“Relying on Heaven” 57available to these leaves when they are taken up in the factory and subjected
to the processes of withering, tossing, heating, and pressing by which Oriental
Beauty’s finished state is achieved. Tea producers refer to this expressive aspect
of each tea’s materiality as its “quality” (質 zhi). As is the case in Euro-American
discourses of terroir (Trubek 2008), farmers concerned with issues of “quality”
take for granted that local environmental specificities modulate the materiality,
and thus potential taste, of each tea. An example of this is the contrast Mr. Tan
drew for me between Beipu-grown tea leaves and those produced across the
county line in the town of Longtan. He told me that
being used to local leaves, you get the feeling that the quality [of Longtan
leaves] is not so good... because of the different soil and climate, the red clay
soil there, we would think that kind of quality doesn’t really match what is
needed to make Oriental Beauty.In addition, some farmers believe that using “ecological” modes of cultivation
amplifies the place-bound distinctiveness of raw tea leaves. Mr. Zhang makes the
distinction between the “quality” of naturally grown tea and that of conventionally
grown leaves thus:
I don’t really go in for the kind of tea that uses pesticides and fertilizers.
The thing is that with a tea, you can usually assume that fermentation will
naturally produce a reddish color [around the leaf’s edge], but I feel that
with those teas the transformation of its color is not so nice. What I mean
by “transformation” is that as we go through each step in the tea-making
process—sun withering, indoor withering, all the way to tossing—if you use
too much fertilizer, you’ll get a dark, blackish tinge instead of the bright red
color that is produced in organically grown leaves.Here, the signature effects of each tea-field ecosystem are imbued in each
batch of leaves as a differential potential for transformation.
Although tea producers rely on a particular configuration of non-human agencies
to produce zhuoyan, the transformation of these raw leaves into a finished tea that
possesses “honey aroma” and “white down” depends, in turn, on the efficacy of
particular tea-making conventions. As a “partially fermented” (部分發酵 bufen
faxiao) oolong tea, it is only by subjecting the leaves to sustained heat, motion, and
moisture that the farmer can achieve a desired taste, fragrance, and appearance that
are significantly different from that of the raw leaves.^8 It is zhuoyan, as a material
signature, that serves as a link between these ecological and technological systems.
Mr. Zhang touches upon this interplay between when he states that
what we produce here [in Beipu] is mostly heavily fermented tea... to
about fifty to sixty per cent. If you don’t have a good degree of zhuoyan, tea
produced like that—its honey fragrance note, or its ripe or fresh fruit notes—
they won’t be so apparent, and the tea won’t be considered very good.