“Relying on Heaven” 61Heaven and the market
Having a sense now of how each tea maker’s affective and practical acumen is
crucial to eliciting the optimal taste from each batch of tea, we can appreciate
why questions of personal style and its theorized relation to taste are central to the
understanding of each tea in its guise as a product. The taste of a finished tea is
understood as the result not only of the environmental qualities specific to its space
of cultivation but of each tea producer’s sensitivity to such specificities as embodied
in their tea-making practice. Each tea maker invests his or her tea with qualities that
are expressions of their personal style of tea making. As Mr. Zhang put it to me,
All we can say is that for tea, left on its own, dried naturally, it will have
a very bland (淡 dan) taste and color. It’s because after being subjected to
human labor that it can be bitter or astringent... Producing tea, I actually
think that the main technical challenge is to get rid of the bitter or astringent
flavors [that are produced] and preserve the sweetness and freshness. This is
what we who are serious about tea are after. But the changes [in the tea] that
this involves, how to control the timing and distribution (調配 diaopei), that
will differ from person to person.In keeping with this conception of artisanal “style,” Beipu tea producers were
typically keen to link the taste—and by extension the value—of their tea with their
personal approach to tea making: the care and attention that they lavished on their
own teas, the extended time spent tossing the leaves by hand, the higher degree of
oxidation that is achieved, and the richer, deeper “honey aroma” that eventuated.
This conception of the tea maker’s labor dovetails with the Deleuze and Guattari
definition of “style” and its relationship to materiality as being “no longer a
question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increasingly
rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces” (1987,
p. 329). Tea made with this requisite level of attention, Beipu farmers claimed,
produced a singular taste that surpassed that of the lightly-fermented teas currently
most popular among Taiwanese tea drinkers.
Often my informants contrasted their own painstaking pursuit of “honey
aroma” with what they alleged were faster, lightly oxidized, and less carefully
manufactured teas produced by farmers in the neighboring town of Emei or in the
high mountain areas of central Taiwan, techniques that they felt were ill-suited
for producing Oriental Beauty. These differences were understood as more than
just differing taste preferences or manufacturing conventions. Instead, the alleged
embrace of more economically expedient manufacturing techniques was taken to
indicate a deficit of personal attainment that rendered these farmers oblivious to
the “heavenly” environmental contingencies that condition the singular materiality
of each tea. Making tea without adequate care was a sign of an insufficiently
resonant connection between the producer and his or her tea. And in the views of
many Beipu tea farmers, this deficiency was in turn manifest in what they claimed
is an insufficiently robust “honey fragrance” in their competitors’ teas, which