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Thank you for sharing!

Excellent reading.

nicely written all down, good job!

Hahaha, this should really be required reading for anyone going into pu.


I love these passages:

ditto! Nice and informative reading.

This is also a very interesting paper by the same author

Taiwan and the Globalization of Puer Tea: The Role of the Taste of Aging

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... e_of_Aging


These are some very provocative passages (bold highlights are my own)

The knowledge that aging positively affects Puer’s taste has existed for decades, but its origin is hard to pin-point. There are stories about teashops in Hong Kong that stored good tea in warehouses for future consumption, which explains why we have quite a lot of aged Puer today (Deng 1995). However, there is no evidence that Hong Kong teashops in any systematic way stockpiled tea before the Puer fad of the mid-1990s. Tea merchants in the Kunming wholesale markets often use the saying “the grandfather manufactures tea for the grandson to sell” to suggest that aged Puer had been a major commodity among early private firms and the taste for aged Puer tea existed decades before today’s fad. Some others, for example, the Taiwanese teashop owner Zhou Yu (in his lecture), also tell a story about the Red Guard burning Puer stored in state-owned tea factories during the Cultural Revolution to explain why there is no aged Puer tea in Yunnan. But the former account was likely invented quite recently and we can find no evidence for the latter. What we can be certain of is that the aging of Puer tea in a systematic manner is a recent practice. The first Yunnan state-owned tea factory was established in the last few years of Sino-Japanese war. The Menghai tea factory imported machines to manufacture black tea for export. In the 1950s and 1960s, black tea produced in Yunnan was an important source of foreign exchange for the Chinese government. Lei Pingyang’s research on the Menghai tea factory also shows that before 1964 Puer tea represented only a small percentage of Menghai’s production (2003). Also, under the planned economy model, the production at state-owned factories was determined by government orders received, not by markets; only with reforms, when the rigid planed economy was dropped nationally in 1995, was it possible to create surplus production that could be intentionally stockpiled as an investment. Today most of the so-called aged Puer seen in Kunming’s wholesale markets is 15 years old or under, rather than the “authentic aged Puer” that had been accidently stored in Hong Kong, which often had been warehoused at least 30 years.

Stockpiling tea for long periods to develop its unique flavor has clearly been practiced for a long time, but we do not know from historical records whether it was widely practiced. Li Yuanyang’s (1497-1580) Jiajing Dali Fuzhi (嘉靖大理府誌) published in 1573, states, “Diancang mountain produces tea; its tea tree can grows as tall as twenty feet. Diancang tea’s quality is not inferior to that of Yangxian. The longer the tea is stored, the better it tastes.” Diancang is a famous mountain in Dali, Yunnan.

Although we do not have evidence showing that tea produced at that time was anything like Puer, Li Yuanyang’s statement does demonstrate that people in Ming times knew storing tea away would produce a flavor of better quality than newly processed leaf. Nonetheless, we found no clear evidence that consumers in Ming or Qing times emphasized the age of their teas as much as we do today; “aged” does not seem to have been a significant tasting category. There are no records about intentionally stockpiling Puer to enjoy the flavors specially developed through long-term aging. When Puer tea began to be offered as local tribute in the tenth year of the Yungzheng reign era (1729), it was like other tribute teas offered to the royal household, strongly emphasizing the “fresh and fragrant” taste developed from newly picked tea leave tips. The Qing imperial household was especially fond of the tea produced in Mansong village on Yibang Mountain, whose tea was said to be sweeter, more fragrant, and more flavorful—at its best when new and fresh (Deng 1995). In the famous Qing novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin’s “steeping a bowl of Puer tea” image is probably the most quoted description of how Puer tea was prepared in Qing times, allowing us to imagine how it was consumed. 3However, Cao only pointed out that the kind of Puer was called nuercha 女兒茶, a kind of Puer tribute, and did not describe its flavor. In his Puercha Ji 普洱茶記, Ruan Fu (1802-?) comments that “Puer cha was famous nationwide; its taste was most ‘strong’ (yan 釅).” The author of the Gongnu Tanwang Lu (宮女談往錄), Jin Yi and Shen Yiling quote one of the palace maids saying that the Empress Dowager Ci Xi preferred drinking Puer tea after eating greasy foods and as an everyday tea during the winter months (she sipped green longjing tea during the summer). These two records allow us to understand why the Qing royal family loved Puer and how its consumption related to seasonal changes, but neither mentioned aged Puer. In 1963, when PRC government cleaned the warehouses in the Forbidden City, two tons of Puer gongcha (貢茶, tribute tea) was found, telling us that Puer was probably considered storable for long periods of time without being discarded for passing its “use-by date.” In summary, no evidence exists to support the idea that drinking aged Puer tea was ever the widespread practice it has become in the past two decades. The only clear description of consuming aged Puer tea is found in Tang Lusun’s Zhongguo Chi 中國吃, published in 1976. Tang describes tasting tea made from a hundred-year-old Puer tea round in the home of the son of a former Yunnan provincial official. He had gotten the tea from his father and told Tang that it could be stored long term, and if protected from humidity, it became more flavorful over time. However, Tang did not mention whether, in the early Republican era, drinking aged Puer was popular. 4 Puer’s packaging provides some interesting information. Two small paper cases I collected in Kunming hold compressed squares of Puer tea. They were produced in 1992 and 1997, respectively, and both are marked with an expiration period, one of 18 and the other of 36 months. Some traders think that this simply followed the government regulation that an expiration date had to be listed. Interestingly, packaging produced after the mid-2000s all changed the preservation periods to “long term,” indicating the influence of the aged Puer tea fad. Whether the Qing royal family liked to sip aged Puer or not, and no matter what the real story is behind stamping an expiration period on Puer packaging, there is no doubt that the “taste of aging” has become the most significant consumption category and reference of value over the last ten years.

@LeoFox and @Tillerman: thank you for drawing our attention to those articles. I've finally had a chance to look at them in a bit more detail.

As I understand it, the author is making the points that:
1) puer has not been aged intentionally outside of Hong Kong and Guangdong until recently;
2) puer does not appear to have been aged in a "systematic" way or as an investment anywhere until recently; and
3) Taiwan is responsible in large measure for the current way in which puer is aged, consumed and priced.

I would have thought that the first of those points was well-known already, and that the second of those points is a reflection of how puer was treated in Hong Kong and Guangdong until recently, which is that it was an ordinary commodity that was considered to be too cheap to be any good and that was aged in order to make it palatable rather than aged in order to become a precious treasure. The third point is an interesting example of how a single tea can be understood and appreciated in different ways by different people over different periods of time, and it is consistent with similar accounts that I have read and heard about the importance to puer of both Taiwanese tea culture and the fact that so much puer went to Taiwan around the 1990s.

I'm one of those people who think that 'puer' should really mean 'aged puer', and that 'aged puer' should really mean the way that puer has been aged traditionally in Hong Kong as well (and, to a lesser extent, how it has come to be aged more recently in humid environments elsewhere such as Taiwan and Malaysia, without Hong Kong wet storage in its early life).

There's a small description given by Sunsing of their history with puer, which helps put things into perspective by reference to a time when puer was a commodity and not a treasure: http://sunsingtea.com/sunsingtea/en/kno ... php?pid=15

In any event, it's important to appreciate that puer means different things to different people. Young green puer is really nothing like old humidly-stored puer. Apart from where they were grown, they have really nothing to do with each other, and they seem to appeal to different people.

I'd be very interested to learn more about the history of Hong Kong puer storage, such as when wet storage first started to be used, how the pre-1950s cakes were aged, and whether puer was enjoyed by tea drinkers outside yum cha restaurants, or whether it was never really treated as anything other than a yum cha drink until recently.

I'd also be very interested to learn about the history of aged tea more generally. I understand that liu an and liu bao have been aged intentionally for more than a century, but so far as I am aware, that was also a Hong Kong, Guangdong and Malaysia practice rather than anything more widespread. Is there much of a history to ageing wulong, or was it accidental or not performed on any real scale? And did aged tea have a role in traditional medicine generally throughout China, or was that aspect of them also limited to Hong Kong and Guangdong?

I wonder if anyone around here might have anything to contribute to any of those topics, or might know where to find out more about them.

(and incidentally, I'm also reading and writing about puer while drinking puer; something not too dry and not too wet from the 1990s, to put me into a tranquil state of mind and to take my attention away from lockdown)

Andrew

Andrew S wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 13, 2021 11:01 pm

I am always admiring and distracted from whatever you write, by this soft and creamy light of your pictures...

@Bok: I just try to isolate the nice elements of tea, teacup and teapot for my pictures, to avoid the disorder and mess that lies hidden, just out of sight.

Andrew