A hard journey to authenticity : narratives of Puer tea from Yunnan in Southwest China

Abstract

This thesis examines narratives about the recent Puer tea fad in China, during which the production region, Yunnan, has experienced changes in both tea production and tea consumption. The thesis illustrates the unprecedented depth of the contentious fashioning and refashioning of a commodity during reform China's consumption revolution. The experience of Puer Tea demonstrates both enduring and transformed characteristics of Chinese cultural consumption.

The rising commercialisation in twenty-first century China has generated multiple desires for presenting newly constructed forms of nationalism, regionalism and individualism. This is exemplified by the desire to authenticate one's unique identity via authentic Puer tea. A new discourse has emerged about Puer tea's transformative cultural value: "the longer the storage, the higher the value" (yue chen yue xiang, ????). This constructed value was, however, challenged by the flourishing market in counterfeit tea and controversy about how Puer tea itself was to be defined.

This thesis links the recent history of Puer tea to the Chinese concept of jianghu, a non{u00AD}mainstream space popularly used in martial arts novels as well as in daily life, in which the actors seek to go beyond the governmental law and solve problems with self-help. This intrinsic feature of Chinese jianghu culture is crucial in understanding Puer tea's chaotic situation and the responses to this adopted by different Puer tea actors. This will explain why it has been impossible to standardise Puer tea's authenticity. Determining if tea is authentic can only be empirically, contextually and multiply self-managed via inter-personal negotiation. Drawing on previous research on the construction of meanings in relation to food, this thesis seeks to bring specific Chinese concepts into the English language literature to further highlight how a certain food's meanings can be deeply shaped by its cultural and social context.

The ethnography follows Puer tea's life history from its main production areas to its sites of consumption. Film is used as an important methodology to trace the social life of Puer tea. Segments of film, to be viewed alongside the text, illustrate the social and physical landscape of tea production and visualize people's sensory experiences in tea consumption. The video seeks to go beyond textual representation and provide additional narratives about Puer tea, echoing the jianghu theme of multiple voices and alternative resolutions.