Pu’er

Making tea with pu’er tealeaves

Pu’er ( Chinese: 普洱 ) is the name of a municipality in the province of Yunnan in the southwest part of China. It used to be a trading post between the imperial court and tribal groups and foreign traders in dynastic China.

Tea was one of the major commodities, especially those that were compressed and blackened. They used to be both a material for making beverages as well as a form of currency for different groups of people. Tea traded through this historic post was thus named after the town.

Historically, all teas that were meant to be traded with the different groups of people living inside the Chinese border or outside of it, had been referred to as bian cha ( Chinese: 邊茶 ), meaning tea for border trade. Pu’er was a bian cha.

Many types of tea are produced in Yunnan province and vicinities of the city of Pu’er nowadays. To differentiate the kinds of tea in the lineage of this tradition, only certain types are called Pu’er: those that are blackened ( not to be confused with black tea ) and the leaves that are meant to be blackened through time. The leaves that are meant to be blackened through time are now traded under the label of sheng cha. Blackening of sheng cha, i.e. post-fermentation, can happen through exposure to environmental elements or through an induced method called ou dui. The kinds of pu’er tea produced through ou dui is also called shu cha, as opposed to sheng cha.

Both sheng cha and shu cha pu’er teas are traded in the loose leaf form or compressed form.

There are other kinds of sheng cha and shu cha produced outside of Yunnan. Historically, Yunnan was not the first to produce such teas for trading. Indeed, those that are produced elsewhere have different names that are older than the term pu’er as a tea. For example, a subcategory called Zang Cha ( Chinese: 藏茶 ), meaning tea for the Tibetan people, has been a Sichuan production for many centuries. The government of China has imposed that only sheng cha and shu cha teas produced in Yunnan can be called Pu’er.

However, since the term pu’er has been well understood by the market as this type of blackened or to-be-blackened teas, some products that are produced elsewhere have now also been referred to as pu’er. Some people now have a concept that pu’er is a subcategory of the dark tea category, some even think that it is a category of its own.

The term pu’er is used in the following articles: