A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘history’

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.

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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.

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A year long hiatus

August 31, 2022 · 10 Comments

Last time I wrote a post here was July 2021. That’s more than a year ago and the longest break I’ve taken from this blog. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been mostly busy dealing with various projects of mine, the most important of which is what you see above – the publication of my first book. I just got my own copies a couple days ago, which is pretty exciting. It’s also a long, long way away from when I first started this blog when I was merely a second year grad student. That year, I first started conceiving of this project that ended in this book, so in a way, it’s a nice milestone.

My next project is going to be much more about tea – I’ve been doing some research on various aspects of tea for the past few years now, as many of you have seen. The project is now slated to be mostly about tea production in Taiwan over the course of the 20th century, and its implications on what we can learn about skills, artisan production, and global trade. I originally wanted to do something more comparative, but Covid-19 travel restrictions means that it’s much harder to get that done in any reasonable timeframe. I do hope that in the next few years I’ll be able to go more to Taiwan to finish up some research and to get a book out, this time in less than than it took my first one.

Otherwise though, on the tea front, not that much is going on. I’ve been drinking lots of deathroast tieguanyin these days – just grandpa style in a mug. It’s easy and tasty. Without much travel and with all the Covid silliness, there’s been much less tea activity than normal and so not a lot to write about. I suppose a recent highlight is a session with a very well stored 1950s Red Label. That was nice.

Now that the book is out, it’s time to get cracking on the next book. Hopefully I’ll have some meaningful updates on here once I have made some more progress.

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Tea Geek Paradise

May 11, 2018 · 4 Comments

I spent the past three days in central Taiwan doing fieldwork visiting tea farms and such. Once you’ve seen a few tea farms, they all start to blend in – farms on their own are not particularly interesting unless the farmer is doing something really interesting, or there is something weird about the farm. Likewise for tea production facilities – the machines are mostly the same, the processes similar, and the only real difference lies in things you can’t see – the producer’s skill, timing, weather, leaf conditions, that sort of thing.

And then there are places like this:

This is one of the five tea research stations of Taiwan, official units of research into all things tea – from developing new tea varietals, to cultivation techniques, to production improvements. This place isn’t open for public – you need to have a valid reason to request a visit in advance.

The tea station is quite large – they only use about 10% of the land they have because they don’t really have enough manpower to use any more. This is the place that developed Taiwan tea #8, #18, and #21 – the station was originally set up in the Japanese colonial period for developing technologies related to cultivation of assamica varietal imported to Taiwan. #8, #18, and #21 are all black tea varietals, with the #18 being the most popular these days for a variety of reasons.

The station is quite interesting – they don’t use any pesticides and herbicides, and only organic fertilizers from what I understand. The point, after all, is to test the plants’ abilities to withstand various growing conditions and select the strongest trees for selective breeding. Using pesticides and such will mask their weakness. In the above picture you see how there are lots of random plants growing under the trees – that’s what a farm that uses no herbicides look like. In most pictures of tea farms you’ll see the soil around the tea trees are barren and brown. Likewise, the leaves are full of marks of insect damage. This is of course because they don’t spray pesticides. They do use something called “tobacco water” – a natural concoction with an infusion of tobacco (leftover bits from the cigarette industry). The nicotine helps repel insects a little, but only lasts a couple weeks and spraying is a lot of work. Most farms wouldn’t use it, but they do because it helps control the insects somewhat without any chemical pesticides.

They also do all kinds of tests with production methods. This is necessary because for each varietal of tea the processing may be different – a certain tea may come out better with longer oxidation cycles, or needs slightly less time during withering, or so on. The Tea Research Station might not know what is the best method of making a certain tea – after all, that is dependent on a lot of factors – but they certainly do try to figure out new ways of production that will help farmers along. Different varietals also have different growing characteristics that changes production methods. #21, for example, has buds that will grow too old quite quickly, so the harvest window is relatively short. If it happens to be raining on those days, then a farmer may be forced to harvest in sub-optimal weather (normally, nothing is done during harvest on a rainy day). Those teas will be inferior. For someone who has a smaller field who wants a tea that is easier to work with, #18 is preferable.

They also offer classes – introductory, intermediate, and advanced ones on tea making skills. Unfortunately, sons and daughters of families of tea farmers have priority, and leftover spots (if there are any at all) are filled by people in the tea industry. Younger people in the tea making business I talk to generally have done some of these courses at some point – they learn the basics and use those skills at home when they help out. In many ways, this is probably their most important active service to the tea production community, even though it may be underappreciated.

As one of my colleagues said, this is the “Tea Geek Paradise.” It was very interesting visiting and talking to the staff there, surrounded by tea trees while geeking out about tea history. Doesn’t hurt that they have an amazing view of the Sun Moon Lake as well.

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Life and death of a tree

April 24, 2017 · 11 Comments

This is a picture from my friend L, who is visiting Yiwu again this year. He’s been going for some years now, the first visit of his from 2007. He said when he first went to Yiwu, this tree was supposed to be 600 years old. It was just growing in the wild, one of the older trees, but certainly nothing too special. A few years later, in 2012 when he visited this spot again, the tree was now 1400 years old, not 600. By then, it had been “protected” with this metal cage you see surrounding it, and also some concrete poured around it to help protect it from, presumably, falling off the slope or something. Fast forward a few more years to today – as you can see in the picture, the tree is either dead or about to die, with no leaves and no real sign of life. It’s not the first tree like this and won’t be the last. Nannuo mountain had a similar, much bigger (physically) tree that was also “protected” and died in the process.

But fear not – there’s already a newly crowned “1000 years old” tree at the front of the village with a sign hanging from the tree proclaiming so. Tourists who are entering the region need not worry – they will still be able to see 1000 years old tree and buy magical leaves from them!

Now, aside from the utter absurdity of the story and the sadness of it all, I think it’s safe to say that those of us who have watched the puerh market for a decade or more know this sort of thing has been going on for some time now. The ever-increasing age of certain trees is not surprising – it’s been that way since at least 2005, when people first started getting crazy about older trees. Prices for the leaves have never really fallen since then, and now ever-fancier things are happening, with single tree cakes being pressed, etc. Just look at this tree though – how much tea do you think it can realistically produce? It’s no taller than a person and half. Even if you chop down the entire tree and took down all the leaves when it was in full bloom, chances are it’s no more than a couple kilos when fried and dried.

That brings us to a more salient point – this area of China has never, ever been rich. For pretty much its entire history, human beings living in these mountains have lived a subsistence lifestyle – they produce enough to sustain their life, but not much more. When tea traders first visited these areas in the early 2000s, conditions were primitive. Huts were shabby, sanitation basic, food, while they exist, were not exactly free flowing. In earlier decades many farmers actually chopped down their tea trees to plant rubber, because rubber trees offered a more steady income. Old tree tea was cheaper – they were considered less good back then, and more troublesome to harvest. Prices only really reversed starting somewhere in 2003, and hasn’t looked back since.

So in the face of this sudden rush of fortune, it is not a surprise that farmers in this area would want to exploit it to the full. This is, after all, their one chance of getting comfortable, even rich if you were one of those lucky ones to live in a famous village like Banzhang. You can finally make some decent money, send your kids to school comfortably, buy some creature comfort, build a new, better house, get a motorcycle or even a pickup truck. You can have some money in the bank, and enjoy life a little more. If the cost of all that is, say, the over-harvesting of some trees in the slopes above your house…. that’s ok, no? These trees finally will pull them out of poverty, and with an endless supply of newcomers who don’t know that much about tea, business is good.

In the last few years as tea-tourism has increased exponentially (I read one account that said this year 500,000 people are visiting the tea mountains during harvest season) there is an increasing number of people who really have no business going to the mountains in there, buying tea. If you are a rich, city professional interested in tea, and are spending a couple weeks in Yiwu looking at things, well, you would want some of your own tea, no? Here, here’s some tea from my 800 years old tea tree. That bag there? It’s the 600 years old one. If you are visiting only that one time – you’ll want to get your hands on some of these things. What’s a few thousand RMB for half a kilo of tea? It’s the memory that counts, and you can press it into a cake or a couple cakes and store it forever, knowing that you personally went up to the mountain to press these unique, old, single-tree cakes.

At that point, does it actually matter what trees these leaves are from? These guys are just buying tour souvenirs. It can be trash tea and it won’t matter. And a lot of it is indeed trash tea sold to people who really don’t know what they’re doing when buying maocha. When you compare a few bags of tea, one of them will always be better than the others. That doesn’t mean the bag is good, unless you really know what you’re doing. Most people have never really tried really fresh maocha enough to know the difference.

Eager customers from faraway places who don’t get to go to Yunnan easily are also lured in by the same promise. Like this tree that magically went from 600 years to 1400 years old – outlandish claims exist, even among vendors whose primary customer are in Western countries – and people buy them hoping that they, too, can experience these amazing teas. Let it sink in for a moment how old those trees are really, and think about how likely it is that these claims have any semblance of truth. Meanwhile, spare a thought for this tree that perished in the process.

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300 years old tea

November 21, 2016 · 1 Comment

I didn’t see this when it came out, but apparently, they found a box of tea from 1698. I only saw this because I’m now reviewing a book called Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World. What’s interesting, first and foremost, about this tea, at least from the somewhat grainy picture that they showed, is that the leaves are still green. Moreover, that this is unmistakably green tea – small buds, processed in ways that looks to be quite similar to what we consume now as greens. The fact that it kept its colour is quite interesting. I wonder how they have stored it in the intervening years, and what process the tea was produced under. Of course it’s a pity that they won’t let anyone try it, but it’s quite interesting nevertheless.

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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.

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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.

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The original Oriental Beauty

April 9, 2014 · 6 Comments

As some of you know, I’m a historian in my day job, and my new project is working on the history of how ideas (drinking practice, health concerns, etc) and technologies (plantation methods, processing techniques, etc) pertaining to tea moved across borders. Taiwan turns out to be the most interesting place to look at, because of its close connection with China, but at the same time because of its distinctive history and geopolitical location, thanks to it being under Japanese jurisdiction for the first half of the twentieth century. It ends up being a nice, big melting pot of stuff, perfect for my purposes.

As a result, a side story I’ve been pursuing on and off is the history of the tea Oriental Beauty (dongfangmeiren), more commonly known locally as Pengfeng tea (bragger’s tea). There are two kinds of legends surrounding the origins of this tea. One has something to do with nomenclature – the name Oriental Beauty. You have probably read this online somewhere, most likely from some vendor trying to sell you tea, but the story usually involves some queen of the United Kingdom (some say Victoria, others Elizabeth II) drinking it, finding it absolutely marvelous, and therefore giving it this nice name. This story is almost certainly false, and is made up to sell tea.

The most common name for the tea in the local community, Pengfeng tea, means bragger or bluffing tea. The idea is that the farmer who originally made the tea was able to sell it for such a high price, he bragged to his friends and neighbours, none of whom believed him. So, the name of the tea was born.

This story has always sounded sort of true, but like many such stories, there are lots of slightly different versions, making you wonder whether it’s true or not. What we do know is that the tea was from Beipu. The farmer was probably surnamed Jiang 姜 and there were large sums of money involved. Exactly how large, nobody knows. Everything I saw was a “it is said that” sort of version.

Everything, until today.

On my last trip to Taiwan I was able to get a copy of many issues of a journal called Taiwan no chagyo, or Taiwan’s Tea Industry. It was a trade journal from the colonial period. I have been going through the issues to look for information on all sorts of things, and today, reading one issue from 1933, I came across this

Bingo. The headline is “A high class tea worth a thousand yen”. Not a thousand yen for one jin, mind you, but a hundred jin, which doesn’t sound like a lot of money, until you figure out that the average jin of tea back then sold for a yen or less – so one jin of tea that sells for 10 yen was, indeed, an astronomical sum. The tea was one of the participants in a local tea competition, and it broke the 300 point mark in whatever scale they were using to grade the teas. The buyers included the governor’s office. It was obviously a cheap and easy way to promote better tea production – encouraging farmers to make better tea and they would be rewarded too with great prices if their tea were good. As the Taiwanese government was trying hard at that time to increase the production quantity and quality of tea for export, it made sense to pull a PR stunt like this.

The tea probably already existed by this time, but this was what made it famous. It probably is also where the name Pengfeng originally came from – maybe not so much a bragger in the liar sense of the word, but the farmer getting rather pleased with himself and annoying all the neighbours. Either way, it’s very gratifying to have found the smoking gun, so to speak, for the story, and it’s good to know that sometimes some of these legends do have some basis in fact.

Categories: Teas
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Tea is poison

August 20, 2013 · 5 Comments

I’m currently in Heathrow waiting for my plane to Munich, where I’m going to be giving a (pretty terrible and rough) paper that I’ve been working on regarding early ideas about tea in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, I was trying to look at how people thought about tea’s connection with health. It was quite interesting, really, because for anyone trying it for the first time, tea is obviously doing something to your body. It’s not just water – it’s more than that. If you drink a strong cup of tea, it will do certain things to you – and these are effects that are universally noticed.

However, that doesn’t mean people all have the same conclusion when it comes to tea and what it does to your body. Whereas in the very early eighteenth century when tea was still a rare and unusual commodity, people writing about it were still most introducing it, by the mid century it was obvious that tea consumption had become very popular (with mentions of ladies drinking tea in the afternoon, people using tea in copious amounts, etc) worries about tea also increased. You start seeing people writing about it and saying it causes health problems – everything from physical problems to causing neurological diseases. In one instance, an author even claimed he tested and found that tea caused scurvy, which is of course the opposite of the truth (tea in fact cures scurvy with its vitamin C).

Then by the late eighteenth century, people seemed to have started to calm down a bit, and worried more about the economic effects of tea. This is when George Macartney was sent to China to try to persuade the Qianlong emperor to open up trade, only to be rebuffed. You see this anxiety reflected in writings at the time – a lot of pages devoted to the economic health of Britain and how tea was draining it. Tea is not physical poison, but it’s economic poison. People also drank a lot with their tea – adding alcohol in it. So it got mixed up with the whole temperance movement. Not quite tea as a poison itself, but tea as the conveyor of poison, in this case.

It’s only by the nineteenth century that we seem to see that subside as well – of course, things had changed a lot by then. But it’s pretty clear that for almost a hundred years, there were doubts, worries, anxieties, and uncertainties about this drink. Contrast that with today’s unequivocal belief that tea is healthy, in any circumstances, things have definitely changed. Is that really true though? I think, as with anything, tea is best only in moderation. Claims of the cure to cancer are, unfortunately, probably exaggerated.

Categories: Information
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