“Relying on Heaven” 59environment. For example, if a dry northerly wind is blowing at the time the tea
enters the factory, then the tea makers must increase the speed of activity to avoid
the tea’s drying out. Conversely, an increase in humidity will slow and prolong
each aspect of manufacturing as the speed of evaporation from the leaf decreases.
Another example is how, when the tea is left out for withering, the tea maker
traces the speed of evaporation by attending to material changes in the leaf: a
decrease in the leaves’ weight and increasing dryness to the touch, the wrinkles
that emerge on each stem, and a darkening of each leaf around its edge. This same
logic entails also that tea farmers attend to the impact of zhuoyan on the leaves.
As another Beipu tea producer, Mr. Du, told me, the reduced water content of
heavily insect-damaged leaves makes them softer and more prone to bruising or
drying out, necessitating an extra care and finesse when they are tossed by hand.
If, on the other hand, a tea producer detects a low degree of zhuoyan than that
required to successfully elicit a “honey fragrance,” they might instead settle for
a more easily achieved “ripe fruit” fragrance (熟果香 shuguoxiang). These are
some of the many ways that tea producers register and respond to the material
transformation of each batch’s “quality” via the sensations (scents, textures, and so
on) that this material produces as it undergoes oxidation. As one farmer regularly
stressed to me, “there is no timetable” to be followed in the tea factory: The tea
itself determines the speed and duration of processing. In place of a timetable, tea
producers thus substitute a pragmatics of attention.
Making tea requires that the tea producer learn how to sense both the ecologically
freighted qualities of the tea “itself” (as a material) and the features of each batch’s
processing environment that will impinge upon the speed and intensity of its
physical transformation. For the tea maker, these are registered as experience (經驗
jingyan) rather than disembodied knowledge (知識 zhishi). A degree of affective
sensitivity thus distinguishes the bodies of the novice and master tea maker
If the humidity today is a bit high, then it will slow down the evaporation
process. If the temperature today is relatively cool, then it will be slower to
dry. How do you grasp all of these together? Is there an answer? There isn’t.
Lot’s of stuff has no answer. Even when you produce the finished product,
you still don’t know the answer... It depends on your degree of sensitivity
and harmonization (協調性 xietiaoxing)
(Mr. Zhang, interview)To make tea successfully, one must acquire the ability to identify the traits of
expression that emerge through the tea-making process and project from these to
the taste of the finished tea. Likewise, the tea maker must adjust (or “harmonize”)
his or her own behavior or elements of the factory set-up (for example, altering the
speed or intensity of tossing the tea; adjusting the temperature at which the tea is
fired) to hold each batch of tea on the desired trajectory (Yu 2013). On this point,
Mr. Peng confessed to me that early in his tea-making career, although he had been
able to understand the concepts behind each stage of processing, he was still not
able to “link up” each stage to elicit the desired taste. It was through trial and error