For Americans who are into directly sourcing tea in China: how did you do it?
I read the story of one guy (David of Verdant) and found it to be very interesting. I’d especially be interested in the stories of people like Yunnan Sourcing, Crimson Lotus, White2Tea, etc. How did you get into this? How did you get started? Are you fluent in Chinese?
I live in China and have decent enough Chinese (maybe you could characterize it as conversational fluency and the same level in reading and writing) but I don’t live in a tea producing region so that world is off limits to me at the moment. I’m just curious as to how you guys got into this extremely specific area of work!
I got into it with my wife, which helps. We moved to her hometown (Kunming) after being bored of Canada. Our situation was made a bit easier by the fact that her family has been involved in tea for quite a while and know a lot of people, including farmers that her dad has been visiting for the past 10 years or so (mostly for his own personal teas).
For doing it on your own, “conversational fluent” Mandarin should get you by. It might not be the prettiest, but I’m sure you won’t have too much trouble. A native speaker, and better yet someone who speaks natural 云南话 will do far better though. Except for when out of province people and tea tourists were at the table, 90% of all the conversations we had while in the tea mountains were in dialect, which I think farmers and rural folk are more comfortable with. I can speak enough Chinese myself by now, but it’s far more efficient to leave it to my wife. The language is also only one facet of doing business in China though, which she also has much more experience in.
Yes. Tea markets themselves don’t really matter though, it’s the tea growing region that is important.
Perhaps a better question is for an America in China, how did you avoid getting ripped off? I hear that this is common practice.
It’s not necessarily just Americans/foreigners who get “ripped off” when buying random tea. Chinese tourists who know little about tea experience the same thing. Of course a foreign face stands stands out as more of a target.
For us we only work with people we have known in some way for several years, or through very close friends. We don’t just drive into a town without knowing anyone, look for a farmer, try their tea and hope they’re not lying and/or pull a bait and switch, especially not with my foreign face. There are ways to counter that too though. If trying a tea, take samples and drink them on your own. If you decide you like something, come back (with the sample) and ask for it again. Make sure you see the bag they take it from and make sure it’s the same as the sample you liked. If all is good, tell them you want X kg of that tea and make sure it comes from the bag you just drank from. If you really don’t know the farmer well, ask for brews from the top, middle and bottom of the bag to ensure it’s not mixed or that the good stuff isn’t just layered on top to trick you.
To be even more extreme, some people have eyes on their tea from the tree all the way to cake. This involves 2 people, allowing one to cover for bathroom breaks, etc. I’ve only heard of this in cases of very valuable teas. Again, we don’t buy $1000 ancient tree material from strangers, so never done that myself.
My wife and I came here three years ago. She’s from Yunnan. We had been married the Summer before in Seattle but came to get married with her family the next Spring. I had only learned of puerh tea by accident the year before that. I was always a coffee guy. That was my passion. Once I had puerh tea for the first time I never looked back. I was surprised to find out that puerh came from where my then fiancee was from. I remember casually suggesting to her that we could start a puerh tea business and have the opportunity to live with her family part of the year. She was all for it 100%.
She has her Masters in Accounting and I’ve done Web Dev work for decades. Combined we figured we could make a go of it. We knew nothing about puerh tea or the tea industry. We just dove straight into the deep end and figured out how to swim as we went along. Our first Spring in Yunnan we knew nothing about how anything worked. We didn’t have any family connections we just worked it out on our own. We made a lot of mistakes. We still do. We just learn from them and keep going.
That first year we just jumped in her dad’s car and drove to mountains I had heard of. We arrived blind and worked on meeting farmers and learning from them. We spent a lot of time in very remote places. Those original connections still work for us. We didn’t know how to do anything, so we ended up doing nearly everything ourselves. Looking back I’m not sure how we were able to do what we did. We did have a strong focus on quality and we followed what we liked. I figured as long as I liked a tea and the price was ok we couldn’t go wrong with it.
The more we’re here the more connections we’ve made and the more we’ve learned. We can hold our own now, but it wasn’t always easy. To be fair it’s still not easy. We work hard to find the teas we do and to create unique products that offer creativity to the industry. I’ve never been one to do things the way others do it. I find my own way and if it pleases me I imagine it will please others.
A common theme here seems to be an American who married a Chinese woman. I imagine it would be a lot harder for an American completely on his own.
@AllanK You’ll have to ask 2Dog. He started on his own. I will admit that without my wife this would be significantly more difficult. She is amazing and her skills are much greater than that of a simple translator.
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