Taiwan's 1990s Pu'er Collecting Boom

In 1990s Taiwan, a new topic appeared at the tea table: a tea cake stored for decades, its paper yellowed, brewing a liquor as red and bright as wine, with a deep, settled aroma. Over that decade, Taiwanese tea people brought aged pu'er back from Hong Kong batch after batch, wrote books, held tea gatherings, and compared vintages, creating a collecting boom. Part of the later pu'er craze across the Taiwan Strait and Hong Kong blew out from here.

Why Taiwan?

The pu'er boom happened in Taiwan because several conditions happened to come together:

• A strong tea-drinking foundation: Tea houses flourished in 1980s Taiwan; there were many tea drinkers, they knew how to evaluate tea, and they were willing to spend time studying a good one.
• Hong Kong had aged tea: Hong Kong teahouses had long used large amounts of pu'er, and tea merchants and warehouses had accumulated tea stored for decades. After Taiwan allowed visits to relatives on the mainland in 1987, exchanges across the Strait and with Hong Kong increased, Taiwanese tea people went in and out of Hong Kong often, and they had the chance to encounter these aged teas.
• Aged tea was just then being released: According to Hong Kong tea merchants' recollections, around 1997 many old Hong Kong teahouses and warehouses closed, and aged tea flowed onto the market. A Global Views Monthly report noted that more than 60% of the aged tea released in Hong Kong at the time went to Taiwan, and that in the early days a cake didn't cost much.
• "Drinkable antiques": Aged pu'er is both a beverage and an object with a vintage, packaging, and a story, which suited collectors perfectly.

Deng Shihai and Pu'er Tea

In 1995, Deng Shihai, then teaching at National Taiwan Normal University, published the book Pu'er Tea. It brought together pu'er's history, the dating of tea products, and tasting notes, illustrated with many photos of aged tea. At a time when there was little Chinese-language material on pu'er, it became the starting point for many people, and tea drinkers later called it "the pu'er bible."

Its influence worked on several levels:

1. It provided a shared language: It classified aged pu'er by era and packaging into Hao-grade, Yin-grade, Qizi cakes, and other categories, giving collectors a framework for comparison and exchange. This periodization is still the standard vocabulary among collectors; see Hao-Grade, Yin-Grade, and Qizi Cakes.
2. It promoted "the older, the more fragrant": The book stressed that well-stored pu'er becomes ever more mellow, and Deng also promoted the idea of "drink ripe tea, store raw tea, savor aged tea." The phrase later spread widely and sparked plenty of discussion; for the full story of "the older, the more fragrant," read Where the Idea of "Better with Age" Came From.
3. It drove the spread abroad: The book is generally credited with making pu'er popular among Taiwan's literati and tea people, from where it spread to tea circles in mainland China, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

Before the book, at the first International Pu'er Tea Symposium held in Simao, Yunnan, in 1993, 15 people from Taiwan attended, Deng Shihai among them; Taiwanese tea people's enthusiasm for researching pu'er had actually been brewing for some time.

What Did Taiwanese Collectors Buy Back Then?

What Taiwan's 1990s collectors focused on fell roughly into three categories:

• Hao-grade tea: Tea from private tea houses from the late Qing through the Republic, such as Yiwu's Tongqinghao, Songpinhao, Fuyuanchanghao, and Cheshunhao. The rarest and oldest, they sit at the top of the collecting pyramid; the stories of the old houses are in Yiwu's Old Tea Houses.
• Yin-grade tea: Teas from state factories in the 1950s and 1960s under the Zhongcha trademark, distinguished by the color of the character "茶" on the wrapper: Red Mark, Green Mark, Yellow Mark, and so on; see Red Mark, Green Mark, Yellow Mark.
• Qizi cakes: Qizi cakes from the 1970s onward, and classic recipes with recipe codes such as 7542 and 8582; see The Stories Behind the Classic Recipe Codes.

By the mid-to-late 1990s, Taiwanese tea people also began commissioning new tea in Yunnan themselves, most famously handmade cakes commissioned in Yiwu; see Taiwanese Tea People Return to Yiwu. Those new teas of the time are now nearly 30 years old as well.

What Became of the Collecting Boom?

Aged Tea Flows Back

In the mid-2000s, pu'er rapidly became popular on the mainland, prices climbed steadily, and then fell sharply after 2007. A 2011 Business Today report noted that a large share of good aged pu'er had stayed in Taiwan, and mainland collectors began coming to Taiwan in search of aged tea. So some of the tea that had flowed from Hong Kong into Taiwan began flowing across the Strait again. This rise and fall is in The 2007 Pu'er Bubble.

From Collecting Aged Tea to Drinking Single Mountains

After 2008, drinkers cared more and more about raw material: which mountain, which village, how old the trees. Names like Bingdao, Lao Banzhang, and Yiwu replaced recipe codes as the new talking points; see The Mountain Tea and Ancient Tree Craze.

Back to Drinking and Storing

After several rounds of ups and downs, the lesson many Taiwanese tea drinkers have drawn is: collect mainly what you enjoy drinking, within your means, and take good care of your storage environment; that's more worthwhile than chasing rare teas. For a basic attitude toward collecting, read Collecting Basics; how to store tea in Taiwan is in How to Store Pu'er at Home.

What That Era Left Behind

The 1990s collecting boom left pu'er with several things: a language of periodization and evaluation, a body of aged tea stored in Taiwan for thirty or forty years, and a community of tea people willing to spend time studying pu'er. Drinking pu'er in Taiwan today, whether an aged cake or a dragon pearl, we're all standing, to some degree, on this history.

FAQ

Why did Taiwan have a pu'er boom?
Taiwan already had a deep culture of tea drinking and tea houses, and the 1990s happened to coincide with Hong Kong releasing large amounts of aged tea and the publication of Deng Shihai's Pu'er Tea; several conditions came together.

When was Deng Shihai's Pu'er Tea published, and what impact did it have?
1995. It organized pu'er's history and the periodization of aged tea, promoted the idea of "the older, the more fragrant," and drove the collecting trend in Taiwan and, later, across the Strait and in Hong Kong.

What pu'er did Taiwanese collectors buy in the 1990s?
Mainly Hao-grade tea (Tongqing, Songpin, Fuyuanchang, and others), Yin-grade tea (Red Mark, Green Mark, Yellow Mark, and others), and classic Qizi cake recipes from the 1970s onward; by the mid-to-late decade they also began commissioning new tea in Yiwu.

What became of the collecting boom?
After mainland pu'er prices crashed in 2007, the market returned to reason; some of Taiwan's aged tea flowed back to the mainland, while Taiwanese tea drinkers gradually shifted their focus to mountain-origin material and simply enjoying what they drink.