puer: The myths of origin & the Reality of Blending

Yumcha — having dimsum and tea — in a restaurant, possibly in Hong Kong or Guangzhou. Photographer unknown. Late Qing Dynasty

How real is the claim of the origin of production?

"Starting from the 1950's, Mainland China had practiced 'planned economy'. Since there was no instruction for Yunnan to produce puer tea for export, and more because people in Yunnan did not drink this tea, so there was no production for this commodity. It was the Guangdong Tea Import and Export Company (a national institution in Guangdong province at that time) that organized the piled-fermentation technique to produce the tea to sell to Hong Kong. The raw materials came partly from Yunnan, where they were instructed to sell a portion of their sun-wilted raw tealeaves to Guangdong, partly from Guangdong locally, and partly from Vietnam. Since then, Guangxi, Hunan, Sichuan followed to use 'small-leaf types' for the pile-fermentation process to produce for export."
Yang Wei Ren, Rediscovering the Origin of the "Maturation Craft" of Yunnan Puer Tea, Kunming Tea Culture Development Council, downloaded May 12, 2009

Differentiating facts from myths used in Marketing

Pu'er Special Feature 1&2

Pu'er, Pu-erh, or Bolay?

Pu'er: Cooked or Raw?

Myths of Origin and the Reality of Blending

Valuation for Pu'er

Maturing Pu'er

Tea Health: The Difference between Shengcha Pu'er and Pu'er

Related stories:

Modified Teas: What are compressed teas?

Dark tea: From crude tea to treasure — a demystification

Post-fermented teas (aka dark teas)

The puer that we have grown up with in Hong Kong has never been a production purely from Yunnan, regardless of all the fabricated history about the tea that you may have read elsewhere.

"It is a fact that the craft of post-fermentation originated in Hong Kong…" expressed Zou Jia Ju, Chairman of the Yunnan Tea Association, in a conference on the Yunnan origin designation. That was because Hong Kong was the single key market for the tea in the very beginning, and from there spreading to the rest of the world. The reason why puer production focused in Guangdong, as described in the beginning of this article, was exactly because the tea needed to be exported to Hong Kong for consumption. It was the only market, and then the re-export center.

That is why people with some age and who grew up drinking the tea have an understanding of it very different from what recent marketing has been propagating. <Click here to read the origin of puer> Even today, when Yunnan is fully capable of selling the tea to whoever they want on this planet, over 80% of puer produced here is sold to the other side of China in Guangdong, immediately north of Hong Kong(1).

"Serving You Famous Tea Day or Night!" so reads the sign on this "Cloud Spring" Teahouse in Central, Hong Kong in 1925. A wedding parade with the bride's palanquin is passing through in front.

There has never been a puer drinking culture in Yunnan

Yunnan is planted more with other commodities than tea trees. As a matter of fact, for every acre of tea, there are more than 8 acres of tobacco, amongst other things(2). Contrast this with the situation in Fujian — another major tea production province, where fruit is a major commodity — for every 3 acres of any fruit, there is 1 acre of tea!(3)

There has never been a strong local puer drinking culture to give soul to tea production in Yunnan. Tea has always been a thing for trading rather than part of life, unlike the neighbouring Sichuan, or far out east in Fujian or Zhejiang. Tea was those dark compressed tablets to trade with the other ethnic groups or foreigners in the old days, or black tea for export during the Second World War.(4) That is why even today, after all the popularization efforts by the government and powerful tea associations and the thousands of independent tea merchants large or small, green is still the preferred tea of choice.

Tealeaves are collected outside of Yunnan

Although the wakening of the tea industry in Yunnan to the price potential of puer tea has attracted a lot more people producing the raw materials for the last two decades, during the height of price speculation between 2005 to 2008, leaf collection agents were active in provinces as far east as Fujian, and as south as Laos and Vietnam. Obviously local production was not catching up with what seemed to be an ever expanding demand to make more compressed tea to wholesale to the tens of thousands of teashops old and new to stock up and to "decorate" the shops. Raw material collection activities made a great impact on other teas, throwing off the margins for some of the pre-orders and forcing up market price.

That is also why puers produced between this period are to be more doubted with claims of pure origin, although whether the puer "cake" in your storage will appreciate in value depends on a lot more other things than this. <read more about valuation of puer>

Even today, almost 3 years after the Chinese government formally declared… » continue on next page »

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notes

1 Liu Min (reporter), A Future Quality Standard for Puer Tea, Sina Finance 2006-03-01

2 Perhaps due to the sensitivity of the issue under strong anti-smoking sentiments, the latest figure searchable for tobacco in Yunnan is 42 million acres in 1997. While in 2009, when Chinese officers announced that tea production had recovered, the area for tea was 5.2 million acres. Tea data obtained from Yunnan Tea Trade Association, writer Ding Qiang. Tobacco figure from the Agricultural Department, PRC.

3 Fujian is a much smaller province than Yunnan and the most important "garden" crop (i.e. agricultural products from the slopes) is fruit, so it is used to compare with tea rather than tobacco, which is much smaller in the province. Data obtained from the Ministry of Land and Resources of the People's Republic of China: Land Use General Planning for Fujian Province (1997~2010). Both Fujian and Yunnan are considered major tea provinces.

4 Read more about the origin of dark tea in this chapter: Dark Tea: Origin; more about the history of black tea in Yunnan in this chapter: Black Tea: Dianhong