Taiwan and the Globalization of Puer Tea: The Role of the Taste of Aging

Puer tea was historically produced in Yunnan and consumed in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Tibet. In the mid-1990s it became a fad commodity in Taiwan, and its popularity later spread back to Hong Kong, Guangdong, Yunnan, and then the whole of mainland China, and also to Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. This paper analyzes how and why Taiwanese tea afficionados, who knew little about Puer tea before the 1990s, played such an important role in its globalization. I argue that historical contingencies, especially Hong Kong’s returning to China in 1997, gave Taiwan the opportunity to import aged Puer tea that had sat in Hong Kong warehouses for years; more importantly, Taiwan’s sophisticated tea culture provided fertile ground for the development of a taste for aged Puer that elevated its value and turned its acquisition and appreciation into a fad. This taste for aged tea has since come to be the foundation of the Puer tea market since the tea’s value is now reckoned according to its degree of aging. Puer has even been traded like futures or stocks, which also has propelled the globalization of its consumption. The case of Puer tea suggests that, following Appadurai’s suggestion that we attend to five cultural flows (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes), when studying globalization, we may also benefit from focusing on “sensescapes,” the intense cultural flows of sensory information around the world.