Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic

Chapter 8: Interactive Authenticities

179 Chapter 8 Interactive Authenticities The enchantment of Puer tea lies in its unsolved mystery, its vagueness, and its changeable meanings. It’s like a sea, vast and mighty, filled with submerged reefs and strong rapids, and no one can reach its far end. What we can do best is just sip our own tea! —Yang Kai, Liu Yan, and Li Xiaomei 2008: preface Zongming, a friend from Hong Kong, visited Kunming in December 2007, seven months after the price of tea plummeted. Making use of his holiday, he met in Kunming with friends he had communicated with on the tea website Sanzui. The participants on Sanzui lived in almost every province of mainland China, especially in urban areas. After the Puer tea recession, many participants traveled between Yunnan, the production region, and the Pearl River Delta, the so-called consumption area, to visit one another. Each side was eager to know what was happening in the other location, and both wondered about the future prospects of the Puer tea market . The Sanzui participants in Kunming gave Zongming a warm reception, as they were excited to meet someone who was known as a good commentator and who might bring some new information from Hong Kong. Because Zongming was not a trader but just someone with a keen interest in tea, his Kunming tea friends, many of whom were tea traders, talked openly with him without worrying too much about commercial competition. I got to know Zongming in Hong Kong one year before his visit to Kunming , when he took me to several yum cha restaurants to show me how Hong Kong people drank Puer tea in their daily lives. In Kunming, I joined him on some of his trips to teahouses. When issues about consumption are raised that refer not only to Puer tea’s production but also its storage, the social biography of Puer tea becomes more complicated and contested. The various features of aged Puer tea reflect the changeable social landscapes in 180 x Interactive Authenticities consumption, exemplified by the temporal contrast before and after China’s Reform and the spatial differentiation between Yunnan (the production area) and Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (the consumption areas). Understanding a commodity’s circulation may be approached by examining its detailed social biography in exchange, rather than focusing only on its exchange forms. Thus what links a commodity’s value and exchange is politics—​namely, “the constant tension between the existing frameworks (of price, bargaining, and so forth) and the tendency of commodities to breach these frameworks” (Appadurai 1986: 57). The value of a certain commodity , its path of circulation, the knowledge it contains, and the desire and demand for it are all determined by social definitions and redefinitions, and hence the authenticity of things cannot be static but shifts contextually. The tension around Puer tea, too, may be seen as the contest between multiple self-presentations across time and space. On the one hand, the “habitus” (Bourdieu 1984, 1989) of consuming a certain type of Puer tea is shaped by a certain nature and culture, which shows a strong identification with localization. On the other hand there is a global intent to control, to provoke, and to import capital to the local. In order to cater to the outside demand, the localized “habitus” is forced to adjust and reach a certain compromise with globalization. While compromising, the local forces are also redomesticating the outside forces to serve in the local’s new self-presentation. Thus it becomes neolocalization, in which the global and the local elements are mixed and become hard to differentiate, and one’s self-presentation is never self-determined, but actually involves the borrowed, adapted, and reauthenticated elements from others, as has been mentioned by previous studies on consumption.1 But such neolocalization is never finished, because there are always new forces, whether from the global or the local, to further challenge the existing authenticity of Puer tea, like the jianghu battle in which new risks and disciplines always emerge to break the old format. So, situated in the transformation of China, when old concepts meet new desires, and located in a jianghu contest, Puer tea acquires multiple versions of authenticity. This “multiple” perspective not only recognizes the power of localization to cope with globalization but also displays an interplay between localization and globalization that often goes on with endless counterforces, shaping a changeable and varying authenticity for things as well as for people’s social lives...