56 Scott Writer
To some, to jump so suddenly from the practicalities of tea field management
to invocations of “heaven” might seem overly abrupt. However, it is important to
recognize that the Chinese concept of 天 tian or “heaven,” as invoked here, refers
to naturally occurring forces. More specifically, tian traces a field of forces that
is immanent to and constitutive of the life-worlds of humans, plants, and animals
(the reason why tian and its derivative words can also be translated into English
as “nature”). This term’s appearance in Zhang’s comment above itself reflects a
longstanding interest among tea makers and drinkers alike in how unique relations
of “heaven, earth and human” (天 tian, 地 di, 人 ren) produce teas with individual
tastes. For example, an instructional manual for tea producers issued by Taiwan’s
government informs us that, in the tea industry, “we often say that to produce a
fine tea of outstanding colour, fragrance and flavour, the triad of ‘heaven, earth and
human’ must be in coordination” (Lai et al. 2002, p. 3). This statement takes for
granted that tea processing requires humans to be attuned with “heaven” and “earth.”
What further distinguishes natural farming and “eco-tea,” however, is that the tea
farmers allow their crop’s development to be determined primarily via the agencies
of “heaven” and “earth.” It is this deliberate opening of a space for the agency of the
non-human world to register its effects that allows Zhang to tell me that his method
of tea farming is also a way of “venerating nature” (chongshang ziran 崇尚自然).
To rely on heaven is not, then, simply a rhetorical maneuver on the part of tea
farmers but a way of fashioning their relationship with their tea and the wider
tea-field ecosystem. And inasmuch as the tea producer’s capacity to align with
the productive dynamic of nature is indexed by the taste of their finished tea,
this relationality must manifest not only as concepts but also in tea-making
practices (Ingold 2000, p. 45). For tea farmers, notions such as “heaven,” “earth,”
and “human” pose “problems of value that signify not only rhetorically and
semiotically, but above all pragmatically” (Farquhar and Zhang 2012, p.243). To
grapple with the contingency of these relationships—by worrying whether the
crop will be wiped out by insects; by gauging the degree of zhuoyan in each field;
by identifying the most timely moment to harvest the tea; by training the eye
and hand to pick only those leaves that display the traces of zhuoyan; and via the
manufacturing processes that translate zhuoyan into “honey fragrance” and “white
down”—requires that tea producers synchronize the rhythms of human labor and
its attendant social formations with those of the non-human world. Chen and
Lin (2001, p. 49) call this, “following heaven’s timing” (順天時 shun tianshi).^7
“Relying on heaven” refers to the farmer’s exposure to the contingencies of the
natural world and points to how the intensive relations between “heaven” and
“earth” govern a constantly changing situation in which the tea and the tea farmer
are embedded. The qualities of fine tea, in this sense, attest to the quality of the
relationship humans have established with heaven and earth.
Making Oriental Beauty
If the material changes wrought by the zhuoyan process stand as indices of each
tea field’s “ecological” dynamic, they also transform the expressive trajectories