The Wild Truth of Tea: Unraveling the Complex Tea Business, Keys to Health and Chinese Tea Culture

www.lucasledbetterwriter.com

Preface

The purpose of writing this book is threefold. Firstly, I wrote this book as part of a self-healing process and for my spiritual development. I realized that no matter how much tea I drink or would like to drink, until I wrote out the story of my tea experience that led me to find the correct tea for myself, this process would not be complete. I am a firm believer that to fully be free of something, you have to truly let it go from your heart. What I have realized in the completion of this book is that drinking tea represents something much greater. I am still learning and gaining new experiences, and I have a long way yet to travel. I am by no means perfect, better or worse than anyone else. This was a personal journey I just wanted to share with friends who might be going through similar experiences.

Secondly, I wrote this book to show people a very small facet of reality within this world, to reveal the hidden, shadowy places that lie beneath the glimmering veneer of what many call health food. I feel strongly that no one can truly call themselves healthy no matter the state of their body or mind. Many people follow blindly, supporting these supposedly healthy businesses, yet know nothing of the way they actually operate. More and more people start to feel that tea is a good business opportunity, but many of them have followed along with rules already set up by a powerful system that features no sustainable development concepts. My partner J.T. Hunter and I are creating an International Tea Academy and online tea course to enhance the dissemination of the truth of the tea world as discussed in this book. We only wish to share what we know to help more people build up their sustainable businesses.

Thirdly, the last reason I wrote this book was in the hopes of opening up new avenues to help those who have been discontent following the conventional life to find their own way that is not bound by a dehumanizing system. Hopefully, this book can offer some hope or help for you to find the independent life you want.

Some will find this book hard to read because some of it perfectly describes your practices or way of thinking. You might want me to disappear from the world so that you or others won’t hear me talk about things you don’t want known about yourself. Others will have become desensitized to the lies they live and breathe, and my message will go over their heads; on the other hand, others may find that it resonates with them and inspires personal transformation. Yet others may find it hard to believe because they will not allow themselves to think that the world they are living in has been totally controlled and deeply influenced by powerful players so distantly removed from their own local reality that I must be making them up to support my own overblown conspiracy theories. It is difficult to accept that those who say they are there to help us to be healthier may be doing quite the opposite.

A friend once said a very important thing I will never forget: It matters not how many people believe the truth of a thing, since truth does not require that people believe it for it to be true.

CHAPTER ONE: THE TEA BUSINESS

China’s Role in the Development of the Tea Plantation

You might naturally think that tea farmers grow tea, and then tea farmers process the tea so that we can then buy tea from them. Traditionally, this is as things should be, but over thousands of years, this simplicity has all but vanished. The relationship between tea farmers and tea drinkers has become much more distanced and complicated.

I was born in the 1980s in Mainland China. At that time, China was undergoing a new beginning in almost every field, including politics, economics, industry, agriculture, and more. In China at that time, the tea industry changed drastically due to the impact of Chinese government policy. We can divide these changes into four periods:

The Chinese government had a monopoly over the entire tea industry (from the 1950s until the 1970s).

The full implementation of the household contract system (from 1979 until 1984) in which the central government decided what farmers were to grow, the quantity, and the price of agricultural products.

From 1985 onward, China’s agricultural sector functioned as a market economy, with price and quantity decided by supply and demand.

In December 1994, China started to really open up to business overseas, allowing tea to be exported freely.

As we can see, over the course of these four important periods, tea industry development in China was always shaped by government policy. Even when China started exporting tea in 1994, policy was never relaxed enough to allow the tea industry to grow and develop freely. As you will see, this is a very important factor when determining what a Chinese tea will be like. Tea is a simple thing in itself, but the global historical and economic contexts it exists in are more complicated and less innocent. As many people already know, there have been many major historical events in which tea played a role, such as the Opium War, the Boston Tea Party, and others.

I open this book in such a way because the only way we can know what kind of tea is available today is to go back in time.

The Chinese tea industry’s organizational structure can be seen below:

Let’s look at what this chart means:

1. Small tea farm processing and sales: the original sources of tea are from tea plantations and tea farms. When the tea farmer or the manager of the tea plantation is able to harvest, process, and produce a finished product by themselves, then they can sell it on the market directly. This kind of farming doesn’t require investment in expensive machinery, and most of them follow the traditional handcrafted method of tea production. This type of small-scale operation results in high quality processing and top-notch teas.

2. Tea export for mass consumption: tea for export goes through a very long four steps. Because fresh tea leaves cannot be stored, they must be processed immediately after being picked. Most large producers often also have preliminary processing factories, therefore tea farms are usually composed of two parts: the tea plantation and a preliminary processing plant. However, because some tea farms are very small, building such a factory is beyond their means, so a separate, larger company may open a preliminary processing plant close to the location of the small tea farms, buy fresh tea leaves from those farms, then produce preliminary dried leaves in their preliminary processing plant. Then those bigger companies sell the dry leaves directly to consumers, or sell to companies who have a fine machining plant in order to produce the finely machined tea.

3. That tea is then distributed, and those fine machining factories will sell teas to export companies. The export companies will decide the sales price, accounting for the total cost of production to that point. Big international trading companies or big retail companies will buy those teas from various export companies throughout the world. They might then sell tons of teas directly to their local market, or they might mix the various teas they have bought from all over the world, then based on the flavor and cost, blend the tea again for the retail market.

Many problems arise throughout this chain of events:

Are you able to discern exactly which tea farm the tea you are tasting came from?

Can you discern the processing method and how many machines, vehicles, and hands have touched the tea you are tasting?

Can you be 100% sure your organic tea doesn’t include any inorganic tea leaves?

Can you be 100% sure your fair trade tea doesn’t include any non-fair trade tea leaves?

Do you know why exactly this cup of tea costs as much as it does?

Do you know how different the quality your cup of tea is from a tea farmer’s cup of tea?

These are important questions to keep in mind as we continue. The first step in answering these questions is to look at how the Chinese think about tea industry development and what things they focus on as the market develops. The main idea to grasp is that the terminal market demand always guides the direction of growth and manufacturing processes, so what guides terminal market demand will decide the characteristics of the original tea sources.

I was talking with the CEOs of some Chinese tea companies, and most of them agree that even though China boasts the world’s oldest tea industry, and export quantity continues to increase, China doesn’t really have its own brand like Lipton, Tata, Twinings, Teavana, etc. Until now, most tea exports from China are loose-leaf teas, but foreign firms will buy those teas at a very low price, then blend, package, and label them under their own brands for high profits. I agree to a certain extent that this is the state of things. Based on the years I spent working in a Chinese tea export company, I’m totally clear about how low the quality and price of Chinese exports are. This enables export companies to do very well for themselves, but many tea plantations are rapidly expanding, deforestation is occurring at an alarming rate to accommodate this expansion, and smaller farmers are losing their land to larger tea plantations and changing to a role of of almost indentured servitude. Most Chinese people don’t really realize all this, though. They only look at the profits of Lipton, Tata, and Twinings, etc., and focus on that as their target. So let’s see how the Chinese are planning to achieve this target:

According to Chinese government research, China has almost 41,120,000 hectares of tea plantations, making it the number one tea plantation area in the world, but compared Kenya, India, Sir Lanka and Japan, China produces the lowest quantity. Why? The reason is that Chinese tea farmers usually do not pick summer tea and autumn tea. Letting the trees rest during the summer and autumn is the traditional method for protecting the tea trees so that next spring, the quality of the tea leaves will remain consistently high. But this practice may be coming to an end, as China will emulate those other countries to enlarge the quantity produced.

Enlarged types of vegetative propagated tea tree growing. The vegetative propagated tea tree has already been developed and spread all over the world, and it has already become the necessary condition for the mechanization of the tea plantation production process. The vegetative propagated tea tree grows faster than the traditional tea tree, so it is easy to pick a larger quantity of tea leaves. So in the next 5 to 10 years, the proportion of vegetative propagated tea trees could enlarge to account for 50% to 80% of tea trees in China. In Japan, the vegetative propagated tea tree already accounts for 91%, and 57% in Sri Lanka, 50% in Kenya, 40% in India, and currently 41.3% in China – but this number is likely to climb quickly in China in the very near future.¹

3. I’m no botanist, but feel free to research what a vegetative propagated tea tree is, the way a vegetative propagated tea tree is copied, and the many situations that arise in horticulture where it is desirable to propagate from mature specimens of woody species. This method weeds out what are considered to be bad genes from the traditional tea tree so that tree size and quantity are enhanced; however, we should not ignore one main disadvantage of vegetative propagation: the plants could gradually lose their vigor, as there is no genetic variation. They are more prone to species-specific diseases. This can result in the destruction of an entire crop. Also, since plant quantity and size increase, overcrowding and lack of nutrients results. The method could also destroy the diversity and productivity of ecological systems.

Let’s use a very simple set of data to explain this:

Location: Yunnan Province (Yunnan is the largest tea producing province and is number three in forest area in China)

Yunnan tea plantation area: 5,600,000 hectares²

Yunnan forested area: 273, 000,000 hectares³

So, Yunnan tea plantations cover around 2% of the forested area.

Yunnan ancient tea tree species: 75⁴

Yunnan vegetative propagated tea tree species: 189⁴

After 1949, and especially after 1964, vegetative propagated tea tree plantations started to grow everywhere, with an average tea tree height of 60-90cm. There was strong human intervention, including picking, pruning, pesticide use, weeding, and plowing. Surface soil became barren of nutrients, and chemical fertilizers were relied upon to maintain yields, leading to imbalanced ecosystems.

Following the example of companies like Lipton, tea products are going to become increasingly standardized in China. Differentiation between the flavors and aromas will decrease, and every single unit of a brand’s product will be required to be identical. So how can a natural leaf be molded to this industrial pattern in which every single tea bag tastes and smells exactly the same? Very simple: increase the number of vegetative propagated tea trees and standardize tea blend formulas. These are the two keys to implementing a highly standardized system.

Modern biotechnology and technological innovation are going to be the major focuses of the next 5 to 10 years in China. Scientists will focus more on how to incorporate pest-resistant genes into plants and will use biotechnology to build a good tea tree cell strain so that tea trees will be more functionally aligned with industrial production.⁵

In the next 10 to 15 years, China will increase production of tea beverages to expand the tea drinker market. Based on the data, in 2009, average consumption of tea in China was 0.69 kg, but in 2009, the quantity of tea beverages produced was 8,000,000 tons. Tea beverages will be a big market in China in the next 10 to 15 years. That means that there will be greater and greater demand for tea materials. This matches the plan of enlarged vegetative propagated tea tree plantations.

Why Big Chain Tea Shops Scare a Lot of People

Here is some new information I would like to share with you on the Chinese tea industry’s opinion of the purchase of one well-known national brand in the US by a larger, international one:

After the purchase, many Chinese tea companies started to worry when the brand that was purchased would enter the Chinese market. Since that time, two phenomena have shown up in the Chinese tea market: for one, some investors started showing up in tea markets to invest in tea, teahouses, and other related things. Another is that some tea companies started to think about what they are going to do as the next step in their businesses. This is a statement found in an article by one big Chinese tea company’s marketing manager:

According to basic information, we can be sure the market plan of [the purchased company] is ‘Coffee bar management model + (modern tea element x personalized service).’ Even though the company isn’t yet fully operational, we can very clearly see the shadow of its future in the characteristics and behavior of its purchaser. Some people have shared photos of when they had cup of white peony [tea] at the purchaser: it’s nothing special, no flavor, no sweet taste, but it is sold for RMB20 (about USD$3). I replied to them, Sometimes, you can find some good quality teas that are good all around, but no one would pay even RMB20. So, we’re not saying whether China’s teahouses are good or not compared to this big chain tea shops and cafes. We are talking about the impressions of customers. The big chain shops give me a simple, direct feeling. China’s teahouses give me a magical feeling. They both have a good side and a bad side…but the point is, implementing standardization is an important thing to think about.⁶

So now, we can get an idea of how the Chinese government and companies think about sustainable development of the tea industry or how they look at developing the market. Large quantity, the standard model, industrial production, vegetative propagated tea tree growing… those are the buzzwords that I think will guide the direction of the Chinese tea in the near future.

And I have a question for the tea drinker: Do you want to have a $3 cup of tea with no flavor, no taste, and unknown quality, but dressed up in a pretty cup like in a fashion show? Or do you want to have a $3 cup of tea you can drink at home that has a great taste and quality and that suits your tastes perfectly? Don’t answer right now. You are free to think and choose whatever you like, but remember, because you are the consumer, your decision will influence the structure of the entire tea market, as well as nature itself.

Most tea connoisseurs wouldn’t be caught dead in a big chain tea shop, so why would you?

The more popular such big label tea companies become, the more we will see an increase in mass monoculture plantations. They ultimately help me as a business because more people will be introduced to tea, and many of these customers will eventually become educated and learn what a good tea is. Then they will come to me, because I offer good tea, and a big chain tea seller usually doesn’t. I guess they are serving the masses so people can say they drink tea, as it is becoming the trendy thing to do. What I hear is how cheap it is compared to artisan teas. Of course it is cheap when you purchase metric tons of a single tea that is mass produced and processed on an assembly line.

The Wild Tea Tree Controversy

Let me introduce you to wild tea tree varieties. The original habitat of tea was in southwest China, from the southern border to the tropic of cancer in the north. In 1753, C. Linnaeus from Sweden named the trees Thea sinensis, meaning Chinese tea tree. In 1842, R. Bruce from the UK found wild tea trees in India, and after that, came out with the four original tea tree habitats:

A. China: In the 1990s, wild ancient tea trees were found in over 11 different provinces, some which were thousands of years old.

B. India: the British and Japanese found wild tea trees there in the 20th century.

C. Southeast Asia: in 1968, the British botanist T. Eden published the book Tea, in which he states the opinion that the Chinese-Indian border, near the source of the Irrawaddy is the original habitat of tea trees.

D. Multiple origins: some people think big leaf tea is originally from