Wild Harvested

Tag: reflections

  • Critique of Darjeeling Reason, or Why Reducing Darjeeling Black Teas to “Muscatel” Is a Recipe for Disaster

    Critique of Darjeeling Reason, or Why Reducing Darjeeling Black Teas to “Muscatel” Is a Recipe for Disaster

    We have all heard it at least once: that Darjeeling black teas, the second flushes, taste like muscatel. To some it may seem a trivial matter, but for me reading it for the umpteenth time is torture, a subtle form of violence, like being tied to a bed and forced to listen over and over again to a lullaby sung by that unbearably grating voice of Liam Gallagher. Muscatel has become not a descriptor but a credential, a badge meant to pre-empt further inquiry.

    Over the past decades, this obsession with muscatel has degenerated badly, taking on the shape of every late-capitalist fetish: ultra-categorization, linguistic anesthesia, the aesthetics of pseudo-scarcity, and the misappropriation of other people’s labor (where those who break their backs always earn next to nothing, in short). Premium harvests, super-premium, super rare, Imperial this or Royal that, Maharaja, special series, gold, silver… entering 80% of the online shops that sell Darjeeling is like being completely drunk, crashing your car through the window of a bar, and then asking where they’ve hidden the gas pump. It’s chaos wrapped in floral notes and, obviously, muscatel.

    While the price of what is arguably the most “muscatel-like” oolong on Earth, the Dongfang Meiren (Oriental Beauty), was skyrocketing in Taiwan, and countries like Japan were demanding more and more teas with this profile, various Thai and Vietnamese players were putting their own substitutes on the market, with results that were sometimes surprising and at other times depressing. The difference is that, in those teas, muscatel aroma became an icon of ambiguity, whereas in Darjeeling people rushed headlong into it with kamikaze enthusiasm, to the point that this single aromatic note became the identity card of the entire terroir. No narrative was needed: all that mattered was printing the estate name in huge letters, saying it tasted of muscatel, and to hell with everything else.

    Some time ago I had a discussion about this with two old friends at L.’s house, on one of those days when the air feels heavier, slower, saturated with humidity, the kind of day when you feel the urge to attack something immediately just to distract yourself from the terribly depressing climate trying to crush your mental health. L. is not a lover of Darjeeling teas, let’s be clear. She mostly drinks Tieguanyin, Yancha, and Dancong. Or rather, she had never really been interested in Darjeeling, had never felt the call to walk down the nave and reach the land of lightning. To her they were indecipherable; she simply didn’t feel like buying them, dismissing them as “all the same.” Brutal, but how can you blame her if you read “muscatel” everywhere? It’s as if there were a sort of olfactory socialism, an aromatic Marxism. At some point, their supposed crown jewel, the muscatel note, turned into a leveling policy, an ontological sponge through which no tea is allowed to stand out for its diversity. And the 200 appellations used in a schizophrenic way do nothing to help, further complicating a broth into which everything has now been thrown to please everyone. L. found them oppressively repetitive and excessively, self-consciously “colonial” in their communication. Who would spend €0.50-1+ per gram on teas you don’t even know where to begin distinguishing, drowned in lexical accumulation and burdened by a long struggle to recover from counterfeiting? To be clear, origin falsification happens everywhere tea is produced, but here the media, local ones included, have shown no restraint in piling on, placing a blood-drained territory under the spotlight with macabre, necrophiliac delight.

    But back to the point: the problem is not muscatel itself. Muscatel has the same innocence jazz once had before becoming the soundtrack of elevators and three quarters of Christmas movies. L. told me she had last tried a Darjeeling ten years ago. The experience reminded her of her first time returning home after university, to her stale bedroom that smelled of being shut in and of puberty, with the blinds left in exactly the same position and the same wallpaper, only half detached and yellowed.

    This is because only in recent years Darjeeling has begun to stop being a historical museum, a sarcophagus of the status quo, although resistance remains. Sellers still peddle stuff on the verge of turning to dust, shredded, insipid leaves, or teas dressed up with names that excite colonial nostalgics and crown enthusiasts. What I’ve never understood is this inability to distance oneself from the constant urge toward self-marginalization, and why Darjeeling has refused to stop playing a marginal role, the eternal wallflower at the dance, watching others on the floor while sitting on the chair farthest from the punch bowl, waiting for an appointment that will never come on its own.

    The real problem is the renunciation of conflict. Authentic Darjeeling does not taste only of fucking muscatel. Sure, it’s there too, especially in certain cultivars and in specific seasonal windows, but reducing everything to that means deliberately amputating the rest, making people believe that Darjeeling tea tastes like nothing else. In reality, the tea from these mountains is frenetic, conflictual, full of friction, to the point that you would never believe the same leaves, processed differently, could come from the same terroir, or even the same continent.

    To insist on muscatel as the defining criterion is to deny this productive volatility, to make Darjeeling safe, legible, and ultimately harmless.

    The term muscatel has become a sedative that Darjeeling has been carrying around for fifty years like a bag of diazepam shot straight into the arm, endlessly.

    This territory does not need to be Kyoto, where everything is ultra-described, every sign is endlessly verbose in its insistent multilingualism, where everything is clear to the point of exasperation. Darjeeling should instead show its character, like a Calcutta market at five in the morning, or a pub brawl on any Friday night in Birmingham: disordered, real, and above all done with pretending that this land begins in the White Drawing Room, with all those useless appellations.

    There is an existential need to change the narrative around these teas, so that they can be described uniquely, as one would a singular work of art. We need to detox from neutral descriptions and lexical ambiguities. There is no need to re-propose a worn-out variation of the same symphony. Continuing to scrape the violin over the word “muscatel” is nothing but a preemptive retreat, a laziness that domesticates the masses. Excessive categorization has forced Darjeeling into the need to correspond to a genre, and as such it must “respond” and “fit,” rather than signify.

    Moreover, the systematic exclusion of autumn teas from market discourse looks more like an intention than an oversight. Autumn is less photogenic; muscatel aromas are often muted by a desire to experiment, to create more ambiguous leaves that offer a complex, divisive, at times eccentric aromatic stratification, shaped by different growing conditions.

    In this case, science ends up confirming what experience had already suggested. The famous muscatel aroma is the result of complex interactions, pedological, climatic, agronomic, altimetric, cultivar-related, and the relationships between plants and insects. This aroma appears almost as a direct consequence of the plant’s defense strategies against herbivorous insects, particularly thrips (Scirtothrips dorsalis) and jassids (Empoasca flavescens), whose activity increases during the second flush. The lesions caused by their mouthparts, rasping-sucking in thrips, piercing-sucking in jassids, activate inducible defense responses that lead to the production and release of secondary metabolites. In general, these metabolites play crucial ecological roles: they may act as toxins, feeding deterrents, reducers of plant tissue digestibility, or chemical signals that attract the natural enemies of herbivores. This principle, widespread throughout the plant kingdom, is particularly evident in tea plants. In the specific case of Darjeeling, herbivory stress induces strong up-regulation of genes involved in the biosynthesis of volatile aromatic molecules such as linalool, geraniol, nerolidol and their oxides, as well as key enzymes like lipases, alcohol dehydrogenase and glycosidases. Many of these compounds derive from precursors stored as disaccharide glycosides (β-primeverosides) which, under conditions of cellular integrity, remain separated from β-primeverosidases; membrane rupture caused by insects (and later amplified during processing) allows hydrolysis of these precursors and the release of free aromatic molecules. Among them are terpenoid compounds such as 2,6-dimethyl-3,7-octadiene-2,6-diol and 3,7-dimethyl-1,5,7-octatrien-3-ol, which specifically contribute to muscatel perception. A similar mechanism occurs in Taiwan with Empoasca onukii (Jacobiasca formosana).

    Darjeeling thus represents an emblematic case of convergence between ecology and taste, where muscatel is only one expression of an extremely complex system of interdependencies, also modulated by cultivar, altitude, agronomic management, and seasonality. But what happens when there are climatic imbalances, when gardens are located at very different altitudes, when insect density decreases? These increasingly common phenomena lead to teas that are radically different and inherently unpredictable from year to year. So why not accept this and build a new narrative structure?

    This is made extremely evident by scientific analyses, which highlight how the interaction of the factors listed above allows spring and autumn harvests to accumulate higher levels of metabolites, playing a crucial role in shaping Darjeeling’s aromatic and gustatory profile. Equally important, metabolomic analyses show clearly distinct profiles between flushes (amino acids, sugars, polyphenols, organic acids), demonstrating that spring and autumn can yield high metabolite accumulation and thus cups of great finesse, complexity, and internal tension, which should prompt a reconsideration of autumn teas not as secondary expressions, but as integral to the identity of Darjeeling itself.

    Choosing diversity, accepting that Darjeeling implies teas that are almost impossible to assimilate into any single category, means recognizing its very beauty, a beauty as refusal of assimilation, a beauty as measure, a beauty as resistance of an unnormalized remainder. Continuing to say that Darjeeling teas taste only of muscatel is like building a library filled with a hundred scientific studies, adding a generous amount of humanistic literature, Adorno, Camus, Scruton, Heidegger, Dostoevsky, and then setting it on fire.

    Changing the narrative means reintroducing risk. It means accepting experimentation in tea processing, occasionally producing batches that are hard to sell, leaves no one has ever heard of. Until a few years ago I myself was completely ignorant of what this land has to offer. Then I discovered Darjeeling teas from non-Chinese cultivars, roasted, smoked, or with every imaginable degree of oxidation, leaves with a huigan capable of overshadowing many Chinese teas; notes of mango and green cardamom, of apricot and at the same time wax on an antique piece of furniture, of moss and buttercream and Damask rose, or freshly pressed olives alongside jasmine accords. These are aromas that seem utterly incompatible in any other context, yet here they find shelter, like the eccentricities of the most diverse people taking refuge from urban rain under the same bus stop.

    Reorienting the narrative therefore means striving to describe each lot as one would an unrepeatable painting, just out of the studio and still smelling of oil-paint solvent. It means abandoning the illusory idea that quality coincides with clarity, aromatic clarity this time, not descriptive, because the most disparate and useless filo-colonial appellations will never restore lost authenticity, nor the uniqueness that teas from this terroir so desperately need to reclaim.

    Bibliography:

    Cho, Jeong-Yong & Mizutani, Masaharu & Shimizu, Bun-ichi & Kinoshita, Tomomi & Ogura, Miharu & Tokoro, Kazuhiko & Lin, Mu-Lien & Sakata, Kanzo. (2007). Chemical Profiling and Gene Expression Profiling during the Manufacturing Process of Taiwan Oolong Tea “Oriental Beauty”. Bioscience, biotechnology, and biochemistry. 71. 1476-86. 10.1271/bbb.60708.

    De D,  Hazra A, Das S. & Ray S.. (2025). Metabolomic insights into seasonal variations in Darjeeling orthodox tea: implications for quality, flavor, and nutritional profile. Journal of Food Science and Technology -Mysore-. 62. 10.1007/s13197-025-06310-2.

    De D, Sarkar S, Chhetri H, Chatterjee J, Sinha N, Das S, Sarkar A, Ray S (2024) Impact of meteorological and processing factors on metabolite composition of Darjeeling tea. J Anal Sci Tech 15(1):1–19.

    G, Bornali & Borchetia, Sangeeta & Bhorali, Priyadarshini & Agarwala, Niraj & Bhuyan, Lakshi & Rahman, A & Sakata, K & Mizutani, Masaharu & Shimizu, Bun-ichi & Gurusubramanian, Guruswami & Ravindranath, R & Kalita, Mohan & Hazarika, Mridul & Das, Sudripta. (2012). Understanding Darjeeling tea flavour on a molecular basis. Plant molecular biology. 78. 577-97. 10.1007/s11103-012-9887-0.

    Liu, Huifan & Li, Sufen & Xiao, Gengsheng & Wang, Qin. (2021). Formation of volatiles in response to tea green leafhopper (Empoasca onukii Matsuda) herbivory in tea plants: a multi-omics study. Plant Cell Reports. 40. 10.1007/s00299-021-02674-9.

    Sakata K, Mizutani M, Ahn YO, Shimizu B (2005) Floral aroma of Oolong tea are results of stress-responded reactions in tea leaves during the tea processing. In: 2005 international symposium on innovation in tea science and sustainable development in tea industry, 11–15 Nov 2005, organized by Tea research institute, Chinese academy of agricultural sciences, China tea science society and Unilever (China) Ltd., Hangzhou, China, pp 607–617.

    Wang L, Di T, Peng J, Li Y, Li N, Hao X, Ding C, Huang J, Zeng J, Yang Y, Wang X (2022) Comparative metabolomic analysis reveals the involvement of catechins in adaptation mechanism to cold stress in tea plant (Camellia sinensis Var. sinensis). Env Exp Bot 201:104978.

  • Notes from the Wrong Side of the Province: A Few Words on Jinggu, an Old Tea Merchant, and Two High-Mountain Pu’er.

    Notes from the Wrong Side of the Province: A Few Words on Jinggu, an Old Tea Merchant, and Two High-Mountain Pu’er.

    If you ask many people what their favorite production area is, they’ll probably start listing off famous terroirs, Bingdao for its body, Laobanzhang for its qi, Naka for its fragrance, and some remote shack in a forgotten Yiwu village, which never hurts to name-drop. In short, a litany of names, as if it were a medical prescription for some trivial pathology to be handled with grave care. Or perhaps just another way to show how worn out the magnetic stripe on their credit card has become.

    Jinggu likely won’t even cross their lips, not even by accident. This area is surrounded by mountains on three sides, an enclave where the best gardens are often inaccessible, and where the obsession with naming every single rooftop (as in Yiwu) is quickly anesthetized by a lack of roads and the even greater lack of desire to build them. Here, not even the clunky two-ton electric behemoths at the service of Western merchants can climb their way up.

    I agree that vast expanses of flat land, dull stretches of agricultural functionality, are today brutally carpeted with Da Bai Cha, as in the flatlands of Wen Shan Ding. A cultivar that acts like a funerary carpet, its tea merely a collateral damage, a distillate of hardship and credit requests, with a hint of bank loan in the aftertaste. But if you start climbing and forget all that, you’ll reach over 2,000 meters at Kuzhu Shan. There, ancient trees stretch in swathes; in some spots, they’re even Teng Tiao, like in Banuo, but with a slightly different aromatic profile, less delicate, more fragrant, impactful, and mineral. Less mannered, and more Felliniesque, to put it simply.

    Some time ago, I met a Pu’er expert, a merchant from Lincang whose main business revolved around the Fangcun market. I asked him why he thought people considered teas from Jinggu less worthy, almost like children of a lesser god, tolerated but avoided, like the uncle with a drinking problem at Christmas dinner. He was a big man, with hands the size of shovels. He stared at me for a moment, with his huge, isochoric pupils, maybe the largest I’ve seen on someone from Yunnan, wide like those of an Australian owl photographed by Joel Sartore, performing tiny mechanical micro-adjustments every time you locked eyes with him, as if missing an autofocus. He answered in monosyllables, he looked like someone who read Anna Karenina just to root for Vronsky. He smiled too, but it seemed like his facial muscles were slightly jammed from decades of monsoon rains. And yet, he was one of the most knowledgeable people on Pu’er I’ve met.

    It took him a while, then he said something, I don’t quite remember what. I was too busy noticing the irrelevant details I’d later include in this article. But the meaning behind his cocktail of anthropology and Moutai was clear: Jinggu was guilty of not being immediate enough. Too real, too unavailable. Add to that the fact that the era when people chased uniqueness has been over for a couple of decades. They discovered the villages of Yiwu, Laobanzhang, Bingdao, a few others in between, and the punch bowl quickly ran dry. Because, you see, he said, the markets want exclusivity. The consumers who arrive in polished shoes at the edge of the forest, who slip on plastic sandals before posing in front of an ancient tree, are looking for tea like they’re looking for sushi in Berlin.

    And he was right. Some want only the illusion of a mysterious narrative, not the truth of the land. They prefer a tea that behaves like a cool, aloof actor, properly trained to play the silent type, the tormented one, the aged-in-a-hut-with-a-hidden-past role, rather than someone, or something, that simply tastes like what it is.

    Jinggu teas aren’t for complexity maniacs. They’re rather blunt, direct, break through your guard with a few solid punches, enveloping you in sweetness and asserting themselves through their huigan and bodily sensation.

    In the Kuzhu and Tang Fang Liang Zi areas, you’ll find real forest coverage where tea is harvested, like some portion of Yiwu, the northwestern edges of Laos and Vietnam, or the forested zones of Guogan in Myanmar. Here, the trees grow close to and inside the forest. The soil is clay-based with a good amount of rock, confirming the tea’s mineral and sweet character. The plants are spaced well apart, and younger trees are left to grow naturally. You won’t see any drastic pruning, only containment cuts.

    It’s a complex terroir. In one cup, you’ll think you’ve stumbled into Jingmai. Drive twenty kilometers and drink again, you might swear you’re tasting Yiwu. Walk another ten, parched and hopeful, and you’ll find bitter cultivars whose huigan is so forceful, so magnetic, it makes some Bulang teas feel like passive-aggressive outbursts by comparison.

    Here, like in Laoman’e, bitter and sweet varietals sometimes coexist in the same natural amphitheater. The former, known as kucha, often dominates the more remote slopes, but it’s never overwhelmingly bitter, never out of place or chaotic. It soon turns its cheek to a wild sweetness, like a fist on the table that prepares the caress. If the sweet variety is a well-composed, harmonic melody, the bitter one is drama and catharsis, leaving every door open for further development. These are teas that, even years later, remain an enigma. Tasting them again over time is like revisiting a neighborhood in daylight where you partied in the night before. You barely recognize it, and the sunlight seems to restore a grace you previously failed to notice.

    In both cases, what stands out is an oily, umami-like sip and a genuine, full-bodied chaqi, it feels like it thins your tissues, filling your chest and pushing every muscle fiber up against your skin. A tea with a soul that doesn’t scream, but also doesn’t compromise. A tea you don’t expect, and which, especially in the case of ancient trees, hasn’t been tamed to soften its impact.

    Southwest of Jinggu Town lies Jiu Tai Po, one of the most expensive and coveted areas, graced with the elegance of something that knows how to stay hidden. Few signs, no selfie points, no desire to be disturbed more than necessary. The village itself, small and vaguely adrift in agricultural amniotism, has little tea directly surrounding it; most of it is in the forest zone, along the ridges or on the opposite slopes. Road access is practically nonexistent, and like Guafengzhai, it takes hours of hiking to reach the tea trees. These aren’t roads for people in Italian leather shoes, and a camo cap won’t get you to the top. The landscape feels like a James Cameron set, shot with Kubrick’s cinematography and directed by a mood-swinging park ranger. There, the leaves aren’t picked by good boys, but by madmen, neurotics howling at the moon, yelling into the western wind, and probably monks armed with faith and an unearthly amount of patience. Climbing up there feels like trying to earn a glance from Maria Callas, flailing pathetically to grasp the corner of her eye, she ignores you, and you thank her anyway.

    In recent years, Jinggu has had its big moments, times when even the cynics had to admit that yes, even from those mountains often relegated to Act Two of the Pu’er narrative, something remarkable could emerge. Like the Pu’er from Tang Fang Liang Zi by Farmer Leaf, especially the single tree series that reads like an elegant lithograph set by De Chirico; the 2017 Chawangdi or the 2016 You Shang from Chawang Shop, perhaps among the Western forerunners of Jinggu’s nouvelle vague, to the 2007 Shang Pin by Xi Zi Hao or the old relics from Changtai, old-school, decadent, like an old house with silk on the walls, with the scent of leather and creaking parquet.

    But today, I’ll focus on two other excellent sheng Pu’er by Thés Terre de Ciel, both from old-ancient trees.

    TdC Spring 2024 Xiao Jinggu Puerh des Cimes

    I’ve always had a soft spot for the Pu’er of Jinggu, for their remoteness, their distance from the inflated rhetoric about the primordial nature of its landscapes, for from the market wars over taste profiles and terroir cred. Jinggu teas owe nothing to expectation; they answer only to themselves.

    This is one of those teas. The kind with no prefabricated image, no guiding archetype. Nothing to anchor your imagination, no Muse whispering interpretation in your ear, as Hesiod might have hoped. Just you and the leaf. No crib sheet. No narrative. Only the moment.

    The leaves are twisted, dark green. The sip is viscous, with a round, sticky umami reminiscent of chicken broth from a market stall in Chongqing. There’s a sweetness too, unopposed and undistracted, a sensory monologue rich in subtext. The huigan lays itself across the tongue like a seamless silk blanket. Bitterness exits the discussion early.

    The Qi is delicate, but it moves under your skin, subtly shifting your posture, your pace, your pulse. The salivation it provokes becomes a kind of gustatory capital. The sensation is almost organic-minimalist, like an alabaster vase with no sharp edges, revealing more intentions than it cares to admit. The intensity of the peach note approaches something like an orchestral delirium, building in a near-psychedelic crescendo, and that out-of-the-ordinary umami makes it feel less like a beverage, and more like a pre-dessert at L’Arpège.

    TdC Spring 2023 Kuzhu Shan

    This Pu’er from Kuzhu Shan seems like it emerged straight out of a
    William Morris wallpaper, drawn after two glasses of fine Vin Jaune. Alienated, eclectic, remote, saturated with organic vitality. The dry leaves exude hints of light tropical fruit, citrus, and wildflowers. As expected, this is not a tea that lingers in a labyrinthine dimension of complexity, but that’s not the terrain where Kuzhu teas show their hand.

    The true opera magna takes place in the mouth, which becomes the theater for a clash and debate between a pronounced yet agreeable bitterness and a sweetness that follows quickly, almost antithetical to it. It’s a generative tension that drives this medium-bodied sip to evolve, to layer itself, each new sensory stratum tearing apart, cannibalizing the one laid down before it.

    The tasting unfolds as a kind of sensorial acceleration, like a Baz Luhrmann film, abrupt cuts, frenetic pacing, a hyperactive montage, leading to a terribly refreshing, surreal sensation with an unmistakable note of tonic water.

    It’s a Gin & Tonic stripped of its damnation, as Nick Carraway might say while struggling with his addiction. This is a vividly alive liquid, whose finish is so enduring it seems pointless to measure. It unwinds slowly on notes of ginger beer, candied lemon peel, and rhubarb, while your tongue’s receptors are still stunned by the mineral lash it dealt twenty minutes earlier.

    Usually, when I drink a Pu’er, I think about its aging potential, its price-to-quality ratio, I imagine derivatives and equations, risk and return curves, asking myself whether it’s better to keep it for the medium or long term. I make a lot of projections, hypotheses, even metaphysical guesses.

    But the truth is, this is one of the few teas where none of that matters. I drink it because it’s simply really good. Whether it lasts twenty years or disappears in two days, for once, I really don’t care.

    Left: 2023 Kuzhu Shan

    Right: 2024 Xiao Jinggu

  • The Changing Mountains – Part 2: Economic Perspectives of Traditional Architecture

    The Changing Mountains – Part 2: Economic Perspectives of Traditional Architecture

    The question most of you are probably asking after the philosophical and ideological discourse of the first part is: how important can the implementation of a system based on rural architecture be in economic terms?

    Quite frankly, I am not an expert in land finance, nor do I wish to replace those who work in that field. I’m a food technologist: I work with food, I analyze problems and find solutions related to it. By nature, I tend to understand why mechanisms jam and how to intervene to restore their proper function. So what follows is an analysis based on much of the literature I’ve explored over the past few years, not professionally, but driven by a genuine desire to understand and a deep personal curiosity. I’ve never liked pointing out problems and then standing back while others fix them, even when I had no idea where to start to piece things together. That’s why you won’t find ready-made solutions here, but rather some reference points for building your own awareness, an awareness that can only grow.

    Before understanding how vital it is to support rural architecture and safeguard architectural cultural heritage, we must grasp how important the real estate market is for China’s economic growth.

    China’s economic development has always followed a dual-track system. Without public housing, no “transformation” would have been feasible or even conceivable. In this model, the tracks are not parallel but sequential: public housing comes first, followed by the market. As a result, the health of the second depends entirely on the first. This is the main difference between China and Singapore, or China and the rest of the world and it explains why housing policy has had such a strong impact in China. It also helps us understand how the greatest forms of resilience, whether in the face of internal crises or external shocks, were triggered by shifts in the central government’s approach to real estate. First in 1990, with the provisional regulation regarding the granting and transfer of state land-use rights in urban areas; then the 1998 housing reform that allowed a huge number of families to acquire necessary goods, including homes, laying the foundations for the current urban middle class. Finally, the pre-2008 policies that prevented China from being swallowed up by the global financial crisis, such as the mandatory implementation of the “831” policy on land sold through public bidding, which brought hundreds of billions of RMB in land revenues to the central and local governments in just a few years.

    The potential economic benefits of preserving rural ecology and traditional building go beyond increasing real estate value, with a possible 15–25% per-square-meter increase in value (Prince’s Foundation). Neighborhoods designed with traditional planning approaches also tend to maintain or increase in value during times of crisis (New Urbanism Report).

    We know that China is currently experiencing a serious real estate crash. Do you remember an old article I wrote about the Pu’er tea price crisis this past spring? There might be a connection, and I’ll briefly get to the point.

    The link between China’s real estate crisis and the issue of rural architecture and place-based value, though seemingly distant, is actually a deep and structural connection. It touches the very foundations of the economy, society and the relationship between built space and capital. The key lies in how value is created through space. Modern China built its economic miracle on the urban real estate market; now, to overcome the crisis, it must find a new paradigm for value creation, one that could partially come from rural areas. To be clear, real estate speculation is a necessary evil*, albeit one that should be pursued with containment logic. But in rural contexts, this is often not the core issue.

    In the article mentioned earlier, I highlighted some potential dangers generated by unchecked price speculation in the Pu’er market, such as a chain of farmer defaults that could cause banks and lenders to restrict credit in an effort to avoid adverse selection (i.e. funding risky projects). That said, there is often a mistaken perception that the essence of real estate lies solely in the buying and selling of land and homes. In reality, the core function of the sector is not so much direct investment, but its ability to generate credit. Any economic initiative can obtain financing if supported by adequate cash flows (as has been the case with Pu’er-related activities over the past two decades); however, the actual ability to secure capital largely depends on having tangible collateral. In this context, real estate plays a crucial role as an asset suitable to serve as a guarantee. Therefore, the fundamental function of the real estate market is to attribute value to real assets and give them liquidity, making them effective tools for activating financial circuits. Equipping villages with targeted credit logic, cultural rootedness, and non-speculative real estate enhancement can thus be a form of resilience in less prosperous times.

    We also know that tourism in well-preserved rural Chinese villages (e.g., Hongcun, Xidi, Zhouzhuang, as well as traditional urban contexts in Yunnan such as Wengji, Nuogan, Shaxi) has led to significant increases in local GDP (China Statistical Yearbook, 2023). The use of native raw materials promotes agricultural biodiversity and increases productivity in mixed systems (agroforestry), while boosting employment in traditional crafts, if supported by local policies that are decoupled from the tea market. All of this fits perfectly within the problematic context of regions heavily reliant on a single crop, where workers often lack transferable skills and economic diversification is limited. When only one productive asset exists (like Pu’er), price volatility threatens not just income but also families’ access to credit, potentially leading to systemic financial exclusion. In this sense, rural architecture represents a form of territorial capital that generates tangible, enduring value, fostering access to local microcredit, creating jobs in restoration, craftsmanship, and tourism, and supporting integrated development. It serves as a catalyst for growth that respects cultural identity without exploiting or commercializing it.

    *
    Speculation is a necessary evil: to increase the housing supply, real estate must be a profitable investment and that means accepting a certain level of speculation: those who build or buy to resell must earn a profit. Also, there is a need to make real estate more liquid, in a sense, it must become a tradable asset and form of collateral. It doesn’t matter whether housing prices are soaring or steadily increasing; what matters is that there’s a sufficient perception of that trend. Without this logic, no one would invest in housing on a large scale. If speculation is curbed too strictly (to protect the right to housing), it disincentivizes investment in the real estate sector. As a result, less capital is deployed, construction slows, employment drops and the economy suffers. Whether the State or the market seeks to ensure housing for all, it often does so through financial instruments like incentives, mortgages, subsidies, market liberalization or low interest rates. This leads to a dilemma: the more accessible you try to make housing, the more you expose it to speculative forces. Therefore, a certain degree of speculation must be acknowledged and managed but not entirely eliminated, otherwise the system risks coming to a standstill. And that is one of the key issues behind China’s current real estate short-circuit.

  • The Changing Mountains – Part 1: How High Stakes Corrupt Authenticity

    The Changing Mountains – Part 1: How High Stakes Corrupt Authenticity

    Cities, villages, neighborhoods as we have inherited them through the centuries are not mere institutions or simple names that evoke order and schematic boundaries. Rather, they are places that preserve the way of life of a civilization. In them, we experience time, space, and relationships with others, the “others” being women and men, once strangers to one another, who built spaces in which to live peacefully. These places are symbols of human relationships, compromises, unwritten laws and oral traditions, of evolution and change experienced side by side. Through architecture, rituals and religions survive. Not by chance, the word religion derives from relegere, to take note. Every cultural practice demands that attentiveness which architecture can teach. Over time, it has become a vehicle of proportion, memory, order, boundary, teachings on the use of light, shelter from the darkest nights, place of muffled sounds, thresholds and stairways that not only lead but instruct.

    Rural architecture approaches the concept of classical architecture, as it is not merely a form of building that blindly pursues the essential functions of a structure, but rather a symbol of growth and the transitional phases imposed by history on a place’s inhabitants, an architecture that has grown over the centuries through inner coherence. Think of the Dai houses, with their classic two-story layout: living spaces and bedrooms on the upper floor, animals and farming tools on the ground floor. Roofs made of local stone or rice straw, and the use of wood from surrounding forests. These features do not simply create a picturesque image for an ethnographic reportage, but intelligent responses to a specific context.

    This design ideology is not concerned with “looking pretty”: it is necessary, because it arises from a balance between nature, function, and humanity. In this sense, it is a fulfilled manifestation of what Frank Lloyd Wright called organic architecture, a principle he tirelessly sought to establish across Europe and America throughout the 20th century. What Western universities were trying to rediscover, Yunnan, and China as a whole, already had right before their eyes and under their feet. But as so often happens in the history of civilizations, the arrival of wealth and the imitation of foreign models shatter this ancient balance.

    With the influx of money from the tea market, some villages changed their appearance, resulting in the construction of alien hotels, expanses of tiles in village centers, glass towers and sterile multi-story concrete buildings rising like imitative forms of globalization and economic development. But this is nothing more than replacing a dialogue with the environment with a monologue of vanity. To blindly and stubbornly surrender to this process is an act of desensitization to one’s own history. This is how the harmony between built and natural environments is dismantled, rendering a particular village into a generic, interchangeable place.

    To those who accuse me of being a fanatical dreamer, just as Léon Krier was branded a nostalgic visionary, I respond that traditional architecture holds forms and anatomies capable of reflecting truly human interests, more so than modern architecture. Including economic interests.

    Buildings, houses, factories, temples, everything in rural architecture responds to truth and real use, but not in a merely utilitarian sense. Today, modernist architectural projects are not designed to be inhabited, but merely passed through, they are meant to represent a transient place. They are theatrical props in an urban performance, with no reference to a broader meaning, a meaning that can reside even in the humblest dwelling. Modern buildings are often imposing, expensive, designed to elicit hollow opinions from critics with numbed vocabularies, who otherwise might look past them and judge them as they deserve.

    And so Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt is known as “the pregnant oyster,” the UN building in New York as “the radiator,” Di Salvo’s brutalist buildings in Scampia, Naples as “the sails,” while for the monstrosity of Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center, they didn’t even bother, just calling it by the name of the neighborhood it was dumped into. While classical forms represent agreements handed down through generations and originate from centuries of consensus, modernist ones require nicknames to identify themselves in their forced attempt to exist solely for a purpose, that of containment, but in iconic form. According to Krier, this need to nickname is nothing but an entry into the category of kitsch: the attempt, by an object devoid of authenticity, to obtain a label that justifies its existence, that makes it “mean” something. It is the staging of a rootless structure, forcibly grafted into a context to which it is alien, like a despised ex who, after years of silence, suddenly shows up, with unwelcome emotional exhibitionism, at your mother’s birthday party.

    In this way, what is gained is not just improved material conditions, if that even occurs, but also the domestication of the sense of belonging: the institution of a “government of smoothness,” where every surface is polished, glossy, frictionless, where nothing invites you to stay. And really, why stay, if nothing is made to last and bear witness anymore and your land is transformed into just another urban cluster like all the others?

    Let it be clear: it is impossible to demand perpetual amniotic preservation. But evolution is not destruction. One can build today according to ancient criteria, using modern technologies without sacrificing harmony, symbolism, or recognizability. Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote that “Tradition is the democracy of the dead,” and that is essentially true. Abandoning it is not freedom, it is an amputation of collective memory. True modernity is that which recognizes itself as a chapter in an already begun book, not a blank page.

    When we speak of rural architecture, as in the case of homes in Wengji, Shaxi or Nuogan in Yunnan, we are not referring to mere picturesque tradition. We are speaking of an organic spatial model, culturally rooted, formally legible, and humanly proportioned, one that creates value not through financial abstraction but through functional continuity (home-work-land), a form of identity authenticity (cultural and symbolic value of place), constructive ecology (local materials and techniques), and a lasting attractiveness much more resilient to external shocks (for tourism, craftsmanship, and quality agriculture).

    Architecture and urban development must preserve the visible memory of a cultural identity, and to defend these principles is not conservatism, but the ecology of identity.

    Note: The photo was taken by Steve Shafer

  • Shaping the Earth: The Instinctiveness and the Human-Matter Connection. A journey through the ceramics of Damian Piątkowski.

    Shaping the Earth: The Instinctiveness and the Human-Matter Connection. A journey through the ceramics of Damian Piątkowski.

    There is a gesture, absolute and primordial, that precedes every form of calculating thought: shaping matter. Before architecture, before writing, before utterances became language, there was the hand that molded the earth, shaping it with generative tension. Instinctive, untamed ceramics, in which function and flair do not yield to any technique, are the manifestation of an art that does not ask permission from aesthetics; it is substance, it exists and consists purely in itself.

    To it belongs that rural spirit that calls for a necessary return to a time when not everything had to be polished, constrained by automation. It offers itself to the kiss of flame, to the intimacy of fire, whose tailor is alchemical chemistry; within it dwells man, not the perfect one, obsessed with premeditated thought, but the one who falls, who errs, who returns to the earth to reclaim his material condition. It is a reminder of the human, of a beauty that does not stubbornly seek to appear as such; a silent resistance to homogenization.

    Nonetheless, I have often reflected on this way of making ceramics, trying to understand the phenomenon of instinct. And through this exploration, I’ve come to realize that contemporary wabi-sabi has nothing to do with this kind of spontaneity. The more I observe the work of true artists, the more I see how the term wabi-sabi has taken on mostly derogatory connotations, an aesthetic shortcut. I’ve seen a flood of pseudo-artists making so-called “wabi-sabi” ceramics, with imperfect forms, teetering between the amorphous and something regurgitated by an earthquake, claiming to tell stories of “the art of imperfection.” But there is no story. Only form. Only matter. Even more sterile than mass production. Just an attempt to sell incompetence.

    But the ceramics of Damian Piątkowski, Jiří Lang, Jiří Duchek, Andrzej Bero, and Jan Pávek are completely different. In Eastern Europe, a movement has emerged, led by these great ceramists who celebrate the unrepeatable, the uniqueness of creation, its original matrix. While in China, perfectionists like Wu Haoyu and Wang Shi Jun, legends of Yixing like Zhou Dingfang, Yuan Weixin, Yang Hui Ying, or of Jianzhan like Chen Xu, Lai Yun Ping, Xiong Zhonggui have risen to prominence, Europe, too, has now undoubtedly reached greatness, albeit in a different way.

    The unpredictability of the result takes on a new form, a recovery of physicality and of the body, not only in its imperfection, but in its symbols, in its meanings.

    The ceramics by Damian (clayoncy) that you see in the photo embody all of this: not a regression into some ancestral making, but a conscious position that places the human-matter bond back at the center through a pre-ontological dimension of form, offering a radical alternative to mere artifice and the reproducibility of shapes, reconstructing not only perspectives and objects, but entire ways of experiencing sensibility and inhabiting the present.

  • The Price of Inconsistency: The State of the Market and Why an Uncontrolled Price Increase is So Dangerous

    The Price of Inconsistency: The State of the Market and Why an Uncontrolled Price Increase is So Dangerous

    A few days ago, a couple of videos by Farmer Leaf were published on the situation of leaves prices in Yunnan, with some insights similar to an article I posted back in late January, written with a slight tone of historical catastrophism, which, rereading it now, almost feels like a premonition. But that happens because history repeats itself in a damnably perpetual way, and I take no credit for that. Now, I don’t think William needs my promotion, I’ve never even spoken to him, to be honest, but I believe he’s one of the people with the most complete, intellectually solid, and sincere vision of the Pu’er landscape, at least on the western side, and, most importantly, capable of combining field experience with analytical clarity, not only because he lives and produces tea in Yunnan. After all, a heart patient is not automatically a great cardiologist, right? For this reason, I would like to ideally connect to what was said in the videos, and perhaps push the boundaries of the discussion a bit further. I know this might seem like an idle exercise, especially now that we’re on the threshold of a season that in many areas hasn’t yet shown itself for what it will be, but I believe the world of tea is already saturated with misleading narratives, or overly bent towards consumption and function-driven logic, so I think many can still tolerate one more.

    In some areas like Jingmai, but also in the whole Lincang region, Wuliang, and many parts of Bulang, for example, we have seen a significant depreciation. Not all in the same way, as the price of Yiwu leaves has remained almost unchanged in the famous villages, likewise in Bingdao, although I’ve heard of at least a 10% drop in surrounding villages. The forecast is that plantation and old trees materials from less famous areas, including gushu from some terroirs, will be the most affected. It’s no secret that Pu’er has become almost a superhuman niche game in the last 10-12 years, but was this scenario so unpredictable?

    The last discussions on this topic were buried by me in 2014 when more and more people, myself included, became involved with Pu’er, along with a sinking fleet of capital supporters still rushing towards creditors because they considered it a good investment. The growth of the sector was predicted to be unstoppable, which indeed happened for the next ten years. But now it’s no longer like that. The signs have been there for a long time, just like they were present in 2007, although I stand by my previous position, namely that today the situation doesn’t verge on tragedy as it did back then.

    What is truly tragic is that Pu’er has reached ridiculously high prices, and in economic terms, this doesn’t mean that people can no longer afford it, which is the point that many emphasize, as if saying that there will always be people willing to spend; the problem lies in the willingness. When the price of a good drastically exceeds its perceived or utilitarian value, cognitive dissonance occurs in consumers, leading to a drop in demand despite the availability of money, simply due to economic rationality. The opportunity cost (what one gives up) becomes too high compared to the perceived benefit. This is in line both with prospect theory, which suggests people react to losses by perceiving an excessive price as “unfair,” and with the luxury paradox. Luxury, which has often been used as a justification for the monstrous figures requested, actually operates in a paradoxical way where some goods lose their appeal if they become too accessible or even too exclusive. A good loses its appeal as a status symbol if its accessibility (real or perceived) collapses.

    Price is not just a number; it is a psychological signal, and the breaking point is not universal. Exceptions are represented, for example, by works of art: they maintain high prices for centuries because they embody the brilliance of human genius, something that transcends mere consumption; they do not extinguish or exhaust in the face of the tangible, as they serve no purpose other than themselves. Their value transcends consistency, even while having physical effectiveness; it’s a status that no other thing in the world possesses. But for most goods, including Pu’er, when the price loses all connection to the economic, cultural, or functional reality, the market simply collapses.

    I remember that a while ago, people often debated the origins of capitalism, the rise of the West, and how it had overshadowed the Eastern economy in some ways, contributing to a geopolitical gap that is now not so clear. It was in this context that Pomeranz’s “Great Divergence” concept emerged. This was later placed in an economic context by Robert Shiller, who understood it as a situation where financial prices deviate too far from the real economy, creating imbalances destined to correct themselves, often traumatically. The way to identify this phenomenon comes from observing its three main drivers:

    – Economic narratives: shared cultural constructions that influence collective economic behavior, often independent of fundamentals. These narratives, such as “the tea from this mountain is liquid gold,” “only here can you find true gushu from 3,000-year-old trees,” “the stock of this Sheng keeps increasing in value,” or “this is the last chance to buy before prices explode,” act as psychological catalysts, amplifying expectations and contributing to speculative communication. The power of a narrative lies in its ability to be replicated and spread, much like a virus.

    – Positive feedback loop: a dynamic mechanism where an increase in the price of a financial asset attracts further investment, which in turn drives prices even higher. This process can generate a self-reinforcing spiral disconnected from fundamental values, further fueling the underlying narrative. It’s a recurring dynamic in speculative markets, often a precursor to a correction.

    – Imitative behaviors: the tendency of economic actors to replicate others’ decisions rather than base their choices on an independent analysis of available information. This behavior arises from both cognitive (reducing uncertainty) and social (fear of being excluded from collective gain or consumption) incentives, and is one of the main forces amplifying the effects of dominant narratives in markets.

    The key point to understand is that no divergence between prices and reality can last forever, none. You might ask, “What about works of art?” Works of art don’t enter into this context because they don’t have divergence. This sets in when the vicious cycle becomes unstable, because goods like tea are always subject to physical constraints, like having a house on the side of a hill in an area that is perpetually at risk of earthquakes. For real goods, final demand always depends on tangible utility, whether it’s for dwelling, consuming, or earning. If this function is lost in products that naturally possess it, the market collapses in the end.

    The significant difference from wine is that in the latter, entire areas have seen an increase in land cost and corresponding product beyond imagination, like Pu’er, but there are still labels that are more accessible and others totally out of reach for 90% of people, and both contribute to maintaining the peak of that specific terroir, which remains accessible but sufficiently elitist. In Pu’er, this doesn’t happen, which leads everything to a single standardized dimension. But it isn’t the same for quality. An example can be that all Bingdao shengs are expensive, some more prohibitive than others, but all are excessively costly and generally inaccessible, even the mediocre ones. The quality of raw material can differ even within the same micro-territorial context, but, above all, the hand of the producer is often unknown in the world of Pu’er, reducing everything to a blind purchase if you go outside your small circle of trusted producers or traders. According to this mechanism, if one producer in Montrachet makes a mediocre wine, it’s an isolated case; if someone sprays herbicides every Friday or produces low-level Pu’er in Yi Shan Mo, everyone risks being affected.

    Secondly, there is the crisis of trust, which arises when investors realize that the price is an “empty promise” in terms of missed capitalization or, at the same time, in terms of unfulfilled organoleptic quality, no matter how high it may be. Furthermore, the crisis of trust sets in when uncertainty exceeds average tolerance thresholds. Rigged auctions, counterfeits, false claims about the region and age of the trees — all factors contributing to the genesis of distrust. Have you ever seen cakes that looked ordinary, wrapped in plain white paper, always nibbled by the chewing apparatus of some friendly larva, with a damp stain, deliberately present to legitimize a supposed date, affixed a line before a price with 3 or 4 digits? If you were to sell a Chateau d’Yquem, pick any vintage as long as it’s not the 2008, to a wine expert, but that Sauternes were in a naked bottle, without a label, do you think they’d be willing to give you $600 on trust alone? Without clear traceability, strict controls based also on biochemical analysis, do you think people would spend a fortune on any Burgundy wine? In these contexts, people self-report among neighbors, whereas with Pu’er, there still seem to be actors who want that jianghu, that shadow line that seemingly benefits everyone. Wine is clearly different and not all concepts can be applied to tea, as it’s a different raw material. But why is it that everything becomes tolerable for Pu’er?

    Finally, there are external interventions, or regulatory agents that trigger corrections, which in this case can be merchants or investors. The money flow stops, and the machine halts, and this is the third reason for the unsustainability of the divergence.

    All these factors are usually monitored by financial experts to assess the health of the current market but also to avoid excessive financialization. If a good loses sight of its utility principle, it becomes an asset detached from what makes it itself, turning into a tool for speculation. So, I ask once again: why is there such a desperate effort in Pu’er to gamble and push itself to the edge of this condition?

    Complicit in all these self-flagellation efforts are surely all those photos, those beautiful live postcards with tea trees standing like soldiers at attention, ready to go to war to satisfy our palates, slaves to a huigan, an authenticity and a cha qi at $2/g findable only there, and I mean only there in those 5 square meters of land immortalized, because only there, according to the seller, God has cast his gaze, good tea is made only at that spot, everything else has obviously been planted to shade that little patch of earth, not to be harvested and sold. What they might not show you is how the person taking the photo might be standing on a guardrail next to the highway, and maybe the grass burnt by pesticides gets cut out with editing, as well as the poorly pruned trees (sometimes they don’t even hide those), or other similar things. Or, simply, the tea doesn’t even come from that patch of earth, because let’s be honest, buying tea is often not just an act of trust, it’s entirely an act of faith. This doesn’t apply to everyone, but it’s a concept that applies to many.

    There are no certifications to guarantee the maintenance of a supply chain, nor that a fair price is paid to the producer or farmer, nor control over denominations like in wines. There are chemometric authentication methods through the analysis of stable isotope ratios to trace the origin and harvest year, but I’m smiling just thinking about it. $400 for 357 grams of pure “maybe” seems a bit too much. Half would still be too much. As you can see, the problem is not whether one can afford it or not, for once the problem isn’t money. The problem is the physiological rejection, that immune response of my body against the enormous “if” that resides in my cup, which I’m about to swallow, hoping that the huigan will overwhelm me so I don’t have to engage in psychomanipulative strategies and explain to myself why I spent yet another boatload of money on something that’s barely worth a third of what I paid for it. Usually when there is asymmetry of information between the buyer and the seller, an average price is paid due to the lack of knowledge of one of the two parties. But in Pu’er this does not happen.

    And having mentioned authenticity, I’ll refer to the next crazy price-justifying argument. I remember an interesting article by Shuenn-Der Yu, an anthropologist from Academia Sinica in Taipei, who concluded by saying, “Ironically, the story of Puer tea demonstrates that the concern for authenticity may have reached a state where no one cares what Puer really is, so long as the current version of the tradition generates profits.” And here comes another bitter pill to swallow. The campaign for understanding what is authentic in the world of Pu’er has been going on for at least 50 years, and today we are still at the same point, the starting point. Authenticity has moved through the debate between wet and dry storage, between terrace tea and forest tea, until reaching the exasperation of single-origin, which cannot be guaranteed, and the compulsive search for gushu. The search for authenticity has poured into the desire to know the exact location of the bathroom closest to the wok that generated the leaves of that cake from the Banpo forest and the need for those trees to date back to the Qinghai campaign of 1723. Otherwise, you’ll never know what authentic Pu’er tastes like. It’s not a communicative strategy adopted by everyone, but there’s always someone ready to pull out the sign saying “I have the real gushu, the others are fake.”

    From the late Qing period, blending (pinpei, 拼配) was considered a refined skill, the result of long training and experience, not unlike, in rigor and sensitivity, the art of blending in whisky or tobacco. This technique continued to represent an essential component of production, both for shenh ad shou Pu’er, continuing its evolution even within large state-owned companies in modern times. But today, authenticity resides in the single village, in the extreme representation of terroir, in tasting the locality, an invitation to the sage of purity and a claim to a place, as happens with French crus or Italian MGA. Too bad that in Pu’er there is nothing similar, neither in historical documentation nor in tradition, nor, again, in the concept of denomination. And without denominations and identity controls, which terroir are we talking about exactly? We can talk about it when we are in that mountain, in that forest, tasting the tea that comes from it because we know who worked it or picked it. But hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, how does that certainty remain intact?

    Apart from the controls in some areas, in other parts no one will tell you the truth about what’s happening. Ten years ago, MarshalN wrote, “If you think about it, nothing stops a seller from going to the nearest Chinatown supermarket, buying a bunch of tea cans that cost $5 each, emptying them, repackaging them as quality tea, and reselling them at a 4x markup,” and what has changed in 10 years? Nothing.

    The marketing of Pu’er tea has for many years been a choreographed performance, orchestrated through often incomplete contracts that leave excessive room for opportunistic behavior. This modus operandi can be rationalized by observing three harmful symptoms: the sanctification of space, the providential narrative, and the pseudo-religious iconography. All of these are present and exposed above. The Pu’er market has been plundered by what should be the true agronomic meaning and sense of terroir, which deserves true protection, not mere commercialization. What should be the core of authenticity becomes the passive accomplice of an economy of hope.

    “It’s normal for people to always want more and earn more; it’s useless to play the morality crusader,” is a typical phrase I hear in debates about situations like these, and it is the natural response many would wield in face of this article. Therefore, I would conclude by reaffirming the reasons that constitute the danger of such a perverse economic cycle.

    In the relentless pursuit of higher margins, many areas have converted their crops, with reductions in many cases of more than 40% of the land cultivated for essential foods, increasing vulnerability in case of external imbalances. To expand or maintain production, many farmers have taken out high-interest loans, which, naturally, are also increasing, as the bet was based on a continuously rising price for Pu’er, thus increasing pressure on the credit system and families. Now, if the price of raw tea continues to decline in the coming seasons, these farmers would find themselves in technical default. I read somewhere years ago that rural banks in Yunnan had about 40% of their loan portfolio tied to the Pu’er sector: if producers could no longer repay the loans, there would be a risk of chain insolvencies, similar to a mini subprime mortgage crisis:

    Farmers → insolvency → rural banks → credit freeze → collapse of local businesses → slow return to normalcy.

    So, the point is not just to lower prices, but to rebuild a network of trust. Continuing the speculative system would not only lead to critical adjustments for honest farmers and intermediaries but also to credit rationing phenomena that would prevent rapid recovery or mere subsistence even after the true outbreak of the crisis. Banks and credit institutions could limit loans to avoid adverse selection risks, like financing risky projects, favoring only the large intermediaries and leaving smaller entities behind. And this is a frequent thing that nobody ever talks about.

    Moreover, most of the workforce in rural Yunnan is directly or indirectly involved in the sector: farmers, processors, vendors, tea-related tourism employees. With another market crisis, what transferable skills would hundreds of thousands of potential unemployed people have? Economic restructuring is not possible in the short term to cope with a potential crisis, given the absence of industrial alternatives. To conclude this excessively dramatic view, even with a collapse in the value of Pu’er, rents and mortgages would not fall, since for a good initial period, land and properties would still be valued based on high-return expectations, and families would remain trapped in a stagflation trap (despite some sectoral deflation): high production, high costs, falling income, rising underemployment, and declining consumption. I don’t believe Yunnan is in this situation, despite some sectoral deflation and possible inflationary rigidity of essential goods and fixed costs, nor do I think it will get there soon. But this article is an investigation into various perspectives, so it is necessary to describe even extreme but possible conditions.

    Essentially, the Pu’er sector, grown under a model of accumulation and continuous speculative expectations, is now facing its structural limits:

    • Inflated prices → distorted rents → inefficient resource allocation.
    • Dependency on a single product → systemic vulnerability.
    • Lack of diversification and resilience → risk of regional social and economic crisis.

    The Pu’er market has evolved into a microcosm of financialized capitalism, where the described drivers create a deadly divergence between price and reality. The correction is painful but necessary, as only by anchoring the price to real values (quality more closely correlated with price, an ethical and certified supply chain, cultural utility) can we avoid the trap of the “Great Divergence.” As Galbraith wrote: “Everyone thinks they can leave the party before the punch bowl runs dry. But the punch always runs dry suddenly.”

    In light of the above, the solutions – though complex and not immediately applicable – must include a selective revision of price levels, especially in areas that have experienced the sharpest increases in recent years. This recalibration would help to rise quality, to reduce the entry barriers that currently discourage new operators and consumers in a sector characterized by volatile and often unstable preferences.

    It is true that there is a niche of loyal consumers, deeply connected to Pu’er from both a cultural and taste perspective; however, most consumers show high price sensitivity, and in the event of compromised accessibility, they will drastically reduce consumption or migrate towards alternative tea varieties, or turn to other Pu’er production areas such as Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, which are more economically sustainable and are now producing excellent teas.

    As also highlighted by William in his videos, another key strategy is diversification: particularly the development of sustainable and integrated tourism (ecotourism) and the reintegration of agricultural crops suited not only for human consumption but also functional for renewable energy production, such as biomass for biogas, or alternative crops like coffee, given the growing prestige of the Menghai region, where extremely high-quality varieties like Gesha are now being successfully grown, representing promising ways to free local communities from the near-exclusive dependence on tea monoculture.

    At the same time, the introduction of a mandatory certification system for Pu’er is necessary as a tool to restore market trust and strengthen the perception of the product’s intrinsic value. The cheerful postcards will not be enough sooner or later. In this regard, the use of blockchain technology – to ensure traceability and transparency – together with the formal recognition of local designations of origin, represents an essential step towards a credible and sustainable revaluation of the entire sector.

    From a macroeconomic and credit perspective, if the market continues to show rigidity and an absence of adaptive capacity, it will be inevitable to implement extraordinary intervention tools. Among these, it will be crucial to begin systematic monitoring of essential goods prices in the most affected areas, to contain the regressive effects of the crisis on the most vulnerable households. It will be necessary to consider the possibility of activating public debt moratoriums for small producers, as well as, with extreme caution, evaluating the partial conversion of debt into equity instruments. Although this measure would provide immediate financial relief and potentially facilitate access to certification programs and technical support, it carries significant structural risks: among them, the potential for abuses, the excessive commercialization of production logics, and the disproportionate cession of land-use rights in relation to debts that might be overestimated or poorly contracted.

    Those who know me or have had the chance to read what I usually write on my profile know how attached I am to Yunnan and China, and they perfectly understand my language, saturated with admiration for an irreducible people. However, I believe that poetic phrasing, lyrical tones, and romantic philosophy are no longer enough. On the contrary, I think a more critical, aware, and participatory approach is needed: a form of shared responsibility toward a market that has proven extremely fragile and that requires more balance and transparency, for the good of all, those who live there and those, like us, who observe, love, and frequent that world.

  • How Money Can Buy Your Taste. And Why You Should Buy Tea Anyway.

    How Money Can Buy Your Taste. And Why You Should Buy Tea Anyway.

    Universities are fascinating places to discuss how money cannot buy happiness. Perhaps because young people at that age are often strapped for cash and, at the same time, eager to prove that money can’t buy everything, not even that feeling, that harmony between duty and desire, between the passive acceptance of immediate pleasure and the attempt to avoid ephemeral satisfaction. The academies, until one secures a professorship, are also the venues where the idea of the hedonistic treadmill is strongly endorsed. This concept describes the human tendency to incessantly seek pleasures or material improvements without ever achieving lasting satisfaction. Even significant achievements, such as a career advancement, the purchase of a long-desired asset, or a personal milestone, generate an initial peak of satisfaction that nevertheless fades with habituation, returning the individual to their preexisting “set point” or “basal level of happiness.”

    I began to wonder, in conversation with colleagues, how one might temporarily yet continuously buy access to the upper floor of happiness, creating an emotional elevator that works on demand, but without the immediate dispersion typical of compulsive buying, and without short-term happiness eventually leading to long-term side effects. Honestly, I was very happy during my early university years, marked by precarious employment and mere subsistence, but I don’t think I’d want to return to those same conditions at this stage of my life. Yet I also don’t want, now that I’m aware of having greater purchasing power, to fall into the collector’s spiral, where happiness is repeatedly renewed and crumbles as one fills a substantial void or into the trap of social comparison, where one measures their value against others in a cultural context that celebrates material success. This phenomenon, as Festinger’s theory of social comparison suggests, has only made many people poorer and poorer. Then, for those of you, like me, who refuse to accept the reality proposed by Lykken and Tellegen, that 50%, and even more, of subjective happiness is hereditary, it becomes necessary to find something that rescues us from our desperate, ill-fated genetic inheritance of perpetual dissatisfaction. I would like to tell you that to govern happiness you must focus not on possession but on mastering your inner judgment; however, I am by no means the most spiritual person you’ll ever meet to be in a position to say that, and besides, I don’t feel like lying to you.

    If money cannot buy happiness, we have certainly noticed how it can at least purchase quality, or at the very least, the pretense of quality. I recall several studies, as well as numerous blind tastings, where it consistently emerged that wine, or tea, showed a positive correlation between price and quality, yet the relationship was always incredibly skewed. The most expensive product never ranked first, never. Now, in the Pu’er saga, we see how, as a common snack available everywhere, tea cakes priced at $1–2 per gram appear as if it were normal, as if quality resided only in those teas, and among the buyers of these cakes very few complain about the actual quality of these productions. Beyond the debatable nature of this phenomenon, there are reasons for it.

    The first is that these products do indeed embody quality, albeit not to the extent that justifies their exorbitant prices.

    The second, as trivial as it may seem, yet as current as a Rolex Submariner on a trust fund kid’s wrist, is that no one is willing to admit to themselves that they’ve burned through a third of their salary on a tea cake that didn’t overwhelm them with a mystical aura but was simply an excellent tea. This is the “sunk cost fallacy”, we recognize that it is irrational to persist in a failing project “because we have invested so much in it,” yet the pain or anger of admitting a loss paralyzes us, doesn’t it? When something is expensive, the link between price and pleasure becomes extremely strong; the price tag transforms into a vehicle for a symbolic narrative that promises a sort of redemption for the expense, an existential revenge. The more you spend, the more you believe you are accessing a “superior” pleasure, rarefied, almost transcendent, and this occurs even before the actual possession of the good, via dopaminergic anticipation.

    But the third, and most important, reason is that often the price demands attention. When you spend a lot, it is rare not to notice every smallest detail; every moment can become saturated with meaning. You’re willing to overdose on information just to testify that something is truly extraordinary. This happens even without resorting to selling your organs for a cake, but when you spend a lot, there is no doubt that even someone usually inattentive to every macro-detail would experience the situation differently. In short, both emotional and physical engagement reach their maximum.

    Tea in Asia is the apotheosis of agricultural art, and it is natural that people find far more to discuss about a Bi Yun Hao tea cake priced at $500 than about a Xiaguan tuocha costing $10. In the latter case, even if there were something worth discussing, the buyer might subconsciously suppress their thoughts, because it is socially expected that any good priced below a certain threshold has nothing to offer except a “daily squeeze” of repeated consumerism. Many believe that you cannot enter the elite with a ten-dollar purchase, right? But then, how can one leverage this perverse, consumerist vision to one’s advantage without selling both kidneys? Now I come to the point.

    What if we viewed price not as a determinant of the intrinsic quality of tea, but as a marker of a sacred boundary between the everyday and the consecrated moment, where money is not betrayed by the real quality (a quality that will never be proportional to the money spent in any case), nor idolized by those who have invested a fortune in what they consider the only way to achieve “true” pleasure? It would no longer be about chasing luxury or a social identity, but about intensifying the present regardless of other factors at play.

    To do this, there is no need to spend vast resources; it is enough to pay just a little more than what we consider “normal,” employing a critical yet functional hedonism in which that slight surplus serves as a cognitive bypass and taste criticism functions as a true tool in the search for real quality. Then, all that is needed is to unbox a tea cake and share it, with someone you love or with yourself on a difficult day, thereby consecrating the moment. And you can do this repeatedly, in a logic that transcends every commercial imposition.

    That “little bit more” translates into the symbolic gesture of surpassing the ordinary. If you think that isn’t enough, bear in mind that one aspect is the rational awareness of a cognitive bias, and another is overcoming it. It becomes akin to knowing about an optical illusion yet continuing to perceive it even after understanding the trick. Awareness of a bias triggers the analytical system, which is more laborious but corrective; however, it does not interfere with the creation of the bias itself—because biases are effects of evolutionary inertia, developed to survive in a context of cognitive sustainability, not to be right. Essentially, we live in a sort of metacognitive blindness, so why not exploit it.

    Let it be clear, this approach would not make extraordinary what is not, nor would it imbue something with an unreal quality it does not possess, but it would help remove many externally induced obstacles to accessing this generative mechanism.

    In addition, it would bypass what Byung-Chul Han defines as the “psychopolitics of consumption”, that is the colonization of emotions by the market, which transforms price into an indicator of sentimental intensity, a revealer of truth. Instead, a practice of ritualized happiness is built, as Bruckner would note, whereby a Pu’er tea cake becomes a pragmatic and positive fiction, an accessible simulacrum that does not promise the eternal happiness but guarantees a repeatable fragment of fulfillment.

  • Seven Essence Darjeeling Masquerade

    Seven Essence Darjeeling Masquerade

    I believe there are few people on this earth for whom I have ever felt even a modicum of envy, and I do not say this out of vanity nor from some absurd, ultraterrene awareness. I’m simply indifferent to the allure that possession exerts on people, the resonance of an echo of absence, the trace of a denied desire. Yet Bubble and Abhijeet have a rare, transcendent empathy when it comes to tea, a quality that is either innate or remains scarcely graspable, one that probably I don’t even have. Their autumn collection attests, indisputably, to their status as the Vaughan brothers of the Darjeeling terroir and to the perception that selecting leaves is a virtuous act, a testament to aesthetic discernment.

    The election of the proper material is not a mere sorting process; rather, within it dwells that lyricism, that aphonic language in which what resides is lifted from its ordinary form, unfolding into a dizzying array of aromas and scents where time contracts and expands with a diaphragmatic cadence. To select leaves is an invocation of the sublime, a re-creation of the universal tension between order and chaos, wherein the structural opposition of what is utilitarian and what lies beyond utility is drawn and maintained open, rendering tea not merely a beverage but a vehicle of meanings.

    Masquerade is a Darjeeling oolong produced from the AV2 cultivar, a tea with a dense liquor, a chromatic snapshot vibrating between ancient gold and dusty amber. The leaves exude the fragrance of rose and jasmine, of olive oil and fruit tart. The infusion is sweet, soft and persistent, with hints of pear, pistachio and dried apricot. It is a sip of freshness, capable of rejuvenating even those weary nights, illuminated by the flashing lights of police cruisers deployed in one of those torrid, sleepless nights.

    Notes of chlorophyll, subtly vegetal, along with hints of olive leaf and mango, evoke an introspective road movie, laden with trembling shooting of hands brushing against corn stalks and bodies staggering in the sultriness, a spiral of rural unrest and youthful rage, of adolescent fights in the badlands, where typically nothing was too dear but everything cost too much.

  • Rethinking Changtai’s Legacy: Are post-2004 Productions Really That Bad?

    Rethinking Changtai’s Legacy: Are post-2004 Productions Really That Bad?

    The postmodern saga of Changtai is a mélange of nostalgia and decadent retrospection—a journey that began as an escape route, full of fleeting glimmers and vibrant lights, from the state-dominated gloom of the ’80s, soon became a conceptual reimagining of State Road 9, with its kilometers of pitted asphalt and half-lit motel signs sliding anonymously past the car window. They were riding the Pu’er epic, where every tong was marketed as if it were the Rosebud of Citizen Kane, that elusive treasure everyone sought to understand and possess. Nowadays, according to many aficionados, the tale of Changtai resembles the narrative of Bas Jan Ader’s brazen, smiling bike ride right before his humiliating crash. “If you want Changtai, look for it before 2005…”—one of the most overused phrases of the past decade. But is that really true?

    Founded in ’99 in Yiwu by the will of Chen Shihuai, Changtai began selling its tea under the brand Yi Chang Hao, carving out a niche much like an indie rock band holding what seemed to be the perfect record, before the industry ruined everything. After YCH, they went on to produce numerous successful series sourced from single terroirs, such as Chen Hong Chang and Chang Tai Hao—exclusive teas crafted to last, to age like the finest Chateau Margaux. Yet, a few years later, something broke.

    The Pu’er market of the 2000s was not unlike the realm of contemporary art: suddenly, money flooded in, investors arrived, critics lost their impartiality by getting drunk with the artists, and everyone wanted a slice of the cake. Demand exploded, prices soared, tea was even planted at lower altitudes, and factories ramped up production. Pu’er was no longer merely a tea, it had transformed into a financial asset.

    In 2004, the factory reorganized as Changtai Tea Group, and with it came a change in approach: economies of scale took precedence, there was a greater reliance on plantation-grown material, more commercialized sourcing, less meticulously managed fermentations, and a reduced attention to detail. The overarching idea was to produce volumes, to churn out new batches for collectors who scarcely understood what they were buying—all while fierce competition for the best leaves intensified. Quality became diluted, much like a Warhol reproduced ad infinitum.

    At the onset of my own economic tragedy, when I first began acquiring cakes, I, too, partly embraced this notion.

    Comparing a Yiwu from ‘99 with one from 2006 felt like plunging from one metaphysical plane into another. The former was silky, layered, opulent and clear, while the latter was sparse, tediously sober, its complexity shackled by an almost ascetic organoleptic austerity and a finish that fizzled out too quickly, like a film abruptly cut before the climax. Yet over the years, I questioned whether this was universally true for all Changtai teas and how much weight these few general observations really carried—perhaps too cursory to be definitive. Thus, I granted them another degree of judgment.

    I compared dozens of Changtai cakes each year—an obsession, really—and indeed, something had shifted, at least in trend. However, about five years ago, as I revisited that graveyard of samples I had set aside, I was stunned. The productions between 1999 and 2003 were undoubtedly remarkable, but those of 2005 and 2006 were not so far removed from their predecessors. I mean, hundreds upon hundreds of grams tasted in blind comparisons over ten years, two epochs that were supposed to be worlds apart and with an extra zero in the price tag, should have belonged to entirely different existential planes. But they weren’t, or at least not as much as public opinion, and my own mind, insisted. Production had indeed changed; however, certain elements of those iconic batches survived the onslaught of serial reproducibility, escaping the cynical, clinical gigantism of enormous, hypertrophic factories. Although these later productions underwent adaptations that created some detachment from their predecessors, cakes like the one in the photo, and others from 2005 and 2006, cannot, simply by that fact, be equated with the banality of a uniform proliferation, the child of that industrial era so often lamented.

    This supposedly inglorious decline was cemented when a course correction was made, delineating a sociological divide between tradition (what peoples craft for themselves) and folkloric reproposition (destined for mass consumption), which, though appealing, remains distant from the truth that governs the opus traditum, the craftsmanship of remote ancestry. But how much truth lies in all of this? How much tradition truly remained in Changtai after 2004?

    What shocked me most was the disparity in storage conditions among the various references, a factor that skewed the objectivity of judgment far more than any real qualitative gap. The cakes from the end of the last century through 2003 are genuinely of a high caliber, achievements that later productions can hardly aspire to match. In the 2003–2005 period, I found no absurd differences, certainly not enough to justify the price differentials from one year to the next. Often, excessively humid aging had irreparably ruined even excellent signatures—like a ’99 Yi Chang or a Mr. Wang Red Chang Tai Hao—trivializing their brilliance.

    Therefore, I believe that the environment in which these cakes have spent their lives is far more important than determining whether a 2005 Chen Hong Chang measures up to one from 2000, and that much of their economic and organoleptic value lies precisely there—in the climate, in the place in which they have dwelled—probably more than in the origin of the leaves, which counts for nothing compared to a twenty-year period spent in a humid warehouse, left to sour and reduced to nothing more than a basement squeeze.

    Moreover, finding well-preserved cakes to make such comparisons has become increasingly rare. Therefore, my modest piece of advice—if you haven’t sampled what you intend to buy beforehand—is to drink; take 2005 cakes without prejudice, provided they come from a reliable source. It is not entirely true that quality plummeted drastically after 2004; these issues emerged slightly later, and I may expound on the reasons in a subsequent article. In any case, if you are lucky, you’ll have secured a small masterpiece at a quarter of the price—one that, with high probability, isn’t a fake. If things don’t go your way, you’ll have gained a daily drink that is surely better than having burned a fortune, blindly thinking you’d closed a deal for a Romanée-Conti that, in reality, tastes like an old fisherman’s boot; or worse, a counterfeit, because the seller’s reliability wasn’t factored into the equation.

  • The Liquid Reflection of Civilization. Seven Essence Darjeeling Epilogue

    The Liquid Reflection of Civilization. Seven Essence Darjeeling Epilogue

    Years ago, I met a professor, one of those old, gruff Labour men, fond of humanity provided it was kept at a safe distance. He lived in permanent exile from pragmatic reality, an outcast who had sought refuge in erudition, guardian of a nation that had ceased to exist before he was even born.
    He listened to Mahler after his Darjeeling, but would only play it if the tea had truly satisfied him, perched on that Danish Art Nouveau oak stool with its black leather seat, with his fingers gripping the keys like ash roots burrowing into earth.

    Epilogue by Seven Essence brings him back to me, sitting in his study poised within the hypothetical temporal sliver between Hope’s Regency style and Ruhlmann’s Art Deco.
    He never chained tea to a fixed hour, nor did he treat it as a prelude to elitist drunkenness. To him, it was the liquid echo of ancient civilizations and their highest reasoning.

    The mahogany, varnish, sweet potato, petrichor, rye bread and cask notes, all wrapped in a cloak of earthy minerality, bring back that room drowning in bound pages and an excess of ebony. Watching it in the cup, I recall our conversations about Vermeer — the tea shines, releasing a warm light, as the one that illuminated the flesh-like surface of the Girl with a Pearl Earring, a radiance both earthly and sacred.

    The sip is rounded, neoclassical, sober yet embracing, with a warm, exuberant body, full of pepper, cocoa, violets and autumn fruit. The sip ends with a sugar cane sweetness almost severe, like the curtain closing on a Powell or Pressburger finale, those directors who knew how to grasp the soul of things without succumbing to sentimental drift.

    Epilogue reminded me of those cultured, discursive forays and how drinking tea itself is politics: a good, human politics that forces us to admit our dependence on the earth, on history, on the cultures of those far from us, in another time or place.
    Every cup is a choice. Drinking good tea is an act of resistance.