Pu’er Tea in Xishuangbanna

                                  by Jim Goodman

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 3^rd 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.

tea gardens near Menghun, Menghai County

      The main growing areas in Xishuangbanna, all inhabited by non-Dai ethnic minorities, were the ‘six major tea mountains’ of Yiwu and Kongmingshan in Mengla County, Youleshan in Jinuoshan district and Nannuoshan, Bulangshan and Xiding’s hills in Menghai County.  The type cultivated was Pu’er tea, named after the town in southern Pu’er Prefecture (formerly called Simao) where the tea was packed and shipped north to Tibet along the famous Tea and Horses Road.

       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.

oldest wild tea tree (1600 years) near Bada

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.

Aini girl in a tea tree in Nannuoshan

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.

Dai tea garden in the plains near Menghai

      From the 1909 foundation of the first tea company in Menghai, the tea trade turned into a more organized business.  Over the next two decades seventeen more started operations.  All of these were Han-owned, but Dai nobles often acted as middlemen between the companies and the growers, arranging the annual collections in the hills and deliveries to the towns, earning a 10% fee for their services.

       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

drying tea near the top of Nannuoshan

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.

loading up the raw tea harvest

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 21^st century, looking for a domestic product in which to invest their money, suddenly took a keen interest in Pu’er tea.

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.

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.   

shaping tea cakes

preparing Pu'er tea

      Tea prices eventually recovered, but nowhere near the figures during the boom.  The frenzy had faded forever, but Chinese people still drank tea and Pu’er tea, with its fine taste and therapeutic value, is still a connoisseur’s favorite.  Culturally associated with philosophy, creativity and good health, drinking tea is a national habit and venerable custom.  There will always be a market for Pu’er tea.

tea gardens south of Mengxing, Mengla County

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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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Hidden Attractions in Mengla County

                                                        by Jim Goodman  

looking north from above Mengxing

       Most visitors to Xishuangbanna spend their time in and around the city and on day-trips to the Dai Park, the pagodas at Damenglong or various places west in Menghai County.  If they venture into Mengla County at all, it will be to Menglun, about 60 km east, just inside the county boundary.  The sprawling, fascinating Botanical Garden is just across the river from the town and is certainly worth the excursion.  The only other place in the county to see many travelers is Mengla city itself.  And these are people passing through on the way to or from northern Laos and may not even stay long enough to look at anything.

Dai girls in Manla

       Thanks to the new highway, the journey from Jinghong to Mengla only takes about three hours, as it skirts around the highest hills or tunnels through them.  Buses on the old road took nearly the whole day, having to climb a high mountain south of Mengxing, then up and down hills before the descent to Mengla plain.  Of course, it was a far more scenic route, with views of the hills to the north and lots of forest on the way.  The new route runs mainly through low hills full of rubber trees.

       As the view from the mountain pass just south of Mengxing indicates, the northern half of Mengla County is much hillier than the lower elevations of its southern districts.  Of the northern towns, Manla is basically a Dai village turned into an administrative center.  Xiangming, on a road branching west just south of Manla, is the prefecture’s only Autonomous Yi District, mainly inhabited by the Lalu branch of the Yi who migrated here from Jinggu County in Pu’er Prefecture in the last decades of the Qing Dynasty.  They also have settlements near Yiwu and north of Manla.  Some of them moved on into northern Laos, where they are known as the Lolo, the original name for the Yi.  About 57,000 Yi live in Xishuangbanna, comprising 5.6% of the population.

Longshi Jinuo village

        Their clothing style—side-fastened tunic, usually blue, black trousers and turbans--and housing type—timber posts, brick walls and tiled roofs--resembled that of the rural Han in their original homeland.  They were not as distinctly different as the Miao and the Yao settling in the county then as well, but coming in the area long before the Han had any significant presence, they probably impressed the Dai as very different kind of people.

        Xishuangbanna’s Yi do not share a couple of the most famous Yi characteristics common to bigger sub-groups in the province.  They do not celebrate the summer Torch Festival.  Villages do not have a bimaw, the Yi spiritual specialist who keeps the traditional books written with the unique Yi alphabet, covering myths, legends, pharmacopoeia, ritual rules, moral aphorisms, and so forth.  Like other Yi, though, they keep an ancestral altar in a corner of the dining and receiving room and make offerings at New Year and other occasions.

Yiwu

       In Xiangming the local government last decade revived the Baishijia Festival, honoring Jin Xian, an ancient martial hero.  When drafted into the army to fight a foreign invasion he promised his village he would return by the next lunar New Year.  As it turned out, he didn’t show up until the 8^th day of the 2^nd moon.  He was, however, laden with decorations in recognition of his valor in combat.  So the festival is held on that day to celebrate his return.  The revival was a typical government-sponsored event, dominated by songs and dances, but for once the traditional Yi costume was the fashion of the day.  From 2011 the festival has also been staged in Yiwu.

above the fog in Yiwu

       In the mountains west of Xiangming, aside from a few stray Miao settlements, the villages are mostly Jinuo, a mountain-dwelling people who only reside in three areas of Xishuangbanna; here in the Kongmingshan area, as well as Jinuoshan and Mengwang districts in Jinghong County.  The paved part of the road out of Xiangming ends after four kilometers and the dirt road begins climbing uphill several km further from the large Dai village of Manlin.   After passing thick forests full of flowering trees, interspersed with tea gardens, it reaches the new Miao village of Andong.  From here a road north goes to Xinfa, and then on to Longshi, through the heart of Jinuo territory.

tea gardens near Yiwu

       According to the prefecture maps, this is a designated Scenic Area.  Longshi lies on a spur with a clear view of the blunt peak of Kongmingshan directly west.  The Jinuo here do not ordinarily dress in their ethnic style and the characteristic stilted houses that still prevail in Jinuoshan are absent.  A few are modern style, but most are simple wooden structures with corrugated iron roofs and satellite dishes for their televisions.   And perhaps because of the television influence, only the older generation still uses the Jinuo language.  Everyone else converses in Chinese.  Like their cousins in Jinuoshan, they cultivate tea rather than rice.

Yao man in the Mengla market

Aini woman in Mengban

      The prime center for tea production in the northern half of the county is Yiwu, in the hills south of Manla.  Vehicles have to turn off Route 213 in the valley and climb up to the city.  It’s a small town, mainly Han-inhabited, with Yi and Miao villages within walking distance.  Tea merchants dominate the commercial area, while tea gardens lie along roads in every direction out of the town.  A walk along the road north of the town in the early morning gives one a spectacular view of peaks above the low clouds of early morning, especially Kongmingshan.

the aerial ropeway walk

       The Yi who might be in town dress in modern clothes, but a few Miao may also be around, the women distinguished by their bulky, pleated skirt.  Around 12.000 Miao live in Xishuangbanna, mostly in eastern Memgla County, comprising 1.1% of the prefecture’s population.  Like the Yi, they came here in the last decades of the Qing Dynasty, migrating from Guangxi, but are a small fraction of the over one million Miao in Yunnan and the over seven million throughout China.  They are not congregated in any particular area in Banna, but scattered in the hills among other minorities.  

       Forced migration has been a theme of Miao history since ancient times.  They settled in remote hills and secluded valleys until expanding Han populations began encroaching on their territory.  Then they would revolt, drive out the Han and face massive military retaliation, forcing them to surrender their land and move south.  Originally from central China, and there are still Miao communities in Hunan, different sub-groups eventually settled in China’s southern provinces and over the border into Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar.

bridge over the Nanla River near Mengla

well pagoda in Mengla 

       Xishuangbanna’s 20,000 members of the Yao minority nationality also live mainly in eastern Mengla County, mostly from the Landian sub-group, who also reside in Jiangcheng, Luchun, Yuanyang and Jinping Counties.  Their women wear a tight pair of black pants to just below the knee, white leggings, a loose black jacket, a skein of bright magenta wool thread hanging down from the neck in front and silver ornaments in their hair buns.  They also shave off their eyebrows. 

pavilion at the Manlongdai bridge

       This Yao sub-group favored locations at lower altitudes than most other Yao and except for the Yiwu highlands established villages in remote valleys with nearby streams.  Traditionally the Landian Yao built one-story houses of wattle and thatch, with mud floors, and aligned them with the stream, facing upstream.  They are concentrated around Manla in the north and Yaoqu in the center

       A road along the Nanla River north of Mengla comes to a fork after 27 km at Nazhuo.  Another 11 km northeast lies Yaoqu, but it is a modern town and the Yao around here do not dress Yao-style nor live in traditional houses.  However, the fork turning northeast passes Naka, a typical Yao village along the Nanla River, where at least the females still wear traditional clothing.  They may also be seen at the market in Mengban, a few km upriver, along with Miao and Aini.

 

typical Manlongdai house/restaurant

      Aini villages lie a couple of hours walk up into the hills directly east of Mengban.  Their stilted houses with attached, open-air balcony resemble those of Aini elsewhere in Banna.  But the women’s outfit is very different, without a skirt or lavish use of embroidery.  In this sub-group they wear a long black coat, with a bit of appliqué around the lapel, over calf-length black trousers.  The black headscarf features a row of silver studs in front, coins attached to the sides and silver chains with a pair of hoops at the ends dangling from each side.

       The road from Mengla to Nazhuo offers pleasant views of the river.  Parts of it are filled with half-submerged trees and thick forest flanks the eastern banks.  Fishermen ride rafts of lashed bamboo poles, about three meters long and half meter wide.  At bends in the river’s course the mountains to the east are visible.

temple compound near Manlongdai

       About ten km north of Mengla a side road turns west into a patch of virgin rain forest, one of the last surviving in the prefecture.  In most cases, people have to appreciate the wonders of such a forest from a ground-level viewpoint.  From 2007, another perspective became possible here.  An aerial ropeway adventure opened, offering a walk across planks mounted twelve meters up in the trees, flanked by heavily netted sides and a railing to hang onto while making the walk.  Only a few people are allowed on the walkway at a time, and it does sway a bit while used, but is perfectly safe.  The view is both up and down at magnificent tall and straight tree trunks, creepers, vines, epiphytes and a hundred shades of the color green.  The walkway ends in full view of a jungle waterfall.

the interior of Manlongdai's temple

       In Mengla City, most of the shops, restaurants, hotels and offices lie on the busy north-south road.  The residential areas are off to either side.  The little central park is busy mornings and evenings with local people practicing tai qi and other forms of exercise.  On the hill above it is the local Buddhist temple compound.  Just down the street is the Nanla Shopping Mall, with attractive buildings employing Dai architectural motifs, like pagodas on the roof, that include a supermarket, several boutiques, snack and drink shops and outdoor restaurants along the river.  A Dai-style pagoda well stands at the corner and a right turn here along Qingnianlu leads to the old neighborhood of Mansai, a collection of traditional Dai houses, a few of which double as evening restaurants.

       The latter are popular with visitors who stay overnight.  For afternoon meals, though, tourists and even Dai from other parts of the prefecture tend to head for Manlongdai, just several km north, an 800-year-old Dai village famous for its cuisine.  With scarcely any modern-style buildings around, just Dai-style stilted houses, diners can relish their meals in an authentic traditional setting.   Hosts serve them various locally grown vegetables, raw and cooked, steamed fish, boiled and grilled chicken, ground pork mixed with herbs and cooked in a bamboo tube, and Pu’er tea and rice liquor to wash it all down. 

Huilong Falls

       The village lies on the south side of a narrow stream, with the rice fields on the other side.  A modest wooden gate stands on one side of the bridge across the stream, while on the village side is a very ornate, red-painted gate doubling as a rest stop, decorated with carvings and a painted peacock below the roof apex.  Just beyond the north end of the village is the old monastery, with wooden walls and roof tiles, still the original building from centuries ago.

       Just two km away another Dai village, two centuries older than Manlongdai, has also retained its original temple compound buildings.  They’re a little dilapidated and they use a bit of corrugated iron here and there on the awnings above the ground floor.  Concrete pillars have replaced the wooden posts.  The interiors are quite well preserved, however, featuring lavishly painted altars, ceiling imagery and wall murals internal and external.

       In the jungle a short distance from Manlongdai is the most hidden of all of the county’s little-known attractions—Huilong Falls.  The waterfall plunges about a hundred meters from a tall cliff straight through the jungle.  To reach this serene and lovely site one has to find a guide to take one down a certain jungle path, then cross a creek and fight through the bushes, perhaps startling a porcupine on the way, bend under tree branches and crawl over boulders for about a half hour just to get into a position to see five of its nine cataracts. 

       Similar unexplored jungles still exist elsewhere in the county.  No doubt intrepid travelers In the future, driven by an insatiable appetite for unspoiled natural beauty, will discover new waterfalls, caves and scenic tucked-away ponds.  The list of Mengla County’s hidden attractions is bound to grow.     

in the heart of a tropical rain forest

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                              for more on Mengla County and its people, see my e-book

                                           Xishuangbanna:  The Tropics of Yunnan