52 Scott Writer
ago (some operate larger-scale businesses that also process raw leaves purchased
from other farmers in Beipu and adjacent tea-growing areas).
The tea that these farmers produce is commonly and widely known as “Oriental
Beauty” (東方美人茶 dongfang meiren cha). However, it is also known locally as
“Peng Feng Tea” (膨風茶 pengfeng cha) and as “White Down Oolong” tea (白毫
烏龍 baihao oolong), the latter a reference to the distinctive silver-white down that
coats the leaf-buds of the tea after it is processed. In keeping with this volume’s
interest in ways of imagining ecologically attuned “green” living in Asia, my
immediate concern in this chapter is to think through how “ecological” practices
of growing and manufacturing Oriental Beauty are also ways of understanding
and rendering sensible qualities of local tea-growing and tea-manufacturing
environments. To produce high-quality tea requires tea producers apprehend the
relationships that hold between particular tea-growing environments, received
styles of tea manufacturing, and the optimal taste and fragrance of each tea.
And it is only by successfully coordinating these different contingencies that
the tea maker can be confident that his or her tea will command a viable price
when it enters into systems of market exchange. This conjunction of ontological
and economic contingency is neatly summarized by a vernacular expression
commonly used by tea producers, 靠天吃飯 kao tian chi fan: “to rely on heaven
for sustenance.” In what follows, I take up the notion of “relying on heaven”
(kao tian) as a way of conceptualizing how tea production practices are tangled
up within relations that hold between the qualities of tea and the environmental
qualities particular to its space of cultivation and manufacture. The first part of
this chapter situates these concepts in the context of the “ecological” methods
of tea cultivation as carried out in and around Beipu, paying special attention to
the way in which relying on heaven in practice requires tea producers to admit
into the tea-growing process a raft of non-human actors whose interventions can
play a decisive part in determining the quality of the raw tea leaves. In the second
part, I change tack to consider how practices of tea manufacturing transpose this
engagement with the tea field ecosystem into a concern with the materiality of
each batch of tea leaves and the sensory effects that skilled tea manufacturers are
able to elicit from such material.
Framing my inquiry into tea production in this fashion puts me in debt to several
currents in recent scholarship. On the one hand, in conceptualizing the tea field as
a site for contingent articulations of human and non-human agency and granting
that the latter is often decisive to the outcomes of cultivation and manufacturing
practices, I am echoing not just the views of my tea farmer informants but also
a concern with the agency of non-humans that animates a wide range of recent
social theory. The import of this work is captured to some extent by Bruno
Latour’s remark that a full rendering of social life must also account for “the
capacity of artefacts to construct, literally and not metaphorically, social order”
(2000, p. 113). Accordingly, I have endeavored to give sufficient weight to the
various agential capacities of the plants, animals, and natural forces: the “things”
that constitute the tea-field “ecosystem.” In the field of cultural geography, an
allied concern with the cross-hatching of the human and non-human worlds has