“Tea traders,” Sean whispers. “Watch how they act with each other. It’s like the Gold Rush out here. I’ve found my lode, and I’m not going to tell you where it is. They’re checking us out too—to see how prosperous we are and determine if we’ll drive up the price of tea this year.”
When our noodles arrive, I follow Sean’s example and pour steaming tea over my chopsticks and other tableware, then toss the dirty liquid on the ground. The alternative would be the trots or worse. Every pandemic in the history of the world has come from China.
The tea traders leave as quickly as they came. Sean calls farmers and dealers on WeChat, an instant messaging system that allows him to speak into his phone instead of typing complicated Chinese characters, giving me an update after each: “I told them to expect us at four o’clock.” Or “They said drop by tomorrow. I’ve never brought a woman with me. They’re eager to meet you.” We’re just about to leave when a man who introduces himself as a new dealer sits down next to us, unzips an overnight bag to show us bundled wads of hundred-yuan notes, and asks where he should go to find good tea. Sean sends him to a family-owned tea-processing factory up the road. As we walk away, I ask, “Should I see it too?”
“I’m going to take you somewhere better and more authentic tomorrow. Today, let me show you around the town.”
From what’s left of it, I imagine Yiwu must have once been very beautiful, but the main street is just a strip of clunky concrete enterprises all coated in dust and dirt from the old houses being torn down and from the cheap and ugly buildings going up. We walk part of the Tea Horse Road, which, disappointingly, doesn’t look like much: just a four-foot-wide cobblestone path that snakes through the old part of town and then heads down a hill. On our way back to the main drag, we pass along quiet lanes, where a few traditional buildings made of unfired clay bricks and upturned eaves still stand, chickens peck at the ground, and flowers drip over walls. Before every house, women—the younger ones in jeans and T-shirts, the old ladies in traditional clothes, and all of them wearing scarves or headdresses—sort tea a leaf at a time. This is what Yiwu must have looked like before prosperity hit, and it’s much more quaint and charming, giving the feel of ageless China.
* * *
The next day, our plan is to go to Laobanzhang, the home of the king of Pu’er. We’re driven over an impossible one-lane dirt road. We pass villages made up of between ten and fifty houses. I glimpse a few handmade wooden gates that look a lot like the entrance to our ranch in Colorado: two posts and a beam. Our gate has our brand carved on a wooden disk and mounted on the beam. Here, the embellishments on each gate are, let’s just say, out there, with carvings of a man and a woman with outsize genitals verging on the pornographic. It’s odd to reconcile the primitiveness of these figures with a country that’s now an economic superpower. The cultural disconnect is magnified when the driver is forced to stop the car, because a tangle of minivans has blocked the route. Japanese tourists take each other’s photos posing against tea trees that cling to the hillside—here, in the middle of nowhere. We get out of the car and chat with them for a bit in English. We’re surrounded by mountains blanketed in gray haze, and I mentally try to match them to the markings on my tea cake, to no avail.
The tourists—so strange to see them out here—get back in their vans. Sean waves the various drivers through the contortions required to clear the road. Finally, we’re able to get back in the car. Our driver takes us to a prosperous grower’s house, modern and clean, with several outbuildings for processing tea. In the courtyard, about two dozen women sit around big flat baskets sorting tea. The owner, a Mr. Piu, introduces me to the group as an American scientist, and they show me every step of the tea-making process. I even get to try killing the green and kneading. Around noon, several cars arrive, bringing buyers from around the world. We sit in a pavilion on, of course, little plastic kiddie chairs around a low table and taste tea worth one thousand dollars (!) for a two-ounce cup. I don’t speak Chinese, but they all speak English.
When a dealer from Taiwan asks about my project, I tell them a little about it, ending with “Almost everywhere I look I see another opportunity for scientific study. For example, what effect will pollution have on the tea industry?”
“We have no smog here,” Mr. Piu scoffs.
“Really? Then what’s that stuff in the air?” I ask, pointing to the haze that lies between the hills. “I grew up in Los Angeles. I know what smog looks like. What you’re seeing could have drifted here from a thousand miles away. But I’m wondering too if the slash-and-burn agricultural practices of the ethnic minorities are now catching up to them in this era of climate change.”
The others nod politely, but I’m not sure they agree with me.
“How can the exact age of an antique cake of Pu’er be known?” I continue. “Is there something in it that could actually promote longevity? Is Pu’er a medicinal tonic, a drinkable antique, or merely a beverage?”
“What about social issues?” Sean asks me. “Could tea be seen as a symbol of worth: a commodity that represents change in value for women, and for China, on the world stage?”
At the word women, the others exchange glances like we’re all a bunch of teenagers instead of an international group of travelers outside a farmer’s house miles from anything resembling what I think of as civilization. But they pull themselves together quickly, because everyone seems to have an opinion about where I should go, what I should see, and whom I should meet. Soon most of them have pulled out their cellphones and are making even more connections for Sean and me on WeChat. I’m going to have plenty of subjects for my project by the time I meet up with the Tufts team.
After we’ve sampled about a dozen teas, lunch is served at an adjacent (child-size, again!) table: stir-fried cabbage, tomato and scrambled egg, beef with slivered ginger, and some type of crunchy root. Once the meal is finished, we move back to the tea table. Just as everyone’s getting settled, Sean says, “Haley, why don’t you show them your tea cake? Maybe someone here will recognize the wrapper.” I pull it out of my bag and lay it on the table. People are polite enough not to touch it, but they stand to get better views, craning their necks, pointing, and discussing.
“It must be from a lost tea company,” Mr. Piu guesses.
“Or a lost family,” the dealer from Taiwan offers.
“Or from a long-abandoned garden high in the mountains,” someone’s girlfriend suggests.
“How old is it?” Mr. Piu asks.
“I don’t know,” I answer.
“Tea cakes made before the fifties had no wrappers,” someone says. “So that’s a clue—”
“But it’s clearly much older than that,” the dealer from Taiwan interrupts. “It looks to be hundreds of years old.”
Somehow it’s gratifying that the tea cake is as mysterious to them as it’s always been to me.
“Have you tasted it?” Mr. Piu asks.