While the men and women who devote their lives and their land to tea share their knowledge with a humility fitting for the Buddhist and Daoist use of the beverage for meditation and contemplation of the universe, one need only descend the Lion's Peak to Hangzhou proper for a completely different view. Teahouses line every block, from the four story lakeside operations to smoky establishments with only “green tea,” and “black tea” on the menu where young couples rendezvous and middle-aged women gossip loudly. Prices for a pot range between a 200 USD Taiwanese Oolong and a 40 cent local green tea made from broken leaves.
Even in Qingdao, where tea by no means pervades daily life to the extent it does in Hangzhou, incredibly expensive tea can be found. I sat for an afternoon with a woman who started her own tea shop at age 22, sensing an opportunity with the growth of connoisseurship in a city of increasing wealth. We sipped a heavenly Tieguanyin oolong tea whose price I inquired about. She said that it is probably worth 40 dollars a pound, which was at the time moderate price for the level of quality. Surprised by this I assumed that she must have even better Tieguanyin since most tea shop's high end oolong goes for upwards of 100 dollars a pound. “No,” she said, “this is my best Tieguanyin. I know that you appreciate the tea for its flavor, so I tell you forty dollars, but if some people come in and ask for my best Oolong they would leave offended if I sold it so cheap. More and more people have so much money to spend, but they do not understand tea. They want to impress their friends so instead of offering a creamy, flowerly Tieguanyin to friends they will say 'I have a 200 dollar a pound Tieguanyin.' It is this kind of person that make our prices so high. If I sense this kind of person, the tea you are drinking becomes a 180 dollar tea.”
It was this shrewd woman who made me first aware of a demographic group that used tea as a means to advance socially. They might give an expensive tea to their boss with the price left on, or bring it to a tasting where they compete with their friends to bring the most costly sample. Those who can find the highest price win the highest esteem. I stayed up late that night trying to reconcile the humble kindness of my farmer friends who make the tea with the snobbish use of tea by the elite.
I started the next day early, traveling to the tea markets asking other proprietors about these special customers. Sure enough, everyone that I spoke with had similar stories, all told with a tone of resentment towards the customers in question. However I came across one man with an interesting perspective. He prepared an old Pu'er tea made from the first spring buds of tea trees in Yunnan and aged for a decade in a compressed brick. The bricks sell for hundreds of dollars each and taste like wild mushrooms dried with cinnamon and nutmeg. The tea was extraordinary; Technically made from the same plant that an earthy astringent green tea is made from but processed in such a way to taste of mushroom and mulling spice. The process takes years of careful attention and a precisely controlled storage system.
I asked him about snobbery and disrespect for tea among his customers. He sighed, “Of course. This is China. People buy tea for face, not for its flavors. They will pay extraordinary amounts for the rarest teas like the one we are drinking. But, what can we do? Without the money from such people, nobody would take the time to make teas like this, and if they were made, they would be reserved for politicians. With a market for expensive teas, people like me can devote their lives to tasting the finest tea in China and bringing it here to sell. This is what I love. This tea is the legacy of years of labor. How else can we continue to promote tea culture if not for the money of those who reject it?”
Of course, this proprietor is correct. If there is no market for the commodities that embody tea culture, then tea culture would recede to an elect few. Money brings tea ceremony, and the finest teas to every major city in China. While culture itself is not contained within the commodity or the ritual, Confucius knew that even the loftiest of men need ritual to remember the ideal that such ritual embodies.
In discussion with Qingdao university professor, expert on tea culture and ancient China Qu Jiangchuan, I have come to understand the abstract foundation for humbleness among tea sellers. Tea's historical beginning is simply its use as a medicinal herb, and later for its caffeine. There is a legend of Shen Nong, the mythic founder of Chinese medicine. One day he went into the mountains to try different herbs and record their effects, but consumed a deadly poison by accident. He lay dying on the ground until tea leaves blew in the wind to him. He took it as divine inspiration and tried the leaves. Soon, he was completely recovered.
At the Northern edge of Yunnan province, the land of the famous Pu'er tea, I came across an increasingly Tibetan landscape; Prayer flags hung between mountain peaks, and yak grazing along the road. Here, I had the opportunity to sit with a Buddhist lama and sip Tibet's unique butter tea. Tea did not spread from China proper to this region until the marriage of Han Chinese princess Wen Cheng to the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo. The tea brought over was compressed into bricks for the journey, then ground to a powder and mixed with hot water to drink. The Tibetans found this beverage an excellent compliment to their diet of predominantly meat since it seemed to aid digestion. Butter tea was born with the realization that yak butter and salt could be mixed with the tea to create a highly sustaining drink for journeys through the cold.
This lama explained that he woke up at four every morning and prayed until noon. A lama cannot stop meditation to eat, but drinking tea prepared by the young apprentice monks was an excellent way to stay awake and undistracted.
It doesn't take a trip all the way to the Tibetan hinterlands to understand tea's role as a medicine instead of the object f connoisseurship. On my first week in Qingdao I took a trip to the largest bookstore in the city, Xinhua Book City to search for Lu Yu's Book of Tea. I first assumed it would be with ancient literature, and searched the entire basement floor with no luck. After an inquiry, I was sent to the fifth floor tea section, home to over two hundred titles related to tea. Displayed prominently as the best-seller was “Tea Doctor” an instructional book on using tea to cure various physical ailments.
After searching through piles of texts on “Cooking with Tea for Better Health,” and “All of China's Teas, a Connoisseur's Guide to Tea Buying” I realized that my beloved text was simply not a match in profit potential. This bookstore is a good indicator of cultural trends; Tea, as always, is being used for its health benefits with no consideration for flavor. It is also being bought up by the very wealthy, and in the case of Pu'er, often stored and resold at higher prices. Two hundred titles, and nothing on the history of tea, the philosophy of tea, or the specifics of the tea ceremony.
I walked back to Qingdao university that evening wondering if what I wanted to understand about tea culture had been pushed out of the mainstream and left to dusty libraries and villages like Longjing. Luckily, I had the chance to talk with tea expert Jiangchuan Qu the next morning. “Do you know white tea?”
I responded, “Of course, the Fujian non-oxidized budset tea, Silver Needle and the new bud and leaf clump mixture, White Peony.”
“No, I mean true white tea.” I thought my research into the types of Chinese tea must have skipped over something quite important.
“What is true white tea?”
“The Chinese have a system of labels for teas based on the color of the tea water. Black is Pu'er, red is your 'black tea,' blue is oolong; Green and yellow are the same as the English. Now if you had to pick a color for just water?”
“White?”
“Yes. During hard times, guests were presented with a steaming glass of 'white tea.' The peasant hosts were too poor to buy tea leaves, but they still went through the ceremony of heating the water and pouring it through a tea pot and into cups for guests. The guests would accept the 'white tea' without question, letting the host save face.”
“Would it be rude to serve water simply as water?”
“Tea is more than just a beverage for the Chinese. You must remember there is a ceremony attached to it. The act of pouring tea carries much baggage. Tea is first and foremost a humbling experience in China. Even the particularities of the tea ceremony itself are meant to preserve not obscure this humble quality. Everyone must sit at the same level as the tea is prepared. When the tea is poured into cups, they are lined up with the rims touching and the stream of water travels up and down the line in swift motions toy ensure that the flavor of each cup is exactly the same. If each cup was filled individually, the first one would be too light and the last too bitter.”
Professor Qu's words were the first that seemed to draw a steady line from the humble tea farmer to the final recipient of the tea. This 'white tea' he spoke of gives neither taste nor health benefits, but it was received with the same gratitude that a cup of first picking Lion's Peak Dragonwell tea is received. Perhaps tea's true benefits lie not in the leaf but in the very act of preparing the tea.
The following weekend I went to the tea market to discuss the idea of tea as a social connection with nature and instrument of humility. One proprietor, Ms. Wang, had an interesting idea. “Tea should be served to students in kindergarten and primary school. Making the students sit together and watch tea being prepared in the traditional way would build community and foster patience.” This proposal might not have sat well with children's aversion to bitter flavors, but I admired Ms. Wang's devotion to tea ceremony as an act with significance in itself, an act with the ability to raise even children's awareness to an abstract level.
Ms. Wang poured me some of her family's Anxi Tieguanyin and she brought up the term, gongfu. This is the name for tea to be used in tea ceremony. Literally it means free time. “Tea,” she explained “is the act of creating leisure in a chaotic world. If we do not stop for a few minutes every day we just eat, work, sleep and repeat until death. Tea is a ritual that enforces leisure. When I drink tea my mind is free to wander, to contemplate my life and whether or not I am happy on the path I have chosen. Without tea, who would stop every day to think?” There must be something to her words, for we spent the remaining afternoon chatting about Daoist philosophy.
Ms. Wang and Professor Qu have a true conception of the role of tea culture in modern China. While the tea growing villages have remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of years except for the introduction of machines to dry tea leaves, and a brief attempt at commune-style land reform, the cities have undergone profound and sweeping changes. The pace of life has accelerated, the workday lengthened. Salaries have gone up, international cultural influence has exerted itself, bringing with it Coca-cola and Korean soap operas. Tea is humility, leisure, and contemplation. Of course there are those who only use tea to impress company and boost their social standing, but they are in fact the minority. Tea was first used as a medicine for the body; It has come full circle, providing an antidote for the mind, a medicine to treat stress and anxiety.
Were this not the case, tea would have long ago lost its status as revered. There are connoisseurs of everything under the sun, but tea is still an act of ceremony. Tea is saturated with history, with the humility that is brought out by the ceremony, and with the grandeur of the mountains that it grows upon,
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