A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘musings’

Shipping tea

August 15, 2007 · 1 Comment

I was really worried when I sent my tea out from Beijing. I haven’t shipped tea before, not in a large quantity like this anyway, and I think I learned a few things

1) Do use lots, and lots, and lots of bubble wrap. I didn’t use enough and some cakes took a bit of a beating.

2) China Post has really bad boxes. They look fine, but they get battered very fast. Which means more hazards for the tea itself.

3) Seemingly strong metal cans can be crushed easily by tea cakes in the same box.

4) Teaware actually do ok if wrapped enough, but some, like the delicate, thinner cups, aren’t meant to survive.

5) Some cakes survive better than others, interestingly enough. Having a tong wrapper REALLY helps and there was virtually no damage to any of the cakes wrapped in those things. You couldn’t even tell they went through the mail.

6) I don’t think I’ll do it again if I can help it.

I ended up following Hster’s advice — I thought given what I had it was the most sensible thing, to put some tea in the cupboard — about a tong of cheap cakes. The tea smell quickly overwhelmed the wood smell, so I think I am probably going to be ok with multiple tongs of tea in there. I also used the spilled tieguanyin from the crushed can to help soak up some smell. They’re still in the cupboard, along with all my puerh. Hopefully, when I come back in a few months… they’ll all be good and happy, mould free, and tastes a little better than when I left — which is tomorrow.

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On tea blogs

July 31, 2007 · 8 Comments

It’s been almost a year and half since I started my blog. Initially I had no idea how many people would read it. Since according to some study an average blog gets 7 unique visitors a day, I figured if I get 10 a day I would be doing well. While this blog has certainly exceeded that expectation, the fact remains that it is merely a small project, comprising mostly of notes for myself and observations I have gathered along the way.

During this time, however, the online blogosphere has blossomed. When I first started, only four of the links on the blog existed — Babelcarp, Cha Dao, La Galette de The, and the LJ Puerh Community. The rest, as far as I am aware, were still in gestation. Now any visit to any of these sites will bring you to even more blogs and journals out there, composed by dedicated tea drinkers like you and me. Just keeping up the reading would mean visiting a dozen or so blogs every week, at least.

Visiting these blogs in quick succession, one will get the impression that much of the online blogosphere for tea is devoted to reviewing teas. In fact, many blogs do basically nothing but review teas. Is what we’re doing merely tea reviews, tea reviews, and more tea reviews? Is there a value for this, or is it mostly old news, uninteresting because of the relative lack of experience on the bloggers’ part in drinking tea compared to some grand tea masters out there? After all, my sister has likened the reading of my blog to reading knitting patterns for people who don’t knit — it’s really rather boring stuff. Why bother?

I think what’s beneath the surface of the blogs is what makes some of us come back, day after day, blogging about the rather mundane topic of “what tea we drank today” or “what we found”. It is the exchange of information, the interaction, and the joy in knowing that somebody else is interested in the same thing with the same keen interest that you do that keeps us interested in maintaining our respective blogs. I believe this is partly because of an acute lack of a culture of gongfu tea drinking in much of the blogging community’s own locale. Whereas when I was in Beijing there was always a ready-made group of tea drinkers who can share my interest in person, going out to a tea store or a teahouse to share a cup of our favourite beverage, in much of the English-speaking community, from which most of the online bloggers are drawn, oftentimes the only person who drinks tea seriously whom the blogger knows is the blogger him/herself. What the blogs, and the exchanges that take place both on and off sites, serve are the same needs that a tea drinker in China wants from a visit to a teahouse or teashop — an interaction with somebody else who is passionate about tea. (French blogs, curiously, have a very high “comment” rate unmatched in the English community — I’ve always wondered why)

Online interactions also turn into real life interactions. The LA Tea Drinkers were formed, I think, from exchanges online and now meet regularly in person for drinking sessions. There’s an active group of drinkers in New York centered around the Tea Gallery, and though they do not blog, by an large (except Toki, from time to time), others from other blogs or websites have found them through the internet. For a little while, a few of us in the Boston area tried our best to get together to drink some tea. The same has happened in the UK, and is going on in Hungary soon. Drinkers in Asia are luckier, but even then, on forums such as Sanzui, a large section is devoted to tea drinkers from various cities trying to organize tea tastings, sometimes on a weekly basis. In Beijing, for example, there’s a dedicated group of them who get together every so often, trying everything from white to black teas. All of these groupings consist of people who, by and large, would never have met in real life were it not for their love of tea — and their online activities which revealed themselves to each other.

These groupings remain small, however, and even in China, there are many cities where one sees users post something along the lines of “I’m the only person I know in the city who really likes tea — anybody else???” with nary a reply. The internet in general, and personal blogs in particular, become our outlet for the need for such exchanges. When we review the same tea, or teas of similar genre, or even drinking something random, we’re exchanging views in what is sort of a constant tea meeting. Photos and videos enhance that experience, but at the end of the day, I think it is the exchange of information and views that constitute the raison d’etre of the blogs out there. I, for one, have met many new friends both online and offline through my writing, and now I can count at least a dozen places where I have gotten to know new tea friends because one day in 2006, I decided to start keeping my tea notes online in a blog format. I’m sure I will only meet more in the future.

I think nobody is claiming any of this information in the blogs to be necessarily new, accurate, or thought provoking in and of themselves; however mundane and knitting pattern-like, they serve a purpose that is only possible thanks to the democratisation of the internet experience — as an ongoing virtual tea gathering of like minded individuals, each sharing their little slice of knowledge learned while drinking this marvelous beverage.

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Asian markets

July 21, 2007 · 2 Comments

It is sad, but whereas previously I spent my Saturdays at Maliandao, swimming in tea, now all I can do to amuse myself is going to the local Asian market while I’m here in Central Ohio. It’s not much, but it’s food for thought.

Asian markets, I suspect, is where a lot of people in the USA come into contact with tea that isn’t bagged. Judging from the local teas available at Wal-mart and supermarkets, they mostly consist of Bigelow teabags, Lipton teabags, and other unmentionable names…. Lipton’s new White Tea, for example, just tells you something along the lines of “First discover in the Fujian province of China, Lipton White Tea is plucked by hand from the tips of tea buds before the tea leaf blossoms, to preserve the natural goodness of the whole leaf.”. Sure…. first discovered…. as if it’s new.

Which is why I think Asian markets in general are such a lost opportunity. Obviously, not everybody goes to their local Asian market, but it definitely speaks to the audience that is more likely than most to try out something new, something a little more exotic. While there today, a Caucasian lady and her Asian friend were shopping, and the former asked the latter “do you have a good tea to recommend?” while they were walking by the tea aisle.

Unfortunately, of course, none of the teas there were anything near what you might call good. Starting from the packaging, the teas being sold are atrocious, usually. They usually come in ugly packagings of green, lime green, red, orange, and other bright but uncomfortable colours, many of which haven’t been updated since the 1950s, and with unclear labeling, naming, spelling, etc that further confuses any potential buyer. Out of the whole aisle, only one tin of tea looked decent, judging by the packaging. It was a Lapsang Souchong, the tin having obviously been designed by somebody with half a brain, in a clear black and white layout. It doesn’t cost that much to do these things. It probably doesn’t cost them really anything considering how cheap packaging is to make in China. Yet…. nobody seems to understand the need for such a thing.

The teas themselves, of course, range from bad to atrocious. Rarely do they have anything really decent. I remember trying a few things from the local Asian market while I went to college in Northeastern Ohio (no, I’m not from Ohio; it’s just a coincidence that I’m here again) and they were all… pretty bad.

The only Asian market that had reasonable tea that I’ve been to was the Great Wall in New York City, but I have been informed that it’s dead. They put them in clear glass jars, so you could see what the leaves were like, and generally while they weren’t exactly great teas, they did have a few things that were palatable. In fact, I can say that I really got interested in tea because I bought a pack of mingqian longjing from them while visiting there. It’s odd for a Hong Kong boy to get seriously piqued by good tea from a shabby touristy Asian market in NYC, but such is life. I remember it was really expensive, and I wondered why it was so expensive, and tried some… and decided that I should never drink bad tea again. I’m still trying.

I wish more places were able to do that. Black teas in general keep very well, so it’s not too difficult nor too much of an investment to do such a thing. While cities on the coast definitely have other alternatives for a tea lover, for most of the American population in smaller cities, towns, or even rural areas… the local Asian markets really represent a lost opportunity to bring this beverage to a wider audience.

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Are teabags really that different from each other?

July 18, 2007 · 1 Comment

Today we drove a good 50 miles to go to the nearest Whole Foods, which means that I didn’t really have a lot of spare time to brew tea at home properly, as I don’t like to do a full session at night (which can affect my sleep). Instead, feeling the need for some tea, I bought a cup of tea at the Whole Foods… featuring Republic of Tea teabags. Of course, being RoT, it means that the only thing that isn’t flavoured with vanilla or blueberries or butterscotch or some such was the Assam Breakfast. Sure…

It was all right, a regular Assam-esque teabag. Nothing too fancy, nothing too bad.

Then I came home, and feeling a little indigestion after dinner, had another teabag, this time something that somebody gave me as a gift. Signature Estates Assam. Somehow…. I didn’t feel a whole lot of difference between the two. Obviously, if I stick a Lipton “brisk” tea against one of these, the “brisk” will obviously taste inferior. However, would the difference be that obvious between teabags of the same regions? Whereas if these teas were whole leaf, and if I brewed them my usual way (or even the grandpa way), I am sure I can tell some differences, when they’re in a bag form… it’s almost impossible, or at least, so subtle as to make it a moot point.

Which makes me wonder… why pay the higher price for some of these things?

I think it’s probably worth it to pay the extra to get either of these instead of a box of “brisk” tea, but is there any difference between these two? While the websites show similar prices, I know retail in a non-mail-order form the Signature Estates cost a bit more. On the other hand, it’s got a nice box.

Which means that it all comes down to branding… at some point, it’s no longer the tea being sold, but the distribution chains, the brand image, the packaging, and the idea that the tea is superior… when it is really all tea dust. Does it really matter where a tea is from when it’s tea dust?

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Thoughts after a movie

July 13, 2007 · 2 Comments

I went and saw the movie Ratatouille today. A thoroughly enjoyable movie, and I would recommend everybody of all ages to go see it. In the movie there’s a character, Anton Ego, who’s a food critic who revels in being negative. This character made me think. It is easy to become simply critical of everything one encounters when it comes to tea, but it is important to not lose sight of the joys of drinking, and the hard work went into the making of the tea that we drink. Much of the tea out there are mere products of a factory, made with machine and devoid of any real soul, but others are crafted by hand, made with an attention to detail not unlike a cook does with raw ingredients for a dish. They size it up, they see what they’ve got, and then make the best of it. There is, indeed, much joy when one can truly praise something with no reservations, but even when the are criticisms to be made, the critic could only do so because somebody has bothered to make it. However, tea, in its final stage as a liquid to be drunk, is actually a symbiosis of both its creator and its critic. While we are evaluating the tea that was made by somebody else, we are, at the same time, evaluating our own rendition of the leaves that were given to us. In that sense, the critic is also a participant in the process of making the tea, and perhaps that’s why it is even more delightful to drink a great cup — both as the critic who delights in enjoying it, and as the co-creator who made it.

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Restaurant teas

July 2, 2007 · 2 Comments

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China.  It’s been 10 years already, even though it seemed only like yesterday when the handover ceremony took place on a very rainy night.  There were many things that set Hong Kong apart from China.  There still are, even after 10 years.  One such thing is the way tea is served in restaurants.

In Hong Kong, if you go into a Chinese restaurant or a Hong Kong style restaurant serving localized western or Chinese food (typically known as “cha chan teng”*, literally tea restaurant), tea is automatically served.  The type of tea served depends on where you are.  If you walk into a usual Chinese restaurant, the tea served is determined by you among the usual selection of “polay (puerh)”, “soumeh (longevity brow, or soumee, etc, a white tea)”, “teek guoon yum (tieguanyin)”, etc.  You pick among the ones they have.  In a “cha chan teng”, it’s usually some severely watered down red tea.  It’s more like flavoured water.  Tea is often free, or priced fairly low with a “tea and (Chinese) mustard” charge on the bill.  It’s usually the same no matter what you order.

In China, however (with the exception of Shenyang, interestingly enough), teas have to be ordered.  Even at pretty bad restaurants, the teas are often quite expensive, often rivaling a main dish or more.  A pot of puerh can often cost you 50 RMB or even 100 (at the fancy places) even when it’s just a really bad, insipid cooked tea.  I’ve been to places where the whole meal for two costs maybe 200 RMB, and a pot of tieguanyin would cost you 250.  They’re almost never worth that much, and very overpriced.  It makes ordering tea a real hazard here, without first checking the prices.  You could be adding a lot of cost to the food bill without knowing it, and not getting nice tea in return.  I often never order tea here at restaurants, but eating without drinking some tea makes me feel like I’m missing something.

Tonight, for example, as we’re having a dinner gathering with a few other grad students from my school here in Shanghai, we ordered a pot of longjing.  I think it was something like 50 for a pot, but the tea we got wasn’t even longjing.  It was at best what they would call a “Zhejiang longjing”, which basically means super low grade longjing that is merely a green tea, and called longjing for the simple reason that they’re grown somewhere in Zhejiang.  Everybody noted how cheap the tea is.  The food was good, the tea was not.  It’s a shame that even when charging somebody for the tea, they couldn’t give us something slightly better.

I hope that eventually, China will have restaurants that start offering good tea for not much money (at least proportional to the quality and not outrageous).  Right now though, I’d advise anybody coming here to avoid teas in restaurants.

*This is non standard romanization, as I am merely trying to replicate the Cantonese sound and not following any romanization scheme.  Besides not knowing any well enough, there are a few competing ones and I feel that none of them make intuitive sense for people who aren’t already familiar with Cantonese.

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A productive tea gathering

June 30, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I had tea with L today.  Also present was a Taiwanese gentleman who apparently is quite an important man in the Taiwan tea business.  We had a long discussion on various topics around tea, from puerh to green.  The guy definitely has experience, and you can tell he knows what he’s talking about.  Much of it is just him lecturing, since we all know so little about tea production.

One thing that definitely comes across is that knowing about how tea is made is essential for a higher level understanding of why a tea tastes the way it does.  Being able to say “this tea is astringent because so and so did this during production” is very important.  For all types of tea, there’s a different set of rules, but there are also common things that are true for all teas.  It is obvious that knowledge from one kind of tea will transfer, at least somewhat, into others.  This man, for example, gathered a lot of data and knowledge from individual farmers and tried his best to improve Taiwanese oolong.  Everything from the wind direction, to the specific hour of the picking, to the location of the slope, soil type, etc etc are all important things to consider, and the way one processes a tea will change depending on any one of those factors.  Whether a tea is good or bad depends greatly on whether or not one is able to grasp all of these variables and make the tea come alive, a term that he stressed throughout the day.

What’s also important is that I’ve actually never heard of this man before, and I doubt few outside the trade has.  There must be many such low profile tea makers out there who are just really knowledgeable.  The people who know tea best are the makers, and all pursuit in tea, ultimately, goes back to the production process.  I wonder if it’s ever possible to learn so much, without being a producer myself.  But it’s a nice thought and certainly one goal to aspire to.

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TenFu

June 25, 2007 · 5 Comments

One of the things that I never really said much about in the 10 months I’ve been here is Tenfu, also known as TenRen, or in the States, Ten Tea. For those of you who don’t know them, they are a very big organization, and at least in China and Taiwan, they’re everywhere.

When you walk into TenFu here, you’ll be greeted by a salesgirl (they’re all salesgirls) who will ask you what you might need, and especially if you look foreign (as I, mystifyingly, apparently do sometimes) they will be presenting you with a cup of jasmine tea. On one wall you will see an array of those golden colour tea canisters, with name of tea on them and their price. On the other wall will be a slew of teaware.

The array of teas that TenFu sells basically goes something like… a few kinds of green, some with a few levels, a few kinds of other oolongs, and maybe a million different varieties of tieguanyin, all of the relatively green kind. Prices range from the 100 RMB/500g to the 20000RMB/500g (or even higher, I think). Their puerh are extremely overpriced, and so are everything else, for that matter.

They are ubiquitous in China. Everywhere you go, as long as you’re in a reasonable sized city, you will see at least one. I’ve seen them a few times in Shenyang already, usually in the most central shopping areas, or next to certain sites, or… next to the provincial government, in this case (for the gift-buying crowd). They are one of the few tea stores in China that will sell tea in packaging that is one level up from the ugly foil bags, and they are also a place where they will actually let you taste whatever you want, pretty much (a lot of smaller tea stores that are not in tea markets are a little reluctant about that, sometimes).

The good thing about them is that they do introduce a lot of people who otherwise don’t care much about tea a first entry to decent tea. My friend L, who now runs a tea business, got started with TenFu. He said his family, two generations ago, were tea merchants in Tianjin. Then came the revolution and communism, through which they lost their company, but he picked up interest in tea again when he got involved in tea lessons at TenFu. He’s just one example of many people who are like that. TenFu is actively involved in giving lessons to people in tea, and they have a nice community going. The amount of work they do in promoting tea is certainly worth commending.

The downside is, of course, their price. They are expensive. Everything they sell is overpriced. When I first got to Beijing, I bought a small set of teaware from them that cost me 100 RMB. I probably could’ve bought everything in that package from Maliandao for about 20. That was a lesson learned. A lot of ex-TenFu customers I know now no longer buy stuff from them, because over time they have learned that TenFu sells them stuff that are way overpriced. Far more people, however, just keep buying from them because they just trust them, somewhat blindly, I think. I think it is mostly because it is just too much trouble sometimes for what isn’t really that much money, or uncertain quality, or something like that. Many are happy with what they provide, and that’s that. At the end of the day, I suppose it’s just a matter of “to each his own”, regardless of what it is, where it’s from, or how much it is. So long as TenFu doesn’t lie about their teas (which I don’t think they do), it’s not really a problem. I think when lying starts happening, it’s a different matter entirely.

I do blame them for popularizing the ever lighter oxidation/roast of tieguanyin though, making it hard to find the higher roast stuff. Oh well.

Back to Beijing tomorrow. I think while Shenyang is nice… it’s enough to spend a week here especially with the lack of tea. The archives are not too useful here, for me anyway, although it’s a good thing I finally got to see the old palace here and some unexpected cultural treasures.

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Market fragmentation

June 17, 2007 · 5 Comments

I went to Maliandao today, and saw my friend L who came up from Shanghai. I think he had some business to deal with.

He did bring something good, supposedly, anyway. It’s a sample of a Yellow Label from, ostensibly, the 70s. We tried it… nice, but in almost the exact same way that my loose GYG pieces are nice. They taste virtually identical. I’m sure the person who got the Yellow Label cake paid many multiples of what I paid for my pieces. It was a happy thing to know.

I also tried a number of other things, both at L’s store and elsewhere. They include an 03 Yiwu that’s been in Yiwu storage, which is reputably pretty wet and which shows when I tried the tea — there’s a sort of mustiness to it. I also had an 07 “rainfall” (aka summer) Yiwu maocha. Very bland, relatively speaking. Pleasant enough to drink, but not good enough for anything else. There’s a reason summer teas are used for cooked puerh. In fact, I think it’s a waste to bother to pick them – the taste is boring and flat, despite long infusions and generous amounts of leaves. It was definitely interesting to try though. I also had a mass production cake from Zhongcha this year. Smells nice, decent aromas, but a little too aromatic and too little bitterness for me to feel like I’m drinking young puerh.

Then I went on to the store that sells Douji puerh. I tried two things there. One was their 06 Fall “Yu Pin”, which literally means “jade product”, but is from the fringes of the Bulang area. Another cake is a self-produced cake by the owner of the store, who went to Yunnan this spring to press the tea himself (500 cakes of it) and who doesn’t really sell it except as gift packs. The cake is a Guafeng Zhai spring first flush. He pairs it with a real Lao Banzhang, and the set sells for a staggering $330 USD. Not cheap by any stretch of imagination, but then, he had high costs as well as real financial backing (I think tea is entirely a side business for him — he runs some other company). The teas were collected at above-market rates, and he only used first flush tea. The Guafeng Zhai tea is nice, but somehow, I don’t think it’s spectacularly nice to demand such high sums. I mean, it’s got good qi, but only so so huigan and not a lot of throatiness. I’ve read that sometimes for puerh it is better not to use first flush, which is sometimes too tender. Perhaps that explains the relatively subdued nature of the tea. The qi lasted a good bit, and the tea made my stomach hurt, but really… a lot of teas can do that for far less money. He also used an extremely generous amount of tea, which makes me think it has something to do with the strength involved.

One interesting tidbit the owner of this store told me today though is that he’s tried a number of 07 teas so far, and he thinks they are all weaker compared to the 06 version. There’s been talk that because of low rainfall, the tea this spring should be better, but he thinks that when rainfall gets too low… the tea suffers in quality. He might have a point. I haven’t really seen an 07 cake thus far that has made me feel like it’s worth buying. Prices for cakes this year are also much higher than those of years past, simply because the raw materials have gotten so much more expensive. When a lot of 03-05 cakes can be had for less money, why buy 07? It makes almost no sense to do so.

He also told me that many factories are pulling in tea leaves from other provinces to cut cost as well as to keep production going. After all, the total capacity for producing puerh in Yunnan right now has far outstripped the supply of raw maocha in Yunnan, especially given the low production yields this spring (one reason why maocha prices are up, supposedly, and also why a lot of factories haven’t produced much 07 teas yet). Like the story I posted about a week ago of Li Jing, who started a factory but has received few orders, most factories need to make tea to stay alive. Overcapacity, however, is a real problem, and I think many such small factories will be heading for a fall. What that might mean for the owners of such factories… who knows.

Right now there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market. If you’re a bull, you will cite the fact that puerh is still 1) very cheap, relatively speaking. 2) It’s only popular in the coastal cities. 3) Brands are still forming. 4) The tea’s inherent advantages, like rebrewability, ageability, etc. If you’re a bear, then you’ll cite 1) overproduction/capacity. 2) High, bubble like prices. 3) Unpalability when young. 4) Extremely volatile market.

How it goes only time will tell, but I think we’re seeing now a healthy segmentation/fragmentation of the market going on, with real consequences for us regular buyers. On the one hand, you have the big factories producing regular stuff that are, more or less, known items. Menghai and the like are prime examples of that. On the other hand, you have these small, boutique shops that make high priced teas catering to the wealthy and (perhaps) knowledgable. These are the ones with very well defined terroir, limited quantities, and high prices to go with it. These are also shops that can’t possibly do this on a grand scale for simple reason of economy and supply.

One huge problem though is that nobody, as far as I know, has good access to a steady source of such tea production areas. Everybody who is in the business rely very much on contacts in Yunnan, trying to score good maocha from the farmers. The way land ownership and production works in such areas is that nobody can buy out a whole mountain — the most I’ve heard of is somebody securing the promise of local farmers to only sell to him. Even that is difficult to enforce/police, and creates problems for a sustained level of quality, especially in a difficult to manage agricultural product like puerh tea.

Another factor that is complicating the issue is the appearance of drink-me-now puerhs. The oolong-ized or the green-tea-ized puerhs taste great now, but nobody really knows how well they age in the long run, and very few (myself included) can really tell them apart with good certainty. Whether such teas are worth the money depends on your tastes — do you want to buy it for aging, or buy it for drink it now?

I know I buy puerh hoping they’ll age into something great for the future. I’m more of a fan of aged teas than young teas, even though my current drinking habits would seem to indicate that I like them young. Rather, I’ve been trying them as much as I can while I have good access to it, and I expect myself going back to more oolongs in the near future when I won’t see as much young puerh. It creates a lot more work for me, and I noticed I’ve gravitated to small production, higher priced, but more individualistic puerh. Soon, however, I’m afraid I’ll be priced out of that market, if current conditions continue, and I think I will, because, as I’ve said before, I think old tree teas, the real ones anyway, won’t drop significantly in prices. Can’t say the same for the mass produced stuff.

Maybe I need to nurse my collection and hope they will all age to greatness, because I might not be affording some of them anymore a few years down the line. Let’s hope I’m wrong on this one!

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Buyers don’t buy, sellers don’t sell

June 10, 2007 · 5 Comments

The following is an article that I saw on Sanzui (unfortunately, you need to register to see the original text), which was in turn reposted from sina.net, a Chinese web portal. I’m trying to stick as close to the original text as possible, so some places might read a little awkward. Also, note that 1 USD = 7.7 RMB at current exchange rates. I should also note that coincidentally, I’ve actually met Li Jing at the Shanghai tea expo.

Buyers don’t buy, sellers don’t sell: Today’s puerh in a frozen state

From Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna, to the tea country of Menghai, one must pass through Nannuo Mountain.

On the west side of the highway is the wooden house of Qiuhe. The people live on the second floor, and on the ground floor there’s a huge bag of tea, totaling some 250kg. This is freshly produced spring maocha. Right now it’s May 9th, and the price for old tree Nannuo maocha is about 280 RMB/kg. At this price, just this bag of spring tea is worth 70,000 RMB. Adding in the summer and fall teas, making 100,000 RMB this year is no problem for Qiuhe.

Yet he hasn’t sold one single kilogram of tea. He said he’ll wait — he’s hoping for 300 RMB/kg.

Qiuhe has a reason to wait. This Hani ethnicity family has been living in Nannuo Mountain for generations, and have always relied on tea as a living. From what Qiuhe remembers, in the 80s the price for all teas, plantation or old tree, were the same, around 0.4 or 0.5 RMB/kg. It wasn’t until 1999 when the price rose to 3 RMB/kg. Then after 2004 came around, the price went far beyond what he imagined possible. Two years ago, it hit 40 RMB/kg, and last year at the beginning of the year it was already at 55 RMB/kg. This year it zipped past 200 RMB/kg in no time.

Yet, just across the road, the general manager of the Menghai Shagui Boma Tea Factory, Li Jing, said as soon as I met her, “this year’s no good. Renminbi (RMB) shrinks as soon as it sees tea leaves. What do you think this is?” Her factory didn’t receive an order until very recently for two or three tonnes of tea. “You see that factory down the road? They haven’t even lit their furnace (for making tea)”

Li said that the prices this spring for various famous mountains rose about seven to eight times for plantation teas, and more than 10 times for old tree teas. Take Banzhang village of Bulang mountain for example, last year it was around 100-200 RMB/kg for old tree tea. This year, before May 1st, the price shot past 1250. Hu Wang, who came from Beijing to buy maocha, said he’s even bought some for 1600 RMB/kg.

Banzhang village is almost like a fairy tale this year. When Li came here in April to buy tea, she agreed on a price of 1100 RMB/kg on the first day she arrived. The next day, it went up to 1150. She decided to wait a little, but when she got up the next morning, it was 1200. She decided not to wait any longer, and bought 60kg. The tea cost more than the car that carried it home.

Away from Qiuhe’s home, on the other side of Nannuo mountain in the hamlet of Shuihelao, Xiao Zhixin, a graduate student in anthropology from Beijing University is also seeing the effects that the puerh tea craze has had on the people here. “A few years ago the people here just grew their own rice and corn to eat, some families didn’t even make enough food to feed themselves. Even last year, when the tea prices just started rising, there were only two motorcycles in this hamlet of 240 people. Now most have at least one, if not two motorcycles. There are even some new karaoke bars, and some girls from out of town who just loiter in front of them.”.

Pazheng village, to which Shuihelao belongs, produces mostly plantation teas. They neither have the old trees of Nannuo Mountain, nor the miracle of Bulang mountain’s Banzhang village.

Li Jing said other than families that only have old people and kids, almost every family has a car these days, mostly pickups of some sort. As long as you have an identification card for Nannuo or Banzhang, put down the ID card and sign a contract, you can take home a motorcycle or even a car right away. According to a tea merchant from Beijing, a farmer in Banzhang could make a few hundred thousand RMB easily, and during the harvest season, just one day’s picking would be a few thousand RMB.

But, as one can see from Qiuhe’s old wooden house, the wealth that has suddenly arrived is only affecting one corner of Yunnan. According to Yang Shanxi, the director of Yunnan’s Tea Bureau, on the whole Yunnan fresh (unprocessed) tea leaves prices rose about 2-3 times this year, from last year’s 3-4 RMB/kg to this year’s 10-12 RMB/kg. Even then, it is still far from Zhejiang province’s prices, as maocha for Yunnan is around 62 RMB whereas Zhejiang has reached 182. Zhang Jun of the Tea Institute of Yunnan’s Agricultural Academy thinks that as long as the market develops normally, there’s still ample room for growth in puerh tea prices.

Statistics also show that even though Yunnan farmers have had a substantial increase in their income in recent years, they are still ranked in the bottom when compared with the rest of the country. But the stories of Lao Banzhang has attracted the attention not only of people from Menghai or just the puerh production areas, but the whole country as well.

When asked about her thoughts when she joined the puerh tea industry as a kindergarten teacher in 2005, Li Jing said “when I saw other people making money, I wanted to make some money too”. She has natural advantages, having lived in Nannuo for almost 50 generations. Her father teaches in Lao Banzhang. “I was naive back then. There are lots of relatives, so it was easy to buy maocha. When we got maocha we just made it into finished products and sell. It was easy to make money”.

The same thought went through everybody’s mind. Li said that this year, in the local bank in Menghai, there were four lines of people who were lining up to take out cash. The local branch didn’t have enough money to pay all of them, and had to get cash transferred from Dali to meet the needs. Everybody talks about puerh when they meet. A parent of one of her former students, who used to be a garbage collector, asked when seeing her “Teacher Li, you want puerh? I have all sorts of teas.”

“Prices for rice went up. Prices for vegetables went up. People who used to grow vegetables went to collect tea. People who used to work in restaurants are now working in tea factories. Even nannies are impossible to find” Li said, noting things that outsiders don’t see. “Many tea factories can’t begin production because they can’t find workers. Last year we paid 30 RMB per day for wages. This year people won’t even work for 50”

Li’s problems are not limited to these. She planned to make a tea factory in 2005. In 2006 they made about twenty to thirty tonnes of tea in the spring. With the money she and her partner made, as well as the money loaned to her from her distributors, she expanded the factory’s capacity to 500 tonnes a year, and owed a million RMB in debt in the process. The factory was finished early this year, but prices of maocha is already so high that nobody wants to risk putting down a big order. “If our customers don’t send us money first, we don’t do the order. What if the market crashes? We’ll be dead.”

Factories like Li’s are very common. She said that last year there were only about 50 factories in the area. This year, there are 170. In fact, in the whole of Yunnan, according to Yang Shanxi, puerh processing capability is already approaching 200,000 tonnes a year. Last year’s production of all teas was 138,000 tonnes, with puerh accounting for about 80,000 tonnes of it. This means that there’s already a large distance between capacity and demand, which caused the prices of tea to rise quickly this year. The
other main reason is that rain came late this year, lowering overall production of tea leaves in the spring.

Late night on May 11th, in the lobby of a hotel in Jinghong sat a group of tea merchants from various placing, drinking together. Some of them have already been in Xishuangbanna for two or three months, but they still haven’t placed a big order. After May 1st, the price of Lao Banzhang has already dropped back to 800 RMB/kg, but still, nobody was buying and nobody was selling.

“Right now the situation is quite funny — buyers don’t buy, and sellers don’t sell”, Hu Wang said. He said that on the one hand, tea farmers want a better price. On the other, merchants are worried about risk, so they have been delaying their purchase, which then freezes the market.

A Hebei tea merchant bellowed out “do you bet high or do you bet low?”

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