28 China The EconomistNovember 14th 2020
D
ecades spentbrewing tea in rural Sichuan have left Li Qiang
with firm views on what makes for an authentic chaguan, or
Chinese teahouse. If age and beauty were the only tests, his shop,
the Old Teahouse in Pengzhen, would pass easily. A place to drink
tea for more than a century, the grey-roofed, timber-framed build-
ing dates back to the Ming dynasty, when it was a temple to Guan-
yin, a Buddhist immortal. Maoist slogans painted on the walls, in
characters of faded red, reflect Pengzhen’s history as a people’s
commune. Hours before dawn the air is already thick with tobacco
smoke and fumes from a coal-fired stove, for the first customers
arrive for “early tea” at half past three in the morning. Human com-
panionship makes a teahouse, says Mr Li, who rented the hall from
a collective enterprise in 1995. Only when customers treat a
teashop like a home is it a chaguan, he declares. Until then, in Mr
Li’s withering judgment, it is merely “selling tea to passers-by”.
Your correspondent visited Pengzhen this week to mark the
100th Chaguan column, a name that pays homage to China’s tea-
houses and their history as places where ideas are exchanged. Mr
Li’s establishment draws a stream of locals. Many are old men in
farmers’ blue cotton jackets and caps, puffing on pungent cheroots
or cigarettes in sturdy bamboo armchairs. Those photogenic cus-
tomers lure Chinese urbanites, who carry expensive cameras and
look for images of rural life or selfies to post on social media. Such
a diverse customer base makes Mr Li’s teahouse a good place for an
experiment: an unscientific survey of how Chinese think. It being
unsafe and unfair to ask Chinese citizens directly, in public, about
Communist Party rule, this columnist spent a happy (if painfully
early) few hours asking people two questions often used to assess
morale in different countries. The first concerns a subject’s own
economic circumstances. The second is about whether future gen-
erations are likely to be better off than their parents.
The exercise generated strikingly consistent answers. Despite
wide differences of age and education, patrons in the Old Teahouse
are optimistic about China as a whole, after decades of rising pros-
perity. Yet many also describe modern life as stressful, with too
many families chasing too few chances to secure a good education,
a good job and other paths to success.
Jiang Huiyun, an 82-year-old widow, sits in a prime window-seateach morningfrom four o’clock. Crop-haired and chain-
smoking, Ms Jiang married in 1957 at a time of scarcity and hunger.
Her wedding feast consisted of carrot porridge, but only after she
had pleaded tearfully with her production-brigade leader for an
advance on her vegetable ration. None of her four children fin-
ished junior high school. Her eldest son dropped out in his first
year of primary school after being unjustly accused of vandalism.
He earned money by “collecting dog shit and chicken shit”, re-
members Ms Jiang. In the 1950s toughs attacked anyone with a side
business as “capitalists”, she recalls. During the Cultural Revolu-
tion, from 1966 to 1976, Red Guards smashed Buddhist statues in
Pengzhen’s temple-teahouse and “nobody dared to stop them”.
Unsurprisingly, she thinks life today is far better. As a rural
pensioner she receives social insurance and old-age payments of
over 2,000 yuan ($300) a month. Her grandchildren, having gradu-
ated from university, are upwardly mobile like many young people
these days. A quarter-century ago just one-in-twenty Chinese at-
tended university. Today half of all Chinese youngsters of under-
graduate age are in higher education. Ms Jiang no longer lives in
fear of hunger or political violence. Still, some forms of scarcity in-
volve things that are harder to spot, such as equal access to oppor-
tunity. Like many in Pengzhen, Ms Jiang’s family have rural house-
hold-registration, or hukou. As a result, her grandchildren are
second-class citizens, able to live and work in big cities but denied
many public services there. Notably, they will have to find fees of
30,000 yuan a year to send Ms Jiang’s great-grandchildren to high
school. “If we didn’t borrow money from others, how could we af-
ford that?” she asks. Ms Jiang is emphatic: “We have a good life
now.” But she adds: “Young people face a lot of pressures.”In China to get rich is glorious, but daily life is a slog
A middle-aged man sipping tea before work will give only his sur-
name, Huang. He praises modern China, declaring that “Each gen-
eration is doing better than the last.” Yet Mr Huang’s own life re-
mains precarious. Now 59, he has no retirement fund. So he saves
1,000 yuan from his monthly pay as a cleaner in a factory, which
ranges from 2,000 to 4,000 yuan depending on overtime. He went
unpaid while covid-19 closed his factory for nearly three months,
and has not forgotten the terror of worrying if his savings would
run out before work resumed. His hopes rest on enabling his five-
year-old grandchild to land a good job one day, though he worries
about school fees. Taking early tea is one of his few indulgences.
His daughter is too busy working to visit teahouses, he sighs.
Two 20-year-old women photographing tea-drinkers turn out
to be undergraduates from Sichuan University of Media and Com-
munications, on a class assignment. “There is definitely a lot of
pressure” on the young, says one. She has an internship but no job
lined up after graduation. Her mother’s uncomplicated childhood
memories—“stealing bananas in the countryside”—make her al-
most envious. Still, the students are confident that life is better to-
day, though not confident enough to give their names to a foreign
reporter asking almost-political questions.
Mr Li, 55, suggests that some people create pressure for them-
selves by setting their sights too high. A devotee of the simple life,
his menu consists of a single item: jasmine tea from Ya’an, in the
foothills of the Tibetan plateau. He charges locals one yuan for un-
limited refills, and everyone else ten yuan. “You chat a bit, drink
some tea every day, that’s happiness,” he says. Pengzhen’s un-
eventful pleasures are not for everyone, for modern China is a rest-
less, brutally unequal place. The tea, however, is excellent. 7Chaguan Tea before dawn
Visiting a century-old chaguan in China’s heartland, for the 100th Chaguan column