Caveat Emptor

In the tourist-filled old towns of China, paved with uneven stones meant to evoke the atmosphere of a different era, the saying "you get what you pay for" has never been truer.

But don’t confuse the feeling of an earlier time with that of a simpler, more honest one.

Deals advertising 5 bing of puer tea—bing referring to the circular unit of pressed puer tea leaves that traditionally weighs 357 grams—for RMB100 (approximately $15) abound. Packaging brazenly indicates that the tea is from Laobanzhang (老班章), where prices for tea processed with finesse can easily run you a couple hundred dollars for much less than a traditional bing.                                                                                              

Here in Lijiang Old Town though, a historic commercial hub in the northwestern part of Yunnan Province that still manages to be scenic amongst throngs of out-of-towners, you can get “Laobanzhang tea” for the bang-up price of RMB20. It's doubtful whether even one leaf in that entire bing is real Laobanzhang at all.

Laobanzhang is to puer tea as Bourdeux is to cabernet sauvignon. With a fixed supply and demand off the charts (literally off the charts as buyers now go straight to the source before harvest and agree to purchase all the tea produced from particular trees for the entire year), prices rise rapidly and are sustained at sky high levels. Add to that the unique aspect of puer (and other post-fermented teas) in which time improves and mellows the tea, just like with wine, and you now have more than just a beverage to go with your scone. You have an asset (with appreciation potential).

Ultimately, explanations for the abundance of low quality tea are rather prosaic, being simply a matter of market dynamics. Most small shop owners are unwilling to take the inventory risk of buying high-quality tea due to the logical reality of significantly higher prices, which tourists are not necessarily prepared to spend on tea (liquor, no question though). And given that the puer market has come off its highs from a couple years ago, shop owners fear not being able to recoup costs and choose to stock what they believe is easiest to offload.

With a lower quality product, tea producers increasingly rely on packaging to differentiate. Tea leaves may be pressed into a variety of shapes beyond the traditional bing and housed in fancy boxes adorned with gold calligraphy writing.  The bells and whistles employed by Marketing to obfuscate the true nature of a product are unsurprising but stymieing for the average consumer. And the epidemic of intentional mislabeling (more or less unregulated in mainland Chinese) does not help.

Trust then, is ever important in a vast, fragmented market.