by Jim Goodman
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| Jinuo tea farms in Youleshan |
When tea cultivation began in
Yunnan is difficult to pinpoint.
Local legends say that Zhuge Liang, the famed strategist from the Three
Kingdoms era in the 3rd century, popularized tea cultivation in
Yunnan after he conquered the province.
But no record exists of him ever reaching Xishuangbanna. That he popularized it rather than
introduced it implies tea cultivation was already going on in Yunnan. In Banna, the Jinuo people may already
have been residing there, and their origin myth says the goddess Yaobai gave
seeds for both tea and rice to the first Jinuo couple. So the cultivation of tea in
Xishuangbanna may well have begun around 2000 years ago.
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| tea gardens near Menghun, Menghai County |
Tea gardens, factories and
ancient tea trees are among the contemporary tourist attractions in
Xishuangbanna, especially among Chinese connoisseurs of fine quality tea. Way up near the summit of Nannuoshan,
just east of Menghai, stands the oldest extant cultivated tea tree in Banna,
said to be at least 900 years old.
Today it is accessible on a trail that takes about a half-hour’s walk
from the nearest Aini village, passing numerous, generations-old tea trees one
to three meters in height, which local workers climb up to pick the
leaves. The ancient tree,
festooned with chains of linked bamboo loops, is off-limits for tealeaf
pickers. So is the oldest living
wild tea tree, said to be 1600 years old, which stands in a mixed forest above
a small reservoir several km west of Bada, in southwestern Menghai County.
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| oldest wild tea tree (1600 years) near Bada |
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| oldest cultivated tea tree (900 years) at Nannuoshan |
Tea bushes grow in long, evenly
spaced rows on the mountain slopes.
After four years their leaves are ready for picking. Unlike rice fields in the mountains,
created by slash-and-burn agriculture, and only used for an average two years
before being abandoned in favor of new ones, tea gardens are permanent. They do not deplete the soil of
nutrients the way rice cultivation in the hills does. In fact, as time passed and the hills became more densely
populated, fields could not be left fallow long enough to insure, when prepared
again by slash-and-burn, a rice output similar to the previous yield. So rice cultivation became impractical
and people switched to tea as a cash crop, for which they didn’t need to
periodically make new fields.
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| Aini girl in a tea tree in Nannuoshan |
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| picking from the bushes south of Menghun |
Compared to the
work of rice farming—plowing fields, planting and harvesting—it’s not very
laborious. Harvesting starts in
late summer, when the rains have somewhat subsided. Because they were far from the population centers, tea
cultivators did not get involved in the marketing of it. They kept a portion to use themselves and
sold the rest to middlemen from the plains.
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| Dai tea garden in the plains near Menghai |
Tea merchants from the
different companies belonged to an association in the towns, which met annually
to determine prices and allocate collection zones. Sometimes merchants advanced money to growers in the spring,
when the hill people’s food stocks and cash were in short supply, enabling the
merchants to collect the harvest at a reduced rate when picking season
commenced in August. They also
advanced loans, at a monthly interest rate of 8-10%. The presence of Chinese military units and administrators
helped guarantee the Han monopoly in the tea trade
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| drying tea near the top of Nannuoshan |
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| drying tea in Yiwu |
As in the rest of China, tea
in Xishuangbanna was originally considered a medicine. Only in the last few centuries has tea
become an ordinary beverage taken with meals, as a refresher, or served as part
of hospitality. But even today,
for people like the Jinuo and Bulang, who have been growing tea for many
centuries, tea is not only a beverage, but also something that can be eaten—for
good health.
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| loading up the raw tea harvest |
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| sorting the tea |
To make their mixed cold tea
dish Jinuo people collect young tealeaves in the early morning and roast them
over a fire for thirty minutes.
Then they mix the cooked leaves with salt, spicy pepper, ginger and
garlic paste. They eat this
concoction, slightly sweet and with a distinct aftertaste, with sticky
rice. This particular preparation
is supposed to alleviate internal heat in the summer and reduce the feeling of
cold in the winter.
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| selecting the best quality buds |
In Bulang villages a
traditional favorite dish served at weddings and other festive occasions is
pickled tea. To make this
specialty the people collect new sprouts and young leaves from the tea bushes
and spread them out in layers on a mat to dry in the sun. When the lot begins to darken in color
the people rub the still moist leaves and sprouts with their hands, mix salt,
ground pepper and other spices with them, then pack them tightly in a sealed
bamboo tube. After thirty days the
tea will start to sour and in another thirty days is ready to serve. The pickled tea retains all its vitamin
C and other nutrients, is served cold as an appetizer, tastes slightly sweet
and is supposed to aid digestion.
The tea the Bulang like to
drink, though, is slightly bitter.
To process the leaves they either first stir-fry them, then bake them in
bamboo tubes, or else stir-fry or boil the leaves and then dry them in the
sun. Most of the tea processed by
these methods, similar to the processing done by other tea-growing mountain
peoples, goes to the commercial markets.
Freshly picked tealeaves and unprocessed, sun-dried leaves are sold
directly to the tea factories, where a more complex form of processing and
packing takes place.
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| filtering chutes |
In a typical tea factory one
large room contains sacks of leaves, which workers open one by one and toss the
leaves onto a screen to filter out the bigger sticks and pieces. The tea passes through two more screens
of finer mesh. The portions
obtained with each filtering are saved and processed as separate
qualities. Workers remove to
another room the leaves that pass through the filter and pile them up,
uncovered, raking them frequently, to dry indoors. In a third room several workers, usually women, sit over big
winnow trays of tea and select the best buds for the highest quality brands.
The tea is allowed to ferment
for a period of time determined by the managers, then steamed to halt the
fermentation and moved to the packing room. Several molding machines in this room press the processed
tea into different compact shapes, the most common being a round discus,
thicker in the middle than at the circumference. These are wrapped in handmade paper and stacked up in wooden
racks until sold or picked up for delivery to the market. Smaller portions of the processed tea
get pressed into shapes of balls, cones, pumpkins and wheels with square holes
in the middle, like the old coins, and low-relief Chinese characters on the
surface.
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| steaming to halt fermentation |
Samples of these shapes of
compressed tea will be on display in the factory’s receiving room, where guests
and buyers can try out various qualities.
The host prepares the tea almost ritually, over a meter-long, carved
wooden table with built-in drains.
After heating the water the host washes the cups with it to warm them
up, then brews the tea and serves it in small cups. With each refill the brew is darker and stronger and after
three or four cups the host proceeds to prepare another pot, of a different
quality.
Tea production in
Xishuangbanna increased throughout the Republican Era, but by the time the
Menghai Tea Factory opened in 1939, the first large-scale processing and
packing facility in Banna, trade disruptions caused by the war with Japan had
reduced the annual yield.
Production for local consumption continued, but exports out of Banna
didn’t resume until after 1949.
But now it was a state-owned enterprise and production stagnated until
the reforms of the 1980s allowed private initiatives in the tea business.
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| stacking discs of packed tea |
Still, as a cash crop
substitute for rice cultivation, rubber was a more lucrative business until the
late 90s, when prices dropped considerably for several years. Around the same time a sudden national
mania for Pu’er tea developed, spurring the extension of tea cultivation,
especially in Menghai County, an elevated plateau that was too high for rubber
plantations anyway. Even the Dai
in the plains began switching from rice to tea.
Pu’er tea has long had a good
reputation among tea connoisseurs for its flavor and salubrious
properties. It is supposed to aid
digestion, balance the internal body temperature and relieve hangovers. Unlike other brands, like Longjing,
which is good only for a short period after processing, Pu’er tea improves with
age. Indeed, for the maximum
benefit to the health, it should be consumed only after having been kept for
five years. Newly rich Chinese at
the beginning of the 21st century, looking for a domestic product in
which to invest their money, suddenly took a keen interest in Pu’er tea.
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| preparing tea cakes for shipment |
The mania took hold after a
cabal of speculators cornered Banna’s tea market, bought everything available
and drove up prices. Ambitious
investors from other parts of China arrived to contract for some of the
expanded production and set up tea factories of their own. By mid-decade there were 3000 tea
merchants and manufacturers in Xishuangbanna, intensely competitive and
suspicious of one another. And the
price of Pu’er tea had risen to ten times what it sold for at the start of the
century. The top grade aged
variety was going for over $300 a kilo.
Besides the speculators,
pickers and growers also saw their incomes soar. At the peak of the frenzy ordinary farmers could get 200 yuan per kilo for fresh leaves and 300 yuan per kilo for leaves sun-dried in
one of the village squares for a few days. Much of this
new income they spent on improving their lives, beginning by building a new,
“modern” house. So they demolished their traditional stilted houses and erected
cement and brick houses that sat on the ground, shaped like a box, with flat
roof and no open-air balcony. They
basically copied the design of the immigrant Han houses around the state rubber
plantations, a type actually inappropriate for the tropical climate. In some places they retained the angled
roof and perhaps the open-air balcony, but in most newly rich villages what
formerly consisted of nothing but traditional stilted wooden houses were now
transformed into villages of nothing but virtually identical concrete boxes.
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| balls of compressed Pu'er tea |
In the spring of 2008 tea
prices reached their highest level.
Pu’er tea had such an inflated reputation that counterfeits began entering
the market. Tea producers from
other parts of the country shipped their tea to Xishuangbanna to have it repackaged
and sold as Pu’er tea. Government
intervention followed and suddenly hoarders started selling off their stock and
in no time the prices fell precipitously.
By the end of the year Pu’er tea fetched prices comparable to that in
the mid-90s; i.e., less than 10% of the peak earlier that year.
Over a third of the new tea
factories closed down permanently.
The six-story new tea emporium built in Menghai for buyers and producers
was nearly empty. Visitors stopped
coming to the fancy new tea museum.
Buyers from other parts of China, who had been flocking to
Xishuangbanna, stopped coming.
Cobwebs gathered on stacks of unsold bricks of tea, for which merchants
had paid premium prices and now couldn’t sell at all.
In general, the bursting of
the tea bubble was less disastrous for the cultivators than for the speculating
merchants. While they could no
longer garner the returns they once did, the market didn’t die completely and
at least they had new houses to show for their luck during the boom years. Those who had just started new tea
gardens uprooted the immature bushes, plowed the fields over and planted rice
or corn in them instead.
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| shaping tea cakes |
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| preparing Pu'er tea |
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| tea gardens south of Mengxing, Mengla County |
*
* *
for more information on Xishuangbanna, see my e-book Xishuangbanna the Tropics of Yunnan
Overnight in a
tea garden is on the itinerary of one of Delta Tours Vietnam’s routes in Yunnan—Xishuangbanna
and the Wa Hills. See the whole
schedule at https://www.deltatoursvietnam.com/xishuangbanna-wa-hills
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