If you’ve been to a Chinese restaurant (especially one in Hong Kong), you’ve probably had puer. It’s a post-fermented tea and is said to aid digestion. I heard a lot of things about puer, about how Malaysia (and I suppose by extension, Singapore) are great places to age it, about how people buy them for investments, and many conflicting stories about their origin. Many people say that puer was discovered accidentally when caravans carrying tea to countries trading with China were exposed to the elements. This caused the tea to grow moldy, but instead of throwing it away, people realised that this fermentation helped to mellow the taste of the tea. But in a recent workshop, someone told me that puer was ‘invented’ in the 1970s, and that other forms of dark tea are much older than it. So you can see how I was confused. When I found this book, I thought it would be a good way to learn more about the tea and see if I could clear up some of the conflicting ideas I heard.

Puer Tea centers around the 2007 bubble and crash of puer, focusing on how the rapid rise in the value of puer tea transformed the industry for this specific category of tea. Although the book says that the prices have stablised, my colleagues recently attended one of the huge tea fairs in China and reported that many of the booths were focused on puer – clearly the popularity (and profit-making potential) of puer is still there!

This book is divided into four sections – Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter – and eight chapters. The author talked to tea farmers, merchants, and consumers during and after the bubble to get a sense of what was going on. Apart from the book, there are also accompanying videos, which can be found here. I will freely admit to being more of a book than video person (unless we’re talking Netflix – there’s a reason why I never got into Booktube), but I found the presentations, which were like slideshows, about rough and fine processing to be interesting.

I don’t think I summarise the book in a way that does it justice, so I’ll just write down some of the things that I’ve learnt about puer tea:

The first is about processing. Unlike most Chinese teas, puer is made with large leaves (camellia sinensis var. assamica) instead of the small-leafed plant that is more popular in China (camellia sinensis var. sinensis). There are also two distinct processes:

• Rough processing – The end result of this is maocha, which is basically green tea. The tea is harvested, stir-roasted (also called ‘killing the green’), rolled, and then dried.
• Fine processing – The end result of this is tea. Fine processing can be further subdivided into two types: for raw puer and for ripe puer (artificially fermented puer). For raw puer, where the tea is allowed to ferment naturally, the tea is steamed, shaped, pressed, dried, and wrapped. For ripe puer, the tea is first fermented for two to three months, before being dried, steamed, shaped, compressed, dried again, and wrapped.

The second is the fact that where the leaves are from makes a big difference. If the tea is forest tea, by which they mean that the tea is collected from tall trees that are often very old, it is more expensive that terrace tea as it is “considered to come from a more ecologically healthy environment and was thought to taste much better.” Terrace tea refers to tea that was planted in terraces and which was only cultivated in Yunnan from the late 1970s and early 1980s onwards. This was a bit of a surprise because I remember hearing from someone else that cultivated tea was ‘superior’ to wild tea because when the tea trees grow too tall, the leaves lose a lot of flavour or something like that. Sounds like we’ve got two different marketing stories going on.

The third thing I learnt was about different puer regions. I was completely ignorant about the different places where Puer came from (I knew they had to be from Yunnan but that was about it), so it was interesting to learn about Yiwu and Menghai. Yiwu is famous for their raw puer tea which are often made in small family farms, while Menghai makes both raw and ripe puer. Menghai is where the first tea factory (Menghai Tea Factory) was set up, marking the start of mechanical tea processing in Yunnan. Menghai is also famous for the “Menghai taste” in their puer, which comes from the climate there.

The fourth thing I learnt was that it is not easy to define puer. I’ve always defined it by location, the same way I define darjeeling tea, but I’ve since learnt that as the importance of having a clear identity of puer tea grows, the more controversial it becomes. This “controversy is situated in the context of China’s transformation, the consumer revolution, and the desire of undeveloped regions, such as Yunnan, to promote themselves.” Basically, everyone wants to claim their puer as ‘authentic’ and the Yunnan government wants to use it to promote tourism and themselves. There are people who think that the tea was ‘overcooked’ by the government, but others think it’s too ‘raw’ and that “stronger, clearer, and more scientific regulations and supervision” are needed. And as demand outstrips supply, leaves from other regions enter the market, making it harder to identify ‘authentic’ tea. Teas that were sold in Yiwu as being the “authentic forest tea of Yiwu” were “found to be terrace tea leaves from the same region or, even worse, blended terrace tea leaves from somewhere far away.” Not to mention that there used to be something called “Puer green tea”, which many people might see as a contradiction – how can a tea be puer and green at the same time?

One chapter in the book also ties the question to authenticity to the consumer’s image of puer. Many people want to think of puer as an ancient tea and will even travel to Yunnan to look for the most authentic version. But as one interview put it, he traveled to Yiwu but found that “different grades of Maocha are secretly being blended.” While you can “discover a clear and clean version” of Maojian (a green tea from Henan) “if you go to its hometown”, the interviewee felt that “the same standards for Puer tea do not exist in its hometown.” While part of it may be due to the presence of mixed tea leaves in the tea, his disappoint may also be due to “[t]he contrast between propaganda and experience, between imagination and reality, between the perfect past and the uneven present.”

The last thing I learnt was that there are tea connoisseur’s in Yunnan who are calling for Puer to be classified as its own tea category, separate from dark tea. The reasoning behind this is that the post-fermentation process for Puer is very different from other dark teas. Of course, the rising price of puer at that time may also play an unmentioned part. I don’t agree with the argument, but now I see understand the reasoning behind the people who insist that Puer be classified separately.

Overall, this is a pretty interesting book. It’s fairly academic in tone, but it does present a detailed view into the recent history of puer as well as the issues and controversies that surround it. If you’re looking to learn more about puer tea, you might want to consider this.