Tag: yunnan

Pu’er Price Collapse, Are We Heading For A New Crash?

I’ve always loved investigative journalism but I’ve always hated those catastrophic clickbait headlines that always seem to make things bigger than they really are, but there’s a phenomenon in the pu’er world that’s been going on for a little too long to be simply buried like a dog with its bone.

Now, we all, or almost all, remember the bursting of the speculative bubble in 2007, where the pu’er market swelled exponentially overnight that spring only to falter in July and collapse over 70% by the end of the year, basically cutting the legs off an entire industry. Well, we may not be at those levels, but it doesn’t seem like the lesson has been learned, rather it seems like someone just put their shirt on inside out to hide the stain.

What were the causes? Well, to simplify, let’s consider that 70% of purchases were motivated by investment and not by real consumption, production quintupled in 4 years, saturating the market, to which we add fraudulent practices of counterfeiting, manipulation of markets and auctions and crisis of confidence in the product, the source and the quality due to opaque practices dictated by the absence of clear regulation that was convenient for everyone, then we obtain what is a self-destructive economic logic based on artificial growth, completely disconnected from the fundamentals of the product.

In the West we most likely think that Pu’er buyers have broken free from this dimension because we see a large part of them consuming the same tea they bought, which is partly true, but partly not. Many areas of Yunnan that have reached rationally unthinkable numbers, brands or editions that beat crazy prices have behind them a generative structure often of speculative nature that does not always have to do with scarcity, production costs or the quality of the tea.

A while back I found myself tasting old samples or cakes from my collection that I had probably forgotten about. I tasted an old 2005 DaYi 7542, batch 501, along with some more recent production, a 2022 7542 and a 2022 Premium Peacock, both batch 01. I honestly can’t say they were bad teas, they were really good, but to what extent can you justify a crazy price, crazy especially when compared to those before 2015, for a basically “a little more than good” tea. This is not only true for DaYi, but let’s analyze for a moment the price trend of some famous productions. Among the most sought-after cakes in recent years there has been the 2003 Jin No.5 batch 201, in January 2021 its value was 1.45 million RMB/jiàn (84 cakes) while in January 2025 the value amounts to 1.1 million, lower than 5 years ago and above all far from the exorbitant price of 3.2 million in March 2021, same fate for the 2005 7542 (batch 501) which in February 2020 was 230.000 RMB /jiàn (84 cakes), reached 880.000 in February 2021 and then collapsed again at the beginning of this year to 300.000 RMB.

In recent years DaYi has marketed numerous other special and prestigious productions, such as the 2201 Premium Peacock or the 2021 Golden Rhyme to counteract the erosion of the pu’er market prices, but without much success, the first had a value of 118.000 RMB / 42 cakes now collapsed to 61.500 RMB while the second which had reached 152.000 RMB / 28 cakes now touches “only” 33.000 RMB.

So, in China there is a particular and complex economic situation and due to personal and corporate financial difficulties, those who invested in this type of goods have tried to divest from illiquid assets such as Pu’er. The tea market does not guarantee a quick sale (and this can be seen from the huge amount of cakes kept obsessively by those who bought them for this purpose) without even seeing a potential for short-term revaluation, and this has led to a greater supply than demand, which is why many recently produced cakes are and will be available in the future.

Added to this is the real estate crisis triggered by the collapse of Evergrande in 2021, the real estate sector has traditionally absorbed a huge share of savings from Chinese families, who now see the value of their properties deflate, which has caused an erosion of perceived wealth. The liquidation, even at a loss, of pu’er tea to quickly recover liquidity and move a part of immovable money can only worsen the price situation.

Let’s add a piece: in recent years some brands, attracted by demand, have pushed for an increase in production, not limiting themselves to a couple of pressing batches; with the drop in demand, the market is now flooded with a surplus of product and an inability of the market to absorb the supply.

But above all, wage stagnation, a lack of robust welfare for which the capital of families is concentrated more on pension, salary and educational expenses and a slowdown in redistributive policies slow down or cancel the entry of new buyers into the market, a situation that brings us back to the last problem of the analysis: The collapse of the speculative segment.

The cakes of large “investment” brands have suffered a 30-50% drop compared to the 2021-2022 peaks, especially for the post-2010 editions, a sign of the exhaustion of the speculative model, something already seen in 2007, but currently the situation is less dramatic. However, reliance on time is not a reassuring factor in the development of these phenomena, which can see prolonged stagnation as well as a sudden acceleration rather than their dissolution.

Now I get to the point. For years, the “investment” market has functioned with a pseudo-pyramidal scheme: investors bought new and old editions waiting for others to enter after them, driving up prices. When the absence of new players becomes apparent, the system simply collapses, as the first to arrive only gain if new buyers arrive willing to pay higher prices (those who know the world of fine wines are probably not unfamiliar with this game). So prices collapse because there is no longer real demand to support them.

The biggest problem with the collapse of speculative Pu’er is that as it increases in value it sometimes cause the price increase of raw material and “consumer” cakes even from small brands, it can have exactly the opposite impact on the local economy of the region, where many small producers depend on the sector, since the costs for harvesting, processing and storage of Pu’er increase accordingly, especially for the latter who do not benefit from economies of scale.

In addition, many young people seem to give up on this type of purchase and the crisis of confidence due to several allegedly rigged auctions have not helped the image of this sector which in itself is already a niche.

In this article, not all the main problems have been touched upon, for example, I have intentionally left out the problem of fakes (both new and old pu’er, both big brands and, especially currently, smaller brands) and that of fraud on the origin of the leaves, which represents a huge critical point.

As far as pu’er consumers are concerned, the only possible logic is to form and create a personal standard that is totally independent from the logic of price, fashion and advertising of brands and sellers. If it is true that a low price does not bode well, it is also true that a high price does not provide any a priori guarantee on its real quality or on the truthfulness of its origin, and this applies to both Asian retailers and European sellers. Trust in a shop and in the people who run it still remains a fundamental prerequisite, as well as fighting speculative logic through greater criticism and greater detachment from trends that contribute nothing to an authoritative and well-founded personal education, nor do any good to a market that certainly no longer needs speculative logic (also considering the polarity of speculation, which could occur in a unipolar way in the West thanks to some retailers without it actually occurring in Asia). All very familiar advice to those of you who have been out here a while, nothing new from the early 2000s.

To conclude, this trend of continuous increase in prices in a generalized way is not infinitely sustainable, and history unfortunately teaches this, especially in an uncertain global economic context. The future of the market will depend on the ability to balance price, quality and accessibility, avoiding speculative excesses and opening up to new consumers. If the sector is able to adapt, Pu’er will remain a valuable product, but with more balanced and less volatile prices. Companies must become ambassadors of transparency, for example by introducing blockchain certifications or declaring costs and margins so as to show how much is paid to farmers, as happens with some micro-roasteries in the coffee world. Consumers must act as ethical “gatekeepers” avoiding being carried away by the hype without evaluating the quality and institutions must guarantee clear, more stringent rules that absurdly no one seems to ask for (except to limit the use of fertilizers or other superficial environmental restrictions), clarify terms (e.g. gushu) so that they are internationally univocal and measurable as happens with European standards and denominations. All these things seem like utopia, but every now and then it’s good to say things out loud, they don’t even sound bad.

*All prices in the article were taken from donghetea.com

30 January 2025
When a great pu’er become an elegy. Eastern Leaves Lunan Mountain ancient trees 2020

For generations, caravans laden with pu’er have traversed the steep paths of Lunan, eluding the harsh karst landscape, leaving it behind them, slowly advancing towards Tibet.

The muleteers, with their faces hollowed by frost and fatigue, relied on themselves, on their companions, on the tenacity of their horses, following the paths traced by their ancestors, where every bend concealed stories of exchange, trade and survival.

Pasha seems to have been able to overcome everything, from the destruction that occurred with the Panthay rebellion to the wreck of traditionalism and the collectivization of the Cultural Revolution, to the persecution of the Red Guards.

Hölderlin wrote “where there is danger, what saves also grows,” and so it is here that natural beauty and spiritual aspirations intertwine into a rich and vibrant cultural cloth, and teas like this, with their dense depth of flavors of vanilla, candied fruit, nuts and persimmons, take us into a dimension of time that we cannot easily grasp, a place where tradition is not only preserved, but continually recreated.

With its silky sip, honeyed sweetness, musky and citrus tones, the cup becomes a sort of refuge, a bridge rather than an end.

When we sip a cup of pu’er like this we are entering into a dialogue with the past, it reminds us that not all is lost, that in its slow and patient aging lies both a concession and a resistance to time.

A great pu’er becomes an elegy, not only a lyric of sadness for what is lost but a celebration of the intrinsic value of what has been. In its leaves pervaded by scents of red dates, walnuts and toasted pumpkin seeds, of withered broom flowers, its elegiac essence revived through a call to the earth, to history, to the culture, every sip becomes an existential plan, a way of inhabiting time with consciousness.

It offers us a key to a further, more saturated dimension of time, in which loss is not an obstacle to overcome but nourishment for our being. Both, the elegy and the pu’er make memory a cure, an antidote to oblivion, reminding us that the past is not a wound to be closed, but a legacy to draw from.

8 October 2024
A mystical, primordial village that gave refuge to outlaws, tea merchants, heroic loggers and ghosts. Huang Cao Ba told with a 2023 old trees sheng pu’er

Huang Cao Ba is a village of less than 800 souls, a respectable number considering the average of the nearby ones. Although it lives on a simple economy, based mostly on the production of food to be consumed on site, on livestock and agriculture, it can boast a certain basic well-being and the historical prestige of having a thousand-year history of tea production, with most of the relatively contiguous gardens planted in the middle and late Qing dynasty (1636-1912).

The red and yellow dirt roads on which Huang Cao Ba based much of his social life were the edges of a wild peak in whose forests the boys dreamed of being explorers and daredevils. You could smell the rice paddies that overwhelms you like an army of silk bundles, you could smell the mud, the green bamboo swaying in the wind broken by the spring rainstorm and every kind of subtropical exhalation.

Before those houses built with stone and clay bricks with sloping tin roofs, there was a traffic of information and documents, exchange of words and silences in that village which was a post station during the Nanzhao reign on the “刊木古道” the ancient timber cutting road which was a significant link for the foreign and military policy, the culture and the economy of the reign, which ran from Dali through Jingdong, Zhenyuan, Jinggu to Pu’er.

The vegetation consists of evergreen mountain broadleaf and mixed coniferous forests covering the centuries-old tea trees, so dense that the first exploration team was sent from Jinggu County only in 2001. Even its name derives from the cultural ethnocentrism of the first men, who, unable to penetrate it with the same ease they encountered in other villages, hastily dismissed it with what they could see from afar, as the land of yellow grass.

A mystical, primordial village that gave refuge to outlaws and fugitives during the Tang and Ming dynasties, a village of Yi healers and shamans and tea merchants on the Tea Horse Road, heroic loggers and ghosts of fallen workers, It is from its old trees that the leaves of this TdC 2023 sheng come. The leaves are wrapped in scents of peach jelly, cut grass and rock sugar, mango sherbet and orchid.

In the mouth it is delicately soft, translating the wild genesis of the slopes from which it comes, incredibly sweet and persuasive in the aromas of candied fruit, hibiscus, ripe apricot, then hints of walnut, vanilla and citrus peel finish a sip of excellent persistence.

29 September 2024
Love for Country, Reconstruction and Tea. A few words about Yi Bang and Man Gong Village with a 2023 Gushu

What was the land of the emperor’s tea in the 18th century and a trading circle between Myanmar, Calcutta, Kalimpong and Sikkim in the 19th century soon became dust and ashes in the middle of the 1900. The refoundation of Yibang and its prestige started from that old road paved with mud and stone, the only thing that did not bend to human will, the connection with the Tea Horse Road, the bridge with its past.

Many now predict the disappearance of our civilization in the “disaffection”, but in times in which remembering, thinking, writing poetry, praying, living together are barely advancing, there are still places where that duende resides, that thrill in which the call to the land comes to mind. That innate affection that associates us with a land, that binds us to a place, weaves bonds and founds a culture that we feel ours, of which we feel a part, of which we are heirs, children and parents.

Tea works in this place as in those where there has been devastation as a material to give new form, the continuous permanence of what has been, something to live up to and to rebuild on the principle of belonging.

In the village of Mangong, bamboo in those tribes of children was always in adequate supplies, because the canes that swayed in the April sky were a surprising threat to those young fighters painted in every color.

While the young besieged the forest, each adult would bring his own tea to the threshold of an agreed upon house, chosen according to glances and silences in the first hours of light. They would settle under the roof and sometimes even on the edge of the mats that saw the drying of the collected leaves, to form a precise audience, drinking the essence of the forest. It was then that the conditions for a new hearth were created, which made those afternoon gatherings a sort of extension of the homes, an expression of those social situations that are possible only in places where the house and the forest are not yet different and opposing realities, but different verbal intonations of the same meaning.

This Meng Hai Yun He Tea Factory sheng pu comes from Mangong village, spring 2023, from centuries-old trees at 1300 meters above sea level. The notes of wild plum and orchid follow the exuberant sweetness of rock sugar and toffee, the sip is geographical, of great finesse despite the hot year, everything is refined, is in its place, the finesse in the cup reaches a level of purity that puts the language to the test. The sip is sweet, with good huigan, in which you are invested by the “vanitas” of the de Heem fruit, still intact and preserving its natural integrity. It is a tea capable of quieting every mind, of suspending every haughty soliloquy

20 September 2024
Making a true, authentic tea is sometimes a question of consciousness. Meng Tong Yin Shan Tea Factory Gǔ Xiāng sheng pu’er 2009

I happened to wake up this morning with a sense of nostalgia, that damned stinging feeling, that melancholic regret of what has passed or gone, or been lost. I headed to my “pharmacy,” that’s what I call the place where I keep that messy pile of leaves and ceramics that should appear to be a safe place for tea, but instead seems like the war front of a desperate need for order.

I infused the leaves of a tea that had been sent to me some time ago by Moychay, a 2009 sheng from Meng Tong Yin Shan factory. Gǔ xiāng is its name, 古香, “the ancient fragrance”.

Often we prefer not to delve into where the flesh hurts, pushed back to the surface by thought and the instinct of preservation, but I needed a tea that would anchor me to the present, that would satisfy my need to think, that would give sense to the moment. The sense, in its dual nature is able to indissolubly enclose the organ of sensitive experience and the intrinsic value, takes the ancient by the hand, and when there is truth, the authentic.

Truth guides the authentic and the latter spontaneously translates into awareness of one’s vocation. Making a true, authentic tea is sometimes a question of consciousness and the need to resort to painful memories, it is not a question of ability but of understanding, of true, living style, of blood, an incorruptible visceral pact, symbol of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation, of generative power.

Tea full of meaning is a tea that reminds us that this drink is not just form, it is not a mere concept, it constantly reminds us that expressing and evoking are different things. The aromatic traits also become gestures marked by an intention, they become an evocative act, we notice a development, the evolution of a melody that passes from one aromatic note to another, in which form and content emerge and subsist together.

The ancient is distinguished from the old when the former had the opportunity to see the passing of time wrapped in the blanket of truth, of meaning, while the latter simply fades without leaving any memory, neither of itself nor of the intention that was at its origin.

This is the reason why I chose this tea.

Tea changes, it is a map of time and a saving substance, and like few others this Gǔ xiāng carries with it the traces of experience, of a changing form, in its ambivalence between notes of a fading freshness and those that place it ever more in a bygone era.

From the leaves emerge scents of a winter countryside, mushrooms, undergrowth, camphor, surrounded by hints of cinchona and kola nut, nuances of dandelion root, tamarind and caramel wrapped in an unexpected, surprisingly strong blanket of vanilla. The scents of redcurrant, leather, moss on the trees, oak wood and orchid then become prevalent.

The sip of medium softness, sweet but balanced by a light balsamic bitterness lowers the curtain on floral, woody tones, of angelica root, closing on aromas of vanilla pod and leather.

13 September 2024
Gaoshan, the village between uncertainty and change. Bitterleaf “Vision” Gaoshan sheng 2023

Gaoshan is a village in the Yiwu area, a place where about 100 families live, mostly Yi, more specifically Xiangtang. The first time I saw a photo of Gaoshan it portrayed a child under a table and a woman in her sixties with a basket of fruit in her hand, behind her house, she had a stern face sculpted by hardship and dark loose hair, without any hint of layers, as if it were cut with a razor. One of those people who seemed to have never changed their hairstyle in their life or residence.

Every morning she fetched water from the well, collected wild herbs, walking tens of kilometers in that rippled gorge, where the road appears like a clay snake running through the forest.

The photo collection also included the dense forest of tea trees and fruit trees, on a periwinkle-gray afternoon, the kind that precedes a storm. The boy, about five or six years old, was sitting on the floor under the large kitchen table, partially covered by the cloth drapes that were not long enough to hide him, but long enough to make him feel hidden.

I believe that at the time neither the woman nor the child knew how profoundly their village would change in the next twenty-five years.

Uncertainty and change are to Gaoshan as a bell tower is to its church, its teas are often among the truest in Mengla because they tell of their time without resorting to sweeteners or nefarious adornments, they are the fruit of the virtuous life of the settled person, who beautifies and sanctifies a place that is his, the natural result of having roots in the place that gave you the first dawn.

The changing nature of this village can be found in this Bitterleaf Gaoshan sheng pu’er, where the aromatic fan seems to mark a new narrative trajectory every time we meet it in the gaiwan, the leaves are pervaded by a profusion of flowers in a wicker basket, but withered and in the process of changing clothes surrounded by a series of chiaroscuro, as only Rachel Ruysch would have imagined them, that battle of lights and shadows that package and give depth to the human experience.

It is silky, complex, rich in notes of ripe fruit, such as white peach, mango, hibiscus, orchid, mineral sensations of wet lava stone, dried apples. From the first infusion you are enveloped by the honeyed and orchid sweetness typical of Gaoshan with a very nice huigan.
The sip seems perfectly orchestrated in its essential elements but equally chaotic in its accessory elements, the way in which the aromas vary throughout the session creates a swing in which it seems to pass from one existential plane to another, from matter to concept, as in a mixture of science and spectacularization in which the result of the experiment is uncertain.

8 September 2024
Metaphysics of Pu’er blend with Moychay 2022 Melting Reality sheng pu’er

We live in an era where you can potentially know everything about a tea, the garden it comes from, the grower, the exact location of the trees, but the tea market has not always been like this. Blends were so popular in the past that there were few single-origin teas before the 2000s.

Some of the greatest recipes to come out from the Dayi, Xiaguan and Rongshi factories or from the minds of pioneers like Ye Binghuai, Vesper Chan and Chen Huaiyuan who commissioned, produced or supervised them, were blends.

But what can elevate a blend and bring the art of blending back to the forefront of consideration? I believe that when the condition of need and economy is overcome, the blend can become expression and genius, a journey into the unexplored, a domain without potential rules, a disorder channeled into the eternal overcoming of all the contradictions that compose it. But this is on condition that the raw material is of such extraordinary quality as to support the greatness of the intention.

The blend is not a mere offspring of an uncoordinated material, it must be able to fuel the creation of other structures, of superstructures capable of capturing and interpreting the reality and the thoughts of those who create them, something also capable of escaping the premeditation and contingency of the possible and of making us forget those mixtures of leaves devoid of any persuasive power.

The lack of rules and the impossibility of serving the leaves and erecting them as a symbol of a place brings technique and thinking to the limit and, as in art, to experiment the extreme ease of failure but also to the configuration of unique potential, since the technique can be exalted only where it manages to experiment its most radical impotence.

In this Melting Reality, a Moychay 2022 blend, you can find that unexplored, that quality of the first time, of that reality so accentuated and exaggerated that it seems unreal. Like a Blanes painting the drink is stratified on more rural and dark tones of leather and maritime forest which alternate with other sweeter and brighter ones of gooseberry, dried figs, candied fruit and orange blossom as in a delicate play of lights.

It is a liquor where the ephemeral and the real alternate, the light bitterness and medium softness integrate well with the good huigan and the hint of tamarind sauce that give bite and announce chaos in an incessant symphony of notes of candied cedar and honey, orange custard and cooked wheat.

31 August 2024
When Pu’er gone in a single day. Dialogue on the present, the past and rites with a 2006 CNNP “Yellow Mark”

When the fragile walls of the pu’er business were crumbling in the early 2000s, many people stood in front of the screens in the Kunming tea market, crystallizing an evocative image, a shared moment of sadness, like those who see their home demolished, those who see their expectations burned, like smokers outside the doors of a hospital, staring at their affliction in the smoke while waiting for some unexpected good news.

And so the pu’er gone in a single morning, as if all the wealth accumulated up to that point was worth as much as a bright day that tries to make us forget that dark, but much more natural, light from which we defend ourselves at every moment.

Dark like the soul of this shou, with a frowning and crepuscular essence, with aromas that come from the shadows, from the underground warehouses of humid cities, from the decadence of nature in autumn.

In those years, pu’er was sold as a commodity capable of accumulating value and in which to find authenticity. In a country in total growth, there was a frantic search for an identity, for its rediscovery and subsequent affirmation, through rites, the ostentation of them and gambling. But not so much of the true rites but rather a plasticization of them to compensate for the sense of loss that nostalgia brings with it.

In the ritual, in the tea, those who waited, resisted and dared found refuge, they survived because it is the ritual that acts as a contrasting agent thanks to which our present takes on clearer contours even in the darkest night, they fulfill the function of a revealing bath capable of showing the latent image of identity through the reduction of the superfluous.

In the recovery of the ritual one struggles with oneself and the struggle takes shape when one compares the old action with the new action, with the dynamics that are emerging, when one places the travelled path alongside the new scenario.

In ritual opera, things are not consumed or used but rather lived, so that they can age and bear witness. Tea was thus able to recover its place in rituality and with it the integrity of its experience that the period of compulsive enrichment had tried to hide.

This 2006 CNNP yellow mark embodies the residue of that incendiary period, you find that something in it that is not destined to survive but which nevertheless resists and remains. It wears the color of an old vintage Port and in its fragrances of tobacco, old leather, humid wood, lacquered mahogany and jujube you find that pain of uncertainty that constitutes the matrix, the deep layer of something true, intentional, positive.

The light fermentation has allowed it to survive the banality of many of its peers, to escape the hermetic isolation of immediacy that the over-dense, black as tar and hyper-fermented shou demand. In the mouth it’s silky, of proportionate sweetness with aromas of malted brown bread, raisins, butter cream, chinese herbs, brown sugar and ancient wood.

Tea by Le meilleur the de chine

25 August 2024
Discussing the contradictory essence of tea with a pu’er from the ancient land of elephants. TdC 2014 You Le Ya Nuo village sheng pu

I am of the opinion that tea, good tea I mean, should always be accompanied by a good argument. I also remain firmly convinced that it itself must partly be the reason and urge for the conversation, and partly guide it.

If we could reconstruct a sort of symposium evening I often think about which tea I would offer, and the more time passes the more I would like such a reconstruction to materialize.

Between a Yiwu pu’er who exalts himself in his expensive robe, one from Naka on the gentle banks of Mengsong in the throes of self-satisfaction and one from Laobanzhang born under the gaze of God on the happiest mountains of China, the pu’er of You Le I’m sure would find a place without resorting to excesses of violence.

Those of You Le, the ancient land of elephants, are teas with a noble soul that still retain a “bourgeois” trait, that dignified self-sufficiency which, if well channeled, results in the most refined form of intellect.

At a table tea deserves the space it’s due because some of the great events of history are poured into it, the extraordinary possibilities that humans have been granted from era to era are dissolved in it. Because tea is a trail of great epics and immense tragedies, of rhetoric, imaginative experiences and speculations, the history of entire peoples distilled into a cup.

Under the action of its metamorphic nature, tea resolves prose into verse and verse into song, calms the most abysmal dissonances without the need to silence them, rather it legitimizes and composes them.

Because from the hard ground from which its trees arise, an innocent stream of fragile ambiguity can always flow, even in the midst of that jianghu, which it foments and nourishes; between rivers and lakes it doesn’t fear contradiction and is able to make every truth “always also false” and every falsehood “always also true”.

The thoughtfulness of this spring 2014 sheng from Ya Nuo village old trees holds up its mountain’s fame. The aromas arrive with orchestral precision, opening on notes of tobacco and plum, earthy nuances, resin and musk.

The leaves recall the scents of an old library with notes of mahogany and leather armchair, then red dates, raisins and light mentholated hints. The contribution of aging is balanced, with integrated notes of leather and of an old cigar box. The sip is coherent, with good softness but with adequate agility, low bitterness, balanced and with an excellent huigan. The long aftertaste is yet another proof of a dress sewn by a great hand.

The future will give it charm even though it is a tea that does not require eternity to be appreciated, but the aspiration is more than legitimate and a decade of waiting will, in the end, be a splendid meeting.

21 August 2024
Discussing again about Yiwu and authenticity with a 2003 CNNP “Sheng Tai Gu Shu cha” via Camellia Sinensis

Almost 20 years have passed since the declaration of Yiwu as a “Special tourist village of Yunnan”, the program which aimed to attract more and more people to a city which was growing economically at a spasmodic pace and which was obsessively trying to make its authenticity perceived.

Often this intention came into conflict with the reality of a territory profoundly transformed, by wealth, by the introduction of QS, by the architectural disharmony caused by evident asymmetries in the urban development and modernization plan. Shortly thereafter, the rapid and unsustainable rise of the pu’er business would have collided with the bursting of the bubble, raising not only doubts about the economic future of families but also questions about the true authenticity of Yiwu tea which until then had faltered.

Those were years in which the vision was different, although not too distant from the current one, in which the importance of the object was provided by its price and not by its value, the meaning of tea was given by its correspondence to the useful; the forests, despite the already present distinction between them and the taidicha, were already utilitarianistically defined even before their understanding. While many farmers fought for their authenticity, just as many others built the stereotypes of heroic naturalism and “nostalgic” as a symbol of an identity that can be regained through tea, and clearly through its profits. “The truth” was not explored but a proud surrogate was created to be put on sale.

For this reason, my opinion of many teas from the early 2000s is less enthusiastic than what is out there, many although not all were soulless teas, on which was placed a fake effigy of cults and traditions. Without the soul and its intention there could be no authenticity, because in this way the past becomes irremediably past, the mythologies that have passed through it become dull and irremediably dead languages, or in any case incapable of supporting that subtle kinship that exists between thinking and memory, between memory and identity and between identity and the authentic.

This is a 2003 Yiwu pu’er “Sheng Tai Gu Shu cha” via Camellia Sinensis, in a CNNP label different from the typical “white and red zhong cha”, probably the result of an anonymous packaging from a small producer.

One of the testimonies in a “unknown soldier” version of an attempted reconquest of “the authentic”, of the traditional taste that does not come to terms with the conventional. The leaves bring with them smoky notes, of vetiver and seasoned cedar wood perfumes. From the gaiwan come the smells of an ancient lutherie and those of an old wooden church.

The aromas are reminiscent of dried flowers inside a book, evolving olfactorily towards notes of leather, virginia tobacco, incense, dried rose hip and pepper. The medium-thick sip ends on hints of tamarind, dried longan, dandelion root and medical herbs, fading into an ancient sweetness and granting a strong and focusing qi.

26 July 2024