Coffee in Left Hand, Tea in Right: The Pursuit of Pure Pu’er
- 2 days ago
- 20 min read
Note: It’s a very long piece. Please prepare a tea or coffee before reading.
At Escape City, a coffee shop in the Simao District of Pu’er, Yunnan, I lifted a cup of pour-over to my lips. The beans were called “Taoli” (Fleeing Peach), a consistent gold medalist at the Asia International Gold Bean Roasting Competition. Under the barista’s steady hand, the liquid was silk; a bright sweetness cut through with mellow citrus acidity, followed by a funky, fermented aroma that claimed the palate. Though it didn’t possess the ethereal brilliance of a Geisha, it was more than enough to shatter the “low-end” stigma that has long dogged the Catimor varietal. And this product only cost 41 yuan per 100g (6 dollars).
Coffee or Tea? I’m not asking for your preference; it’s the title of a Chinese blockbuster. “Taoli” was the real-world inspiration for the beans featured in the film. It's a quintessential “mainstream” commercial flick: three young protagonists leverage their expertise in e-commerce, logistics, and cultivation to return to their ancestral village in Yunnan and launch a startup. Likely to align with government initiatives to expand the coffee industry, the plot requires the leads to chop down the villagers’ ancient tea trees to make room for coffee—a cinematic clearing of the path for their eventual triumph.
There is a fascinating dissonance in sitting here, in a city lauded as the “source of tea,” drinking a world-class specialty coffee that defies every local prejudice. I hadn’t come here solely because of a comedy film. I came to find a more grounded answer: on this red earth ruled for millennia by the leaf, how exactly did the bean take root? And can it truly escape the labels of “devil’s tail”?
In late February, the liminal space when the coffee harvest had just concluded and the first spring tea buds were beginning to stir, I plunged into Pu’er.
The Whampoa Military Academy of Coffee
Located in a subtropical monsoon climate zone near the Tropic of Cancer, Pu’er (普洱) is blessed with fertile red soil, abundant sunshine, and plentiful rain. The earth is rich in minerals and trace elements essential for tea cultivation. Coupled with a relatively high average altitude of about 1,300 meters, this unique geography gives Pu’er an unparalleled natural advantage for growing both tea and coffee.
As one of Yunnan’s two major coffee-producing regions, Pu’er is dotted with coffee estates. While Yunnan does grow Typica and Geisha, the real master of the land is Catimor. A hybrid that inherited the great disease resistance of the Robusta bean, it was planted extensively for its survival rate. But this resilience came with a flavor ceiling. The inescapable astringency and muddy, earthy notes it often produced became known in the industry as the “devil’s tail.”
Seeking answers from the top of the supply chain, I visited Torch Coffee Lab, often called the “Whampoa Military Academy” of the Chinese coffee world. It lacks the polished facade of government-subsidized estates; tourists online complain that it’s “too rustic to be a plantation.”
But no one questions its authority. Countless baristas have trained here before scattering across China to open their own shops.
Since 2017, Torch has run the “Mountain Man Project.” The director, Mr. Huang, explained that the initiative is an attempt to reconnect a fractured industry. They provide training for upstream farmers on how to “standardize quality,” while bringing downstream professionals to live and work alongside them—experiencing the full cycle from picking to roasting.
However, due to high labor costs, Yunnan beans struggle to compete with imports from Ethiopia or Panama on a cost-to-performance ratio for independent consumers. This makes enterprises like Torch, which bridge the gap between the top and bottom of the chain, vital.
“We shouldn’t drive down labor costs,” Huang told me bluntly. “Some estates pay farmers 100 RMB a day (about $14.5). If a farmer can make more hauling bricks in the city, how can we keep them here?”
The film Coffee or Tea? features a fictional conglomerate called “Star-Nest,” a transparent, villainous amalgam of Starbucks and Nestlé that attempts to buy out the local farmers. But the reality is more nuanced.
The industrialization of Yunnan coffee owes its existence to the very forces the film lampoons: from Nestlé’s introduction of Catimor in 1988, to Starbucks’ push for specialty premiums in 2012, every step has been a dance between capital and survival.
“Please,” Huang said earnestly, “give Yunnan coffee a little more time.”
Huang admitted he entered the industry to make money, not out of a romanticized passion. He is from Fujian; he stayed in Pu’er for his lover. This blend of unvarnished pragmatism and lingering idealism is a microcosm of the industry’s forty-year journey.
Torch hosts free lectures at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., tailored for the general public—people who are curious but have limited knowledge about coffee. For a full hour, moving from a chalkboard to the planting sheds, the staff explains everything from the anatomical structure of a coffee cherry to the current state of Yunnan’s agriculture.
In 2021, Torch released a “Yunnan Coffee Flavor Map.” They collected 319 samples across ten regions, over 11,000 data points, to visually chart the terroir of Yunnan. It was an attempt to measure flavor with the precision of data-science, a far cry from the “mystical” marketing of the tea world.
Later that day, I visited another estate. Their promotional hook—nine coffees for the price of one admission ticket—drew a chaotic mix of patrons. Thanks to government subsidies, the facilities were far more polished than Torch’s, but this glossy veneer attracted a crowd mostly interested in photo ops. The men and women beside me kept urging the barista to pour faster, their impatience clashing entirely with the deliberate pacing of a pour-over. The barista, reduced to an assembly-line worker, had absolutely no time to detail the processing methods or flavor notes of each brew, let alone the story of the estate.
The Bloodline with Tea
Leaving the data-driven world of the coffee estates, my guide, Tao, pulled me back into the city’s oldest pulse: tea. Tao invited me to her home to experience the harvest. Her family owns a small tea plantation, where their small cabin sits aside. Before their new house was built, Tao spent her girlhood here, helping her parents pick, fry, and dry the leaves.
Out in the garden, I clumsily donned a straw hat, pretending to know what I was doing, and shouted happily, “Let’s take a picture!” Tao, in her early twenties, displayed the shy self-consciousness typical of her age. She wiped her face, flashed a brilliant, toothy smile for the camera, her skin glowing radiantly in the sun.
Yunnan people are often called “fairies”—agile spirits who navigate the wild terrain with an innate knowledge of the living world.
Tao played the part perfectly, conjuring wild honey and homemade corn wine as if by magic. She tried to treat me with everything they had. She roared with laughter as I scrunched my face in agony after chewing a tart, fresh olive she had plucked. She told me of the local obsession with wild mushrooms—how they fry them with garlic to “test” for toxicity, and how every year, someone overly confident meets the “King of Hell” after a bad batch.
“You have to come back,” Tao said sincerely. “You can stay at my house, ride my motorcycle, and we’ll go into the mountains for mushrooms.”
But behind the charm is a life of grueling labor.
Tao’s ten-year-old brother is a “mini-adult,” running two kilometers of mountain path to the factory in ten minutes just so “you wouldn’t have to wait long.”
When I praised his reliability, Tao’s eyes crinkled with pride, though she offered the obligatory deflection: “He’s still just a naughty boy.”
Then her voice softened. “He has to be sensible. Our parents work too hard. Besides doing the guiding and tea work, I drive a cab in my free time, trying to make their life better.”
Tea is the lifeblood for families like Tao’s. While the younger generation has more choices now, the leaf is coded into their DNA.
Yet, once you leave Pu’er, the youth gravitate toward coffee or “milk tea”—the latter of which, despite its name, has largely exited the arena of high-end traditional brewing. The film title Coffee or Tea suggests a binary choice, a dilemma for an industry where “mass-market” tea still dictates the rules.
Pu’er tea, having weathered significant “market turbulence,” operates on its own unique, highly codified system. The famed “Iceland” Pu’er, celebrated for its rock-sugar-like sweetness, can fetch tens of thousands of RMB per kilogram.
But wait—what actually constitutes Pu’er tea?
Strictly speaking, only tea made from the sun-dried green leaves of Yunnan’s large-leaf varietal, produced within a specific geographically protected area in Yunnan using designated processing techniques, can legally be called Pu’er tea.
Unlike green tea, which uses only the tender tips, Pu’er utilizes the larger leaves. Based on its post-fermentation process, it is categorized into “Raw” (Sheng) Pu’er—which is sun-dried, and left to age and ferment naturally over years—and “Ripe” (Shou) Pu’er, which undergoes a high-temperature, high-humidity process to accelerate fermentation.
According to the Guangnan County Chronicles (广南县志), around the 5th century BCE, tribes consisting primarily of the Liao and Pu people formed the Kingdom of Gouding. Legends of the “Pu people making tea” have circulated for millennia. These Pu people are the ancestors of Yunnan’s modern ethnic minorities, such as the Blang and Hani. These narratives serve as evidence that the ancestors of Yunnan’s minorities were planting, processing, and drinking tea over 3,000 years ago, pioneering one of the world’s oldest tea civilizations.
By the time it became a tribute tea for the Qing imperial court in Beijing, it had inspired the saying: “Drink Longjing (龙井茶, a type of green tea) in summer, and Pu’er in winter.”
The Tea Spirit of Jingmai
To find the purest source, I traveled to Jingmai Mountain (景迈山) governed under the city of Pu’er, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2023. It is home to five major tea forests and nine ancient villages where the Blang, Dai, Hani, Lahu, and Wa ethnicities have lived in symbiosis with the forest for centuries.
To get from Simao to Jingmai, you have to drive on a period of treacherous mountain roads. Many opt for a passenger shuttle. While tourists in rental cars nervously creep uphill at twenty miles an hour, the Golden Peacock drivers execute flawless, terrifying overtakes, leaving a cabin full of passengers too terrified to complain. I had the privilege of riding shotgun, experiencing firsthand what locals call the “Bayanbulak Racer’s” life-or-death velocity.
The road into the mountain, built in 1983, is a bone-rattling stretch of cobblestone. “The stones are part of the ecosystem,” locals tell complaining tourists. “If we paved it, the plants and animals would suffer.” This physical jolting feels like a ritual of purification before entering the sacred.
However, under the heavy burden of constant traffic, the cobblestones are reaching their structural limit, and the resulting dust and noise are detrimental to the ancient tea trees. Consequently, the local government has opted to upgrade a 10.38-kilometer stretch using eco-friendly asphalt.
I spent my first two nights in Manghong at Jingmai, the highest of the major villages.
The moment I arrived at the guesthouse, I was greeted by the young owner, Sheng. Sitting in a solid wood chair, lighting a cigarette, he expertly poured me a cup of tea. He had dark skin, wore a baseball cap backward, and sported a dragon tattoo swirling down his arm. Years of heavy smoking had left deep stains on his teeth. It was hard to reconcile this rebellious, slightly punk exterior with the delicate, refined art of tea.
But Sheng was born and raised on Jingmai; he knows every inch of the mountain intimately. This was exactly what I needed. I didn’t want a superficial tour of the supposedly 800-year-old tea trees. I wanted to get closer to the “Tea Spirit” revered by the Blang people.
Because at Jingmai, the locals do not worship gods, nor humans. They worship a spirit that took root in the soil beneath the tea trees a millennium ago.
Mid-April marks the most vital festival for the Blang people: the Shankang Tea Ancestor Festival. During the first three days, villages organize dances, fetch “new water,” serve meals to the elders, build sand stupas, and offer food to the dead. On the fourth day—the Day of the Tea Ancestor—the Blang shoulder heavy offerings and climb their hand-laid stone steps to the Tea Spirit Altar. There, the Holiness and one most prestigious elder in the vilage stand at the center, the tribe kneels, and amidst the chanting of sutras, they call the Tea Spirits three times. It is a profound manifestation of their animism and ancestor worship.
Aileng Mountain is part of the Jingmai range. Pa Aileng, the chieftain of the Pameng tribe, is recognized as the earliest verifiable progenitor of tea cultivation.
It’s believed that Pa Aileng was not only a highly respected leader but a brilliant military strategist. To secure his loyalty and maintain control over the Blang tribes, the King of Dai married off his seventh daughter, Princess Nan Falai, to Aileng. The princess brought advanced techniques for rice farming and weaving, and together they cultivated the land and planted tea. When she died, she was buried on Aileng Mountain.
A massive banyan tree stands at the border of the upper and lower Mangjing villages; myth says it grew after her death, its cascading vines resembling her long hair, earning it the name “Princess Banyan.”
We hiked through the mountains, weaving through low-hanging tea bushes. Occasionally, Sheng would stop, pluck a few fresh leaves—“Like this, pinch a few off the branch, but always remember to leave one behind”—and drop them into my water bottle. “Let it steep for a bit. It’s thirst-quenching.”
I ate incredibly well on that hike. Wild Dendrobium officinale (an orchid highly prized and priced in traditional medicine) grew freely; we picked it and chewed on it—astringent at first, but leaving a sweet, tea-like aftertaste. Sheng spotted a hole surrounded by chestnut shells, reached inside, and tossed me an intact, thumbnail-sized wild chestnut. It tasted completely different from the massive roasted chestnuts sold in cities—tart, sweet, almost like fresh fruit.
“Squirrel holes,” he smiled. “When we were kids, we used to follow them to find snacks.” He caught a few vividly colored, skittish beetles to show me. “Animals are the smartest foragers.”
Before sunset, Sheng mysteriously guided me to meet a man he called “Teacher Su,” widely known as the “Last King of the Blang.” He lived in a cultural compound that, despite being open to the public, saw almost no tourists. It was so quiet you could hear the wind rustling the tea leaves. The courtyard was enclosed by living quarters, a village cultural room, a traditional fire pit room, and a temple dedicated to Pa Aileng.
The walls of the compound were adorned with murals depicting Blang history, illustrating the time and stories when the Pu people built their home here.
Teacher Su is in his eighties, but his dignified presence is undiminished. I greeted him respectfully; he smiled and gestured that his hearing was failing. Sheng translated my desire to learn about Blang history into the local dialect. Su nodded and instructed Sheng to show me around.
I later learned that Teacher Su’s full name is Su Guowen, and his father, Su Liya, was the actual last Blang King. Su Liya was appointed headman in 1943, but his reign lasted only six years before the Communist Party “liberated” Lancang in 1949. In 1950, he went to Beijing to meet Chairman Mao Zedong, presenting him with hand-crafted “tribute tea”—a rare, traditional Pu’er known as Quezui Jian (Sparrow’s Beak).
I had no desire to entangle this venerable elder in complex political history; after all, Su Guowen was only four years old when the title of “Blang King” dissolved in all but name. Yet, through his tireless, lifelong dedication to preserving Blang culture—collecting historical archives, reviving sacrificial rituals, and teaching the younger generation like Sheng—he has unequivocally earned the right to be revered as their leader.
“He’s old now,” Sheng whispered, “but every time I see him, the awe I feel never fades.”
Sheng explained that their tea trees were not allocated by the state or local government; they are an ancestral inheritance, and no one can take them away.
I truly understood the essence of the Tea Spirit through Pa Aileng’s final testament edict:
“If I leave you cattle and horses, I fear they will die in natural disasters; if I leave you gold and silver, you will eventually spend it all. Instead, I leave you these fertile tea plantations and tea trees. You must protect them as you protect your own eyes, passing them from generation to generation. You must never let them be lost.”
The Loneliest Café
I asked Sheng to find a driver to take me to a village over ten kilometers away. He was baffled. “Why do you want to go there? There’s absolutely nothing there.”
I laughed. “What do you mean by ‘nothing’? There’s a café.”
Wherever I travel, I have a habit of leaning into digital maps, zooming in until the pixels yield hidden landmarks. That is how I discovered the “Loneliest Café,” tucked away in the village of Na Nai—a Hani settlement of about thirty households.
I figured if it was on the map, I wasn’t going to be its first guest. Sure enough, a quick search on Xiaohongshu (RedNote), a few photos showed up. The storefront featured several signs with one writing: Rainforest Trekking! Perfect. The lonely owner was also a jungle guide.
I added the owner, Shui, on WeChat and arranged to meet at 9 a.m. After a grueling thirty-minute jolting over “stone-paved” roads—the kind that rattle your teeth and test your suspension—I said goodbye to my driver, Sheng’s uncle, and he agreed to pick me up at 2 p.m. As the rumble of his engine faded, silence swallowed the village.
I walked up to the café. It was an entirely open, wooden pavilion. No doors, no windows, not even a fence. A painting of Rafflesia stood at the entrance beneath a goat skull. A hammock swung near some straw mats, and a wooden sign dangled from the beam: “Lose contact with the world for three hours.” An ethnography of the Hani people lay open on a table. Every corner revealed the owner’s eccentric brilliance.
I flipped through the book and waited, until the sound of sweeping broke the silence.
“The white flowers on the tree in front of you are edible,” a voice said.
I trust these fairies implicitly, even though the wild Dendrobium Sheng gave me the day before had left my lips swollen and burning—a phenomenon traditional Chinese medicine attributes to “excessive nourishment” disrupting the body’s yin-yang balance.
I plucked a white blossom, chewing. It was incredibly sweet. I ended up eating the whole flower, leaving just the stem in the houseplant on the table.
Shui brought over a pour-over coffee. “Try the new roast. Beans are from Jingmai Mountain.” I took a sip. Rich nutty notes, though still carrying a hint of astringency. It was Catimor for sure.
Just then, a few tourists wandered past. Shui rose to greet them, appearing reluctant to keep me waiting for the trek, and hastily handed his new guests their drinks.
“Make yourselves at home. You can get ice from the fridge. We’re going into the jungle.” Leaving his shop entirely unattended with strangers, we vanished into the rainforest.
The March weather was perfect. Sunlight filtered through the dense canopy, and the low hum of the jungle was drowned out by rushing streams and a cacophony of birdcalls. I kept my voice to a whisper, afraid of disturbing the hidden life around us. Shui was a man of few words, only pausing to check if I was keeping up or to point out an endemic plant.
“It’s a pity you missed the blooming season for the Sapria,” Shui said, visibly disappointed, though he stubbornly scrambled up a steep embankment just in case. “We’d be lucky if there’s any left.”
He scoured the undergrowth, parting the thick stalks of green until a spark of excitement lit his voice. “There are a few left!” I scrambled up after him. There, amidst the blackened, withered remains of dead flowers, sat five vibrant red buds. They were the last of their kind for the season.
Sapria is a rare botanical relative to the giant Rafflesia, mostly found in Xishuangbanna, a tourist hotspot in Yunnan (You can check out another piece about Xishuangbanna here by None of Your Business School).
“And here in Na Nai. I was the one who found them,” Shui said with quiet pride. “I’ve guided botanists and scholars here to record the local ecology.”
I asked him where his furthest-flung clients had come from. He couldn’t quite remember, but mentioned Japan and Ukraine. It was impressive—How on earth did foreigners find him out here?
When we had to ford a stream, Shui insisted on carrying me on his back. Even though I assured him my boots and pants were waterproof, he wouldn’t compromise on safety—it was his golden rule for guiding. Looking at his lean frame, I asked, “What’s the heaviest person you’ve ever carried across?”
He thought for a moment. “Almost 100 kilos (about 220 lbs).” Seeing my eyes widen, he quickly clarified, “It’s actually fine if they’re tall. It’s the short, dense ones that are hard to carry.”
We chatted our way to the end of the trail, arriving at a giant swing Shui had built himself. Swinging out over the ravine, looking up at a sliver of sky and down at the rushing water, the noise of the outside world felt entirely severed.
Back at the café, I lay in the hammock, feeling a bit dizzy. The sound of the river was gone, replaced by the ringing of wind chimes. A few meters away, Shui was still singing with some villagers who had invited me to join them for homemade corn wine when we first returned, but as the glasses kept being refilled, I saw a heavy session brewing. Sensing my hesitation, Shui had offered me an out, telling me to go rest.
But I had a problem. Sheng’s uncle had handed off driving duties to another man in the village—who was currently immersed in drinking. How was he going to drive me back? I decided to wait it out.
Three hours later, they were completely drunk.
Shui half-carried a drunk man back, splashed water on his own face, and said with a brother’s tone, “I’ll take you down on my motorcycle. I don’t trust them to drive you.”
After a quick wash and a change of clothes, he brewed four cups of coffee, leaving them on the counter for the villagers to drink when they woke up. The sun sets late on Jingmai; at nearly four o’clock, the sky was still bright, with just a faint smear of orange at the horizon.
Over the roar of the wind on the motorcycle, Shui’s voice finally opened up. He talked about his café, his tea business, and his plans to open a hotel. Even from behind him, I could feel his immense satisfaction with life.
“It must be tiring, though. When do you actually relax?” I shouted over the engine.
He told me that whenever he travels to cities like Guangzhou or Shenzhen for tea expos, he spends all his free time hiding in his hotel room, ordering food delivery. Perhaps fueled by the alcohol, the stoic forty-year-old finally cracked his quiet exterior, yelling into the wind:
“Because cooking for yourself every damn day is exhausting!”
I remembered what Sheng had told me the night before. “Every man in our village envies Shui. He lives so freely.” At the time, I’d merely joked that the women probably envied him more, but the unspoken truth hit me as we sped down the mountain—
Freedom has a price. In a land so tightly held by nature and tradition, the cost of an independent “free” life is the daily, solitary fatigue of maintaining it alone.
We pulled over at a scenic overlook. Below us stretched vast oceans of tea forests; beyond them, endless mountains bled into the sky. Shui told me this was the best spot for sunrise, pitifully said that I wouldn’t see it this trip.
“Leave a little regret for next time,” I said. “I’ll come back for the sunrise when your hotel is finished.”
Wengji No. 42
The daily rhythm of Wengji Village is a big contrast to Shui’s wild independence. I spent my final few days there.
In the Blang language, “Wengji” means to read the Gua (卦, divinatory diagram). It’s said that when the ancestors of the Blang people were searching for a home, they had to cast divinations to choose the site, and the village stands exactly where the Gua was read.
I booked a place simply listed online as “Wengji No. 42.” It had barely any photos and only one room. But it exceeded my expectations, a standalone wooden cabin adjacent to a restaurant run by the owners.
Unfortunately, my arrival coincided with the start of the school term. Many shops, including my hostel, had “Closed to take kids to school” signs hanging on their doors. The owners had left my room key with relatives across the street who also ran a guesthouse.
The only people at the house were an elderly couple who barely spoke Mandarin, selling bananas and guanguan naicha 罐罐奶茶—milk tea roasted in clay pots. I dropped my bags and sat by the gate. The grandpa, in accented Mandarin, asked if I wanted a tea. I nodded and asked the price. She just smiled and waved her hand dismissively.
This form is a relatively recent trend, combining the ancient tradition of roasting tea in black clay pots with the modern obsession with milk tea. While recipes vary, it generally involves slow-boiling tea leaves, milk, red dates, and dried roses in the pot. But here on Jingmai Mountain, they add a local twist: tea flowers.
The grandmother tossed a generous handful of dried flowers into the pot, stirring slowly in wide circles. The rising steam softened the deep, carved lines of her face. As the milk began to bubble, she meticulously set out a coaster and a small bowl, gesturing for me to sit while she began roasting peanuts over the fire.
Tourists began stopping by to observe the grandmother in her traditional dress. Unable to understand their rapid-fire questions, she simply repeated “clay pot milk tea” mechanically. Never one to be shy, I stepped in and started explaining the process to the tourists. Before long, I pulled up a stool by the fire and helped her run the business.
Couples on road trips, a solo traveler with her dog, a group of retired “sisters”—a kaleidoscope of tourists stopped by, most of them friendly, just wanting a hot tea and a chat.
The owners returned the next day and immediately plunged into the chaos of running their restaurant. “Big Brother” was a sturdy man with a relentlessly cheerful, honest demeanor and laugh. His wife possessed a quiet, effortless grace, a faint smile permanently resting on her lips, that matched her name, Yunxiu (meaning Cloud Elegance). Her Blang name was Er Xuan.
Wengji village is tiny; it took me half a day to map every alleyway in my head. Seeing me idling in the afternoon, and hearing that I wanted to make a bracelet out of the fallen tea seeds I had collected, Er Xuan offered to take me to her sister’s guesthouse. Her sister, it turned out, was equally enthusiastic; she regularly strung bracelets to sell at the market held on the Wengji Plaza.
Together, we wrestled with her newly arrived hand drill, painstakingly boring holes into the tough little seeds. Some were hollow, easy to thread; others hid tiny kernels inside. I shook one by my ear, listening to the faint rattle of the kernel hitting the shell.
Guests at the table chatted and laughed with us, and I split my focus between the conversation and the delicate work in my hands. I was immensely proud of the final product. The other tourists crowded around, marveling at it, suddenly clamoring to go forage for their own tea seeds. I winked at Er Xuan and her sister, silently urging them to seize the business opportunity.
In our later small talks, Er Xuan shed some light on the local social structure. The villages at Jingmai are governed by two major village committees, Jingmai and Mangjing. Wengji and Manghong villages fall under the latter. While the village head must be a local, the village party secretary is always an outsider.
“We are very obedient,” Er Xuan said, echoing a sentiment I’d heard also from Sheng and his uncle. Coming from an adult, the phrase held a weight quite different from a child’s.
Sanitation in the village is maintained through collective labor. Residents are divided into groups of ten for cleaning duties; failing to show up would result in a 50 RMB fine. Each household must send one person to periodic village meetings to deliberate on local affairs, with a 100 RMB penalty for absence. With the Water Splashing Festival approaching, each village was required to prepare a performance. Failure meant another 100 RMB fine, though successful participation could earn a bonus of one to three thousand yuan.
The social fabric here is tight. I learned that Er Xuan and Shui had been elementary school classmates. Everyone was connected. Even a coffee shop I’d randomly visited—known as “Among the Banyan Trees”—turned out to be a property Er Xuan had leased to an outsider.
I asked Er Xuan if she ever thought about expanding her business or starting something new. She leaned her chin on her hand, took a slow sip of tea, and smiled. “Too much trouble to be considered.”
As evening approached, tourists would dash past the door in pursuit of the sunset. The grandparents would nudge me and point toward their second-floor balcony—they assumed I’d want to chase the light too. But for me, the most beautiful view was their silhouettes framed against the fading glow.
Leaving Pu’er, the marketing slogan “Coffee in the left hand, tea in the right” stayed with me. But after traveling those stone roads, I found something more poignant: the concept of “Pure Pu’er.” This purity isn’t about the liquid in the cup; it’s about the people living among the tea forests who, in the face of capital and modernization, remain as resilient, transparent, and enduring as the tea trees themselves.
Comments