe price fluctuations is oil. Even then, it’s only in the US where the gas prices reflect real changes in oil prices – in most developed countries tax is such a big part of the price of gasoline that the net effect of oil price changes resulting in an increase in pump prices is smaller. In other words, none of us, on a day to day basis, buy anything in our daily life that has shifted in cost and price as much as the puerh we’re buying.

So whereas in 2006 if someone posts on an internet forum, saying they want to buy a decent cake of tea for under $50, there were a lot of decent options, these days if you want a cake for under $50 that will age well, chances are you really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, and even then the likelihood of finding something good is slim. As I’ve mentioned previously, the best bet is for teas that are 1) from before 2010 and 2) from vendors who don’t know current prices, and even then, one has to be very selective. Trying to find a new 2014 tea that’s under that price? Well, as a point of comparison, my new 2014 Dayi 7542 that I just bought cost me a bit over 30 USD. Dayi, of course, commands a premium over other brands, and I didn’t bother bargaining for one cake, but the fact is this cake, 10 years ago, would’ve cost about maybe 4-5 USD a cake. High prices are here to stay, so while it pains me to say this, as consumers we have to be aware that a dollar now is not like a dollar a few years ago, and we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. Otherwise, all you’ll get offered to buy are from the trash heap that nobody would want to buy in China itself.

Categories: Information
Tagged: , ,

Review: two films about Rikyu

May 18, 2014 · 9 Comments

Rikyu is, for lack of a better comparison, the Mohammad of Japanese tea. All three of the formal schools claim descent from him, and among the many branches of tea ceremony most of them are intimately connected with the three schools. He has been almost sanctified in his treatment, and the image we now have of him, that of him in that square hat and black robe, is so deeply entrenched in the public imagination that one almost expects that to be him.

His greatest skill, I think, was not so much in the artistic arena, necessarily, but rather the political acumen that he possessed and the diplomatic skills he had to have in order to secure the continued patronage of two of the three unifiers of Japan, until, of course, his death at the order of the second of these three men, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Like Rikyu, we also have a fairly set idea of of what these men were like – the brash and dominant visionary that was Oda, the rags to riches Toyotomi, and the reserved and cunning Tokugawa. Toyotomi’s (well deserved) reputation as a trickster and his lowborn background certainly added to that intrigue. Working for these two men was probably no easy task, and in being able to hold the position of tea master for these two, and being the most prominent of what was a constellation of tea masters, Rikyu must have had something extra special.

The 1989 film “Rikyu” is a slow, methodical piece. There the director was very much trying to portray Rikyu as a man of few words, driven, by the circumstances, into impossible positions, but always found an exit through tea and, in doing so, was able to create and pursue his aesthetic goals. However, because of the way it was shot and the story was told, it makes the movie difficult to watch even for people like us who love tea. I once showed it to my class, and I could tell that for freshmen students, it was a bit too much. Of course, when watching a movie about the tea ceremony, one can’t expect to see fireworks and swordfights, but when a movie spends fifteen minutes (or what feels like fifteen minutes) on a slow, mumbling conversation in a dark tea room, and when characters’ emotions are expressed only through a sideways glance or a twitch of the lips, it makes many demands on the viewer to be attentive and focused, much as a tea services does to the host.

The new 2013 film “Ask this of Rikyu”, which I just watched here in Taipei at the Spot Threatre (a great arthouse threatre for those coming to visit), is pretty much the polar opposite of the 1989 film. While both movies are anchored around the eventual death of Rikyu through seppuku, the contrast in the way the story is told and the way the characters are depicted cannot be more different. For one (and rather jarring for me) this Rikyu is young – too young by a long shot. When he became tea master to Oda, he was 58, an old man by the standards of his day, whereas the Rikyu in this movie is depicted as someone who was only beginning life – no later than perhaps 30 years old or so. The rest of the movie saves up some surprises along the way, but the Rikyu we see here is a heroic one – one who wears his emotions on his sleeves, who says things that are, sometimes, quite blunt and not politically safe, and who, in many ways, died for his ideals in what sounded a lot like a clash between church and state, except the church here is one where its adherents were in pursuit of beauty, and Rikyu was their prophet. Toyotomi, in this narrative, was jealous of the invisible power that Rikyu wielded (along with other slights along the way) and decided to get rid of him. I find this part of Rikyu to be less believable - he would have had a hard time securing long term patronage with this sort of high and mighty attitude in that world.

The Rikyu in this new movie is also a showman, and that, I do believe. His father was involved in the warehouse business, and selling things, including his way of tea, was always going to be an important part of his life. Selling his way of tea, which was becoming popular especially with the teaching of Rikyu’s own teacher, Takeno Jōō, was an important job that he did very well. Convincing people that less is more and broken is beautiful is not an easy job; teaching this to samurai, especially ones like Toyotomi who came from literally nothing, is probably even harder. That Rikyu was able to do it and to popularize wabi tea to the point where it became the orthodox is remarkable. In this sense, he was sort of like a charismatic religious figure. He must have been a great diplomat and communicator to get through to people with his tea.

I also suspect that it was Rikyu the diplomat that ultimately did him in. Both movies focus on Rikyu’s clash with Toyotomi as having something to do with aesthetics; in the 1989 movie Toyotomi simply does not understand beauty, whereas in this new version he is jealous of and desires the power of beauty. I wonder, though, if the reality was more mundane than that. One of the jobs Rikyu performed was to make connections. The small, cramped tea rooms he served tea in was the cigar-smoke filled lounges of his day; deals were made and alliances were struck this way. Both movies hint at this, but do not really expand on it, choosing instead to focus on the aesthetics side of the narrative. But maybe Rikyu the diplomat and negotiator simply knew too much, and by 1591, when both the Hojo and the Tokugawa clan were pacified (one eliminated, other neutralized), he had Japan in his firm grip. Rikyu was no longer useful, and keeping him around was dangerous. All the talk about the statue on the gate and what not was simply a pretense – he just needed to get rid of someone who knew too much.

Of course this narrative is not movie material – it’s a pretty mundane story if it’s just about Rikyu possessing too many secrets, and nobody would want to watch that. When people see a movie about Rikyu, they want to see tea, and they want to see how great he was at putting together a comprehensive philosophy with how tea can and should be appreciated. This need drives how movie scripts are written, which then further reinforce our views of what Rikyu was like. Commercial interests of course also determine storytelling decisions, and I have no doubt the more cartoonish portrayal of characters in this newer version (as well as other things I’ll leave you to discover yourself) led to how the story is told here. I have not read the novel this new film is based on, so I have no basis for comparison that way. It was entertaining, certainly more so than the 1989 film, and at its best moments it did make me think about how I drink and appreciate tea. That, perhaps, is good enough.

Categories: Information
Tagged: , ,