A Meal wtih Gu-li

I thought that I'd relay a conversation that came up with me and my Uighur buddy once while eating in Xingjiang Cun, a long-since-gone row of Uighur restaurants in Beijing's Western District back in the early 90s.  It has to do with how anthropology more than anything else is to account for my becoming a pu-er disciple and how anthropology informs my Chinese medicine practice. 

Xinjiang is a semi-autonomous province in the far Western regions of China and, as the name suggests, "New Territories" is a fairly distinctive place in the history of China, as a bridge between East and West. Uighur are among the largest ethnic tribes of Xinjiang. Most all of the "nationalities" or tribes or ethnicities are what could be best described as Central Asian, an assortment of different "Mongol" (Turko-Altaic) groups who tend to be desert, steppe, and mountain people who eat plenty of heavy meats, particularly lamb. These are the people of the proverbial Silk Road. They formed the armies of the Manchus and the Mongols, having converted from various forms of animism to Chan (Zen) and Yellow Buddhism and from Buddhism to Islam, there at the crossroads of China, India, Persia and Russia over the past 3000 yrs.

Anyway, on this one occasion in Xinjiang Cun, we happened upon the topic of tea. In Beijing, the tea of choice is hands down hua cha, i.e. jasmine tea. All of the restaurants serve it. The grades in quality can vary greatly but  those will all be grades of jasmine, at least in Beijing. Chinese migrants to the capital city are apt to maintain their preference for their local tea. All of these teas are green and consumed usually quite casually without "ceremony."  I never encountered, let alone drank any of the oolong "red" tea most typically served up with teabags on a string in Chinese restaurants here in the States. This is because that particular tea isn't actually oolong (wu-long) but Keemun. It hasn't a very long history and is drunk primarily by foreigners. There are many very fancy tea shops in Beijing, many more not so fancy, the grades and expense can boggle the mind, but all of this "to do" is primarily over greens and wu-longs, most certainly not black teas... not that I noticed and certainly not in my tightly circumscribed circle of associates.  

The Uighur, in ways not dissimilar from Chinese from other regions, favor their local tea.  The only thing is that it is neither local nor green but from the Southwestern part of the empire and black. The Uighur drink something called brick tea . It tastes like tobacco and resembles hefty plugs of Redman. Guli, my Uighur friend, explained that for a very long time relations with the Central Asian and Tibetan peoples/minorities on the periphery of empire were regulated through the tea trade. These places didn't grow their own, but tea became so basic to life that even today black tea from the Southwest is money in places like Tibet. From afar, it seems perhaps like a case of misplaced priorities. Guli told me it was understood among the meat tribes, all of the western steppe "barbarian" types, that brick tea was essential for digesting the animal fats so replete in their diets. It didn't make my tea taste any better, but perhaps my slurps in washing down cumin-roasted lamb kabobs and  hot onion-sesame naan from the tandori were more earnest.

Later on, I raised the prospect of brick tea actually imparting health benefits with a Western friend to see what he thought. His perspective was sufficiently agnostic: that is he was not apt to believe that such knowledge of brick tea could actually be correct, but at the same time he would not be so coarse as to say so, proffering the shibboleth  "if that's what they believe..." In recent years, I've come to find this view an expression of a very deft form of "market-think" informed by the ideology of rational materialism as manifest through the pharmaceutical-medical system.  The implications are, so long as we do not truly engage the savages' epistemology, market forces will not be harmed; no one will lose an eye, albeit cast in a wayward direction.   Ironically, disciplines such as ethnopharmacology and pharmacognosy would have disappeared long ago if "the natives' " knowledge were fancy, if the pharmaceutical industry did not find dipping into this repository of knowledge so beneficial. We need look only as far as the recent SARS scare that dramatically increased demand for honeysuckle flower as but one timely example. 

Interestingly, I remembered my conversation with Guli when thinking about a way to help patients easily address cholesterol.  Still, I needed proof in the form of scientific studies to have the confidence to make such a suggestion.  It turns out that modern research supports what the barbarians have known for some time when it comes to brick tea, aka pu-er.  It is quite fortunate that there are committed scientists with the integrity and humility to ask the right questions.  Still the larger question of how such knowledge is derived remains, a question that will likely remain unanswered given the naturally assured presumptions about the subjective mindstates of the barbarian and the current of prevailing market forces that duplicitously encourages such presumptions.   

All the Tea in China

Many purveyors of tea like to speak upon the popularity of tea in China, lending to a rather vague impression, by intention or not, that all teas are universally liked with little differentiation from region to region.  I'd like to take a moment to perhaps dispel this misnomer by sharing from my impressions when I lived there eons ago.

Let's first consider for a moment that China is a huge landmass, roughly the size of the United States.  In contrast to our relative homogeneity, also consider regional distinctions that are more akin to the so-called "old world."  For example, although France and Germany are neighbors, there are marked differences in their cuisine.  Similar contrast exists from province to province in China as well.  This means, by way of illustration, that in China people don't go out for "Chinese" food, but rather for Sichuanese, Hunanese , or Cantonese.  Whereas these are but names of restaurants for the vast majority of egg-foo-yung serving restaurants here in the States, these names importantly designate a distinctive type of cuisine that would most certainly ensure that most State-side Chinese restaurants would not survive long in China for the fraud they perpetrate.  Furthermore, the food and drink of each region are in part an organic medicinal response to the environment.  Thus, dry regions favor oily foods and damp regions favor spicy food, all as a way of achieving balance with the elements.  These variables additionally shape the landscape for all the tea in China. 

 When I lived in China in the early 90s, the restaurants served jasmine tea. without exception, because that is the tea preference in northern China.  My students from tea-growing regions were always sure to share their local variety, some quite remarkable.  All of these teas were green tea.  Though I did have some very iffy quality brick tea when eating at the Uighur restaurants in Beijing, I never had a proper serving of pu-er till visiting Yunnan when on holiday.  Yunnan is in far SW China, bordering Burma and Laos.  Pu-er, which comes in many forms: brick, cake, or bird's-nest, is a tea favored by the Western minorities, particularly the Tibetans and Hui, who consume large quantities of meat and very few vegetables.  It is considered a stable of the diet for reasons of digestion, hence the brick tea at the Uighur restaurants. 

Now that we've cleared a few things up about tea in China by understanding the variety expressed throughout such a huge landmass, below you will find an enumerated list to help you remember who drinks what where.  Perhaps a bit of context will enhance your drinking experience, as you begin to imagine how each variety works within our own internal and external environment.

Regions of China and Tea Favored
1) North/Beijing-- Jasmine (aka Hua-cha)
2) South/Shang-hai-- Green (aka Lu-cha)
3) "Deep" South/Hong Kong-- Black (aka Hong-cha)
4) Western-- Pu-er

 Enjoy!