> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cultofquality.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # High Modernism in the Ancient Arbor: Tea Technique Research Trip 2026 – Menghai, Yunnan - Part 3 - URL: https://www.cultofquality.com/high-modernism-in-the-ancient-arbor-tea-technique-research-trip-2026-menghai-yunnan-part-3/ - Published: 2026-09-10T03:36:53.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-10T03:36:53.000Z - Author: Jason Cohen - Tags: China, Tea Book ## Modern Culture Impositions of forest management and tea processing are not the only way the denizens of Menghai have experienced modernism; the Dai majority in the valleys and the upland citizens of Zomia[\[1\]](#%5Fftn1) alike have both embraced the modernization of their culture. What is modernity? Modernity is often framed as the positive advancement of technology, industry, commercial-consumption, and progressive social reform from traditional-society. Modernity may be that, but it is also the erosion of traditional social structures, communal constraints on behavior, and a capitalistic flattening of locality via the importation of globalized culture. Menghai, like many cities of its size and stature throughout the world, has modernized: the buildings are new, the restaurants are varied, and village culture has yielded to individualism. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/69/e4/69e46ae8-c7ea-4919-ab7f-c2c23a98bb8f/content/images/2026/08/IMG_5875.JPEG) A damn good Zomian Mojito; this region knows its herbs and lime. The lowland villages of Menghai and Pu’er were trading centers precisely because of their proximity to the mountains and the local trade in mountain products; the ethnic self-segregation between villages and the ethnocultural preference for specific ecologies (varying predominantly by altitude; with \~800m the dividing line between highland and lowland ethnic composition) created the conditions for the trade in unique goods between upland mountain people (tea, spices, medicinal plants, incense or furniture woods, etc.) and lowland people (iron tools, textiles, salt, etc.), while re-enforcing distinctions between ethnic groups (both within the mountains and between the mountains and lowland ethnicities)[\[2\]](#%5Fftn2). Chinese merchants dominated the tea trade due to market structure: tea from the hinterlands were traded down mountain for transshipment to population centers elsewhere; the value of the product was aggregated at the merchant level because the tea had little value in its place of cultivation. This system of ethnic segregation, merchant control, and the creation of unique export products not consumed by the local population was stronger in Menghai than Yiwu and created the modern framework for pu’er cultivation and production. The infliction of High Modernism in the tea mountains was directed at Menghai, which modernized faster and earlier than forgotten Yiwu, succeeding and suffering as the epicenter of agricultural intervention and the factory system. The structure, practices, and ideals of the contemporary pu’er market are all downstream of modernity and its *High Modernist* imposition. These ramifications are still being felt, throughout China and Yunnan and Xishuangbanna, but perhaps strongest of all in Menghai, where the young up-mountain people are moving to the Dai villages, where commerce and high-intervention agriculture still offer a short-term path to drastically higher income, and where the value of tea still aggregates with merchants moving finished products out of region and province. The mountain divide is in the process of breaking down, by out-migration of tribal members to the cities, not in-migration of Han or Dai to the mountains. Menghai is quite a boring “city”[\[3\]](#%5Fftn3), but Pat and I could still grab a midnight Budweiser at a bar open to 3am playing Mando-pop and the occasional western banger; hotpot restaurants are overplayed throughout China and Menghai is no exception: we had our choice of Chengdu mala, tom yum suancai, Yunnan mushroom (“authentic” and “wild”), and Beijing lamb all on the same block, none of the choices truly local to the region; and amongst our adult female friends, a few smoked cigarettes and all freely partook in baijiu and beer. Intermarriage between various ethnic groups has also become much more common. The transformation of commercial availability, individualism, and breakdown of gender norms would have been unthinkable a mere 10 or 15 years ago. Menghai may be a nth\-tier village, but it’s a modern village. In the up-mountain tea villages, things vary more with size, wealth, and distance from the population centers; villages differ in their cultural adaptation and desire for change or preservation. Laobanzhang may be the most extreme example, where new wealth has changed the culture and the incentives: here the homes are new, 6 stories high, and built to hotel standards; guest rooms are available for visiting buyers of the right size and stature. One LBZ numbered house we work with (casual), contained freight elevators and loading docks; 6 gas fired shaqing woks were set opposite a refrigerator drying room, next to the indoor forced-air withering troughs and the large mechanized rolling machines. This is paid for by gardens full of gushu select-tree leaf material fetching[\[4\]](#%5Fftn4) 10,000 rmb/kg at harvest (raw). Developmental pressures exist everywhere, in some places more than others; as with other maturing regions in the post-modern market, continued consumer interest and attention will likely serve to reward those who engage in sustainable practices in the long run even while damage is done in the short run. This structure, scale, and process are products of industry and capital, something relatively new in the mountains of ‘Banna. Despite the modern comforts offered by the village of personal mansions, many of the wealthiest Lao Banzhang villagers now live down mountain, only venturing up to their village home when there’s tea to produce and buyers to entertain; the communal culture of the tea mountain has been degraded, and their social mores are more modern than places like neighboring Laoman‘e which retains a stronger Bulang village identity. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/69/e4/69e46ae8-c7ea-4919-ab7f-c2c23a98bb8f/content/images/2026/08/2026-03-08-15.14.56-1.jpg) Laobanzhang, looking out from one of the numbered houses at the rest of the village. Every would-be conqueror of the mountains has attempted to civilize the upland villagers[\[5\]](#%5Fftn5): the Imperial Magistrates sought to make the minorities into good Confucianists, the British and French sent missionaries to convert them into good Christians, and the communists willed them to become good comrades. Every success was minor; the minority majority are still Buddhists and now profit seeking Buddhists. The totalizing invisible hand of the market has reached where the emperor could not. The upland villagers are willing participants in the capitalist market and embrace its modernizing force; the high modernism of the villages is self-imposed and directed, not yet rejected. The vanguard of pu’er consumers may have gone post-modern, but the villagers making the tea are still solidly in their modern-era. We found ourselves in the Bulang mountain region during International Woman’s Day, which to my knowledge I have never previously celebrated (lack of opportunity, not lack of interest; I celebrate women generally and specifically, for truly is not every day a women’s day?); this was a major holiday throughout Menghai – women were dressed to impress, off of work, and out-and-about in the social scene. Many tables at restaurants across the down-mountain and up-mountain villages were filled with groups of women enjoying their day to be women, relaxing and luxuriating in the modern-freedoms only wealth and globalization can bring. Beer, Baijiu, and cigarettes were prevalent. If we reversed the genders, this would have looked like any scene from any country anywhere in the world – only it was women in Xishuangbanna, marking it an outcome of modern culture. Pat and I were invited to dance many times, though I assume this was expected to be traditional dance for modern women; Pat’s hip-hop and my disco moves were all met with confusion. Anyway: as the population moves out of the mountains and into the lowland villages something is lost. This is not a problem unique to ‘Banna or Menghai, and I am certainly not against progressive improvements in living standards, gender norms, economic opportunities, or even individualism and personal attainment. Many societies have struggled to balance these desires with the countervailing desire to preserve their culture and heritage; I don’t have an answer to this, though I believe it may be harder in Modern China, where Menghai Mountain Modernism is set against the backdrop of technological acceleration and a more dominant strain of promotional Han-traditional-culture revivalism. ## Post-Modernism and the Search for Great Tea ### And Yet the Tea is Good What is good tea? – and what separates good tea from great tea? The answer to this question has changed over time. The market for tea has evolved, mechanized, commodified, specialized, globalized, grown, collapsed, recovered, and evolved again. The consumers of good tea have changed as well, their access and preferences and desires for tea progressing at a different pace, often out of step with the market. Menghai pu’er was a frontier trade product for Tibet and southeast Asia, an ethnic product for overseas Chinese, a regional product for southern Guangdong, a state-supported export product for hard currency, a domestic luxury product, and now a specialty product for intellectual study or spiritual realization and perhaps appreciation. Collectively, our contemporary post-modern desires have changed the definition of good tea. At the high-end of the market, today’s consumers want natural, organic, ecological, small batch, old tree, high mountain, famous village, and labor-intensive-small-batch production by economically disadvantaged minority groups using “traditional” means and methods[\[6\]](#%5Fftn6). More of this desire is found on the label than in the tea; idealistic preferences born of mimetic desire and conspicuous consumption are rarely analytical or self-reflexive. Menghai’s pu’er makers are now attempting to cross the narrow bridge spanning the modern-to-post-modern divide, only our post-modern ideal of pu’er is beset with conflicting desires: the desire for unspoiled nature, the desire for rare tea, the desire for immaculate processing, the desire for affordable prices. Modernity is the force that balances these desires: merchants package your desires into a product to be sold at a price you can afford. Yes, this tea is rare, from a newly discovered pristine region of a mountain you’ve never heard of, and the hint of smoke from the wok is indicative of its hand-processing, and the thick stems and large leaves mark this as wild tea, and the high percentage of huangpian is just how the minority farmers living in harmony with their family gushu grove deep in the forest process their tea. Sometimes it might even be true. I have found many good teas on the market, some I’ve even enjoyed. Though what of great tea? Great tea is perhaps something else. Great tea is a product of the forest, made in the mountains, sold in unmarked plastic bags, perhaps a character or two written illegibly in sharpie to differentiate it; for what does a label matter? The greatness is self-evident in the leaf, perceived in its flavor, felt in the body, redolent in the cup. The tea is sold loose and unlabeled, pressing and branding left to the buyer. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/69/e4/69e46ae8-c7ea-4919-ab7f-c2c23a98bb8f/content/images/2026/08/IMG_5678.JPEG) This is the good stuff. I visited one pu’er-focused teahouse in Beijing, run by a mixed Yunnanese-Han couple; the marketing was slick, with photos of big trees in beautiful landscapes, replete with promises about their age and altitude. It was constructively interesting to see the presentation, claims, and talking points of pu’er sales in the type of tea house I would have been excited to visit and purchase from as recently as a few years ago. These situations are now difficult for me: I can taste the nuances of flush, and processing, and tree health, things that pretty photos can’t hide, and I am often asked to opine about teas that I am not particularly excited about, at price points I wouldn’t pay. Today, knowing the region, farmers, and market, I could commission superior tea to my own specifications without the vendor markup[\[7\]](#%5Fftn7), and while that doesn’t reduce the generic value of merchants who curate and provide goodtea (and the tea at this specific teahouse was *good!)* to willing customers, it has changed how I think about the role of claims and marketing in the consumer conception of quality. Retasting my collection today, there are teas with forgivable omissions, the white lies of marketing: gushu labels that clearly taste of second-flush, late-harvest coarser leaves, a second day’s harvest lacking all the buds; then there are the cakes with less forgivable exaggerations: gushu labels for whole-garden mix pick, blends of flush from the same garden, “old arbor” for trees under 100 years old; and finally, the cakes labeled with fabricated falsehoods fueling fantastic fables: gushu labels of false age, origin, and material. Cutting gushu tea with lesser small-tree or terraced plantation leaves was rampant amongst farmers, processors, and blenders from 2007 CE onward; much of the labeled “gushu tea” from this era has been cut with \~10% or more of non-gushu leaves. With the new vogue for forest tea, merchant naïveté, and consumer inexperience, it was easy to pass off cut gushu as the “real thing” until perhaps the early-to-mid 2010s; it is not clear to me that this underhanded practice has become any less common outside the very top of the market in the present day. Not every farmer is a tea-man. Many a tea farmer was born into it, loving the inherited profession no more than you’d expect an nth\-generation Georgia peach farmer to love peaches[\[8\]](#%5Fftn8). We suffered through a few encounters of tasting and tea making that was uninspired and obviously paint-by-numbers; occasionally the tea wasn’t bad, though it could have been great given the gushu material. The pursuit of greatness is a form of madness, it’s always possible to put in a little more effort for a diminishing return – most don’t put in the effort, happy with the prevailing market price for their standard quality tea and charging more for commissioning specifications aimed at increasing quality (at least in the mind of the merchant). It’s easy to cast stones in glass houses, easy to break things; my goal here is to say that even the regions with S-tier material are mostly producing at-grade market standard tea. The market standard has improved since the early 2000s when cooking woks were fired without a chimney, a little smoke and spice in every batch, but the market standard isn’t *great.* So much of what is taken for granted today in the pu’er market generally and Menghai’s production specifically is the product of a post-modern process of simulacrum: the reinstitution of a tradition that never existed. Menghai’s gushu trees are real, but until the drive for forest tea became modern[\[9\]](#%5Fftn9) it was never used for the production of post-factory pu’er tea. The literati of yore weren’t kicking back with Laoman’e kucha and bro’ing out on the body feel. Contemporary boutique pu’er is modern tea made with leaves from ancient trees for post-modern tastes. Which, after all of this, is not to say the sheng pu’er gushu tea from Menghai isn’t good – some of this tea is great! It is good in spite of tradition, not because of it. Menghai has good tea, Menghai has bad tea; it contains multitudes; so much of Menghai’s teas come from gardens that look and feel over-managed to my western eye – and yet the tea is good. The lower elevation areas, channeling heat that flows in waves down the river valleys, nurtures lush jungle filled with plant life; the weather is hot, possibly too hot for tea, marking it with a distinct flavor – and yet the tea is good. Tea in Menghai’s higher-altitude environments face cold winds and dry spells, growing on barren-looking grounds that feel sparse and spartan; the environment often creates groves of tea trees that look suspiciously like a monoculture – and yet the tea is good. Menghai’s most famous villages are under enormous pressure to increase yields of gushu tea, yet the number of old trees is fixed; the use of modern forest management and horticultural techniques to increase the per-tree yield does not result in better tea – and yet the tea is good. I am right; I am wrong. Menghai has good tea; Menghai has great tea. ### Becoming a Tea Tree Hugger I didn’t start my journey in tea as an environmentalist or tree-hugging spiritualist (luv u guys tho, we’re on the same team now) or with a strong interest in agriculture. I started on the cultural side, more interested in tea houses, flavor, and brewing technique than anything approaching the plantation or garden. I had early experiences in tea agronomy, living in Yunnan and Darjeeling circa 2007 and 2008 CE, and while I gained an appreciation for its importance, my interest remained focused on the haute culture over the horticulture. I don’t know exactly when that changed, and if my new self-categorization is innate or acquired; I had and retain a deep reverence for forest tea from the beginning of my journey in Yunnan, redoubled after seeing the range of plantation qualities in India, and later I gained a wider perspective on the idea of “wild arbor” while processing tea from Master Hyoam’s garden in 2011 CE. On the other hand, I probably wasn’t a full-blown soil supremacist until very recently – my experience of kenshō (見性, “seeing nature”) occurring in the commingling of pristine and despoiled nature of Wuyi. I am not alone: perhaps surprisingly, there is a countermovement in the tea mountains; just as the industrialized vineyards and over-engineered wines of the 1960s and 1970s inspired the Natural Wine Movement of the 1970s and 1980s[\[10\]](#%5Fftn10), there are tea farmers, merchants, and buyers calling for minimal intervention forestry practices, focused on finding gushu tea in pristine natural environments. On the farmer side, the late-blooming movement in the mountains is blossoming out of negative[\[11\]](#%5Fftn11) experiences with extractive industries (logging and rubber farming) and industrialized agriculture (overuse of agrochemicals and heavy use of arboriculture techniques); experiences from which they’ve faced the negative ramifications of long-term decisions. Zhang Jinghong, in her excellent book[\[12\]](#%5Fftn12), tells the story of Yiwu farmers pollarding many of their old gushu trees[\[13\]](#%5Fftn13) in the 1980s on the advice of the government, only to see the value of those trees collapse in the 2003 – 2004 market as “not representative of forest tea”. I am heartened to see the rising tide of environmentalism in China: plantations are converting themselves to shengtai fields and organic practices, farmers are using less pesticide spray and reduced intervention, and buyers are willing to pay a premium for such tea. These ideas are still, to an extent nascent – litter, trash burning, slash-and-burn agriculture, and other practices remain notable issues, often practiced by those who are otherwise part of the moment, but such practices take time to change and often aren’t yet linked in the minds of those who seek to benefit from more healthy and natural gushu land[\[14\]](#%5Fftn14). ### Being There 75 pages into this trip report, I want to end with a meditation on motivation and meaning. What is the point of these research trips? Of visiting origin and meeting farmers and spending hours in a car to spend hours hiking to see some trees? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/69/e4/69e46ae8-c7ea-4919-ab7f-c2c23a98bb8f/content/images/2026/08/IMG_5624.JPEG) Yet **another* gushu tea tree. To some extent, these trips are fun – the travel high and the friendship and the new experiences are *fun*. Though, and this is true, the fun shouldn’t be overstated: sitting in a car on bad roads for hours with 3 other people who also had 6 young sheng’s for breakfast and an all-donkey-meat meal for lunch isn’t exactly type-A or type-B fun. And there’s the bragging rights – we get to say “we’ve been there” and post pictures to prove it. Establishing credibility or some such nonsense[\[15\]](#%5Fftn15). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/69/e4/69e46ae8-c7ea-4919-ab7f-c2c23a98bb8f/content/images/2026/08/2026-03-10-12.52.15.jpg) Nothing like an ice cold beer with your pasture raised donkey… Yet, beyond that, there is an underlying necessity for this research to take place in the field. I’ve written of the intensity with which we follow research down rabbit holes to find ourselves in wonderland, and the pains of fact-checking everything we were told. These are, in a way, secondary. The primary reason to go is to be there. To find what we don’t yet know and to feel the differences in people, place, and practice. There is a difference to each mountain, and gardens within those mountains; there is a difference between tea growing at 1,000 meters in a jungle amongst banana trees, where the hot moist air channels through a small valley carved by what was once a river, versus tea growing at 2,000 meters in a sub-alpine pine forest, in the lee of the ridge. I could tell you of them, of these differences, though what good would it do? I have now experienced these associations with Laoman’e and Naka and Pasha, and these places now mean something to me beyond their description and name on the label. As my focus has broadened over the years from culture, to processing, to agronomy, I find myself gaining a deeper appreciation for what makes good tea good, and what separates good tea from great tea. It’s so easy to forget that entering wonderland wasn’t exactly a series of purely positive experiences for me, Pat, or Alice; reality is often as irrational as the myths we seek to dispel. I no longer know what to make of prestigious tea fields renowned the world over for great tea, like those across the low hills of Xihu producing longjing, when the forests of Yunnan stand in contrast. Not every forest versus every field, but I’ve eaten the kumquat of knowledge offered to me by the mountain snake and now I’m eco-pilled and forest-maxxing. ![The tea fields of Longjing in Wengjiashan village](https://storage.ghost.io/c/69/e4/69e46ae8-c7ea-4919-ab7f-c2c23a98bb8f/content/images/2026/08/2026-03-25-12.39.28-1.jpg) The longjing fields in Wengjiashan Village. ![the lost enviroments of Laoman'e](https://storage.ghost.io/c/69/e4/69e46ae8-c7ea-4919-ab7f-c2c23a98bb8f/content/images/2026/08/2026-03-08-12.43.48.jpg) The tea forest in Laoman’e. Sheng pu’er was the first tea I loved, the first tea to capture my interest and to make tea worth studying. I was introduced to pu’er in 2007 CE, right as deep forest tea was being rediscovered; at that time, the majority of boutique tea in circulation, in China, Taiwan, and abroad, was Menghai tea from Bulang – the intensity of the flavor and personality of the tea appealed to me, and continued to appeal to me as I became a black coffee and IPA drinking post-modern high-T giga-Chad. That was long ago and I have aged commensurately. My preferences have rounded and refined, my taste for subtlety and subtle tea has grown; I no longer drink many craft beers or Bulang tea. A sessionable lager and refined Yiwu better suit my preferences. So I can’t claim, at this moment, to like Menghai sheng more than Yiwu sheng. Yet I know, for certain, that there is great tea in these mountains, from a depth I have not plumbed, at a price I have not yet paid. I have work left to do, to really understand pu’er tea[\[16\]](#%5Fftn16). Tea Technique will return to Menghai. --- [\[1\]](#%5Fftnref1) The highland of southwestern China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma; I have been influenced by and am using the definition of James C. Scott, *The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). [\[2\]](#%5Fftnref2) Ma, Zhen. "Encounters in Zomia: Dynamics of Ethnic Relations in the Pu'er Tea Trade in Southern Yunnan, China." *China: An International Journal* 19, no. 1 (2021): 137-157\. Ma draws heavily from James C Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed” and his critic Peter van der Veer. [\[3\]](#%5Fftnref3) Menghai has a population of about \~350,000 and falls below the smallest official designation of “tier 4 city”; Menghi is a developed village by Chinese standards. [\[4\]](#%5Fftnref4) Stop trying to make fetch happen. [\[5\]](#%5Fftnref5) Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers. United States: University of Washington Press, 2011. [\[6\]](#%5Fftnref6) Nevermind that the most favored villages have all gone tuhao. [\[7\]](#%5Fftnref7) Though I would need to purchase the whole batch…. so I only do this a few times per season… [\[8\]](#%5Fftnref8) It varies. [\[9\]](#%5Fftnref9) As in *fashionable* darling, a la mode, you know, don’t be *passé*. [\[10\]](#%5Fftnref10) And it’s various beneficial, benign, and baleful strains today. [\[11\]](#%5Fftnref11) Negative from swings into unprofitability, land degradation, and other unforeseen negative ramifications. [\[12\]](#%5Fftnref12) *Puer tea: ancient caravans and urban chic*, University of Washington Press, 2013. [\[13\]](#%5Fftnref13) The pollarding initiative pre-dates the rise of forest tea, so this only affected some of the gushu groves closest to the villages; it wasn’t worth venturing into deep forest until the price increased further, around 2006 CE. Cohen, Jason, private communication with a Yiwu tea farmer. [\[14\]](#%5Fftnref14) We traveled with a well-respected tea maker to a beautiful and remote location where he showed us a very old grove of gushu tea; along the path he explained how the preserved environment of such a remote location yielded superior tea. We watched him toss his plastic bag carrying a snack on the trail while walking back to the pickup truck. It was incongruous to us, but these issues of trash, litter, and development are not linked in his mind. [\[15\]](#%5Fftnref15) I mean, you not really gonna trust some rando on the internet because they posted a few photos with a tea bush, are you? [\[16\]](#%5Fftnref16) Quoting this out of context to win fake internet points will earn you 7 years of bad luck and poorly aging bings.