After the “Puer” tea is ready, the journey begins.
For the Pu’erh that I buy, Emperor’s Pu’erh, it leaves Yunnan, reaches China’s coast and then crosses the Pacific to end on a shelf at a Whole Foods Market. However, before that, for centuries, Puer tea traveled to Tibet and China’s capital for the Emperor.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 1 1/2
Most people have heard of or read about the Silk Road from China to Europe. I’m sure that few have heard of the Ancient Tea Horse Road, which I discovered in the May 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 1 2/2
Legend says that tea from China arrived in Tibet as early as the Tang Dynasty (618- 906 A.D.). After that, the Chinese traded tea for horses, as many as 25,000 horses annually.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 2 1/2
But that isn’t what struck me the most about the piece. It’s the example that demonstrated why the peasants loved and possibly worshiped Mao Tse-Tung.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 2 2/2
For more than a thousand years, men fed their families by carrying hundreds of pounds of tea on their backs across rugged mountains into Lhasa. Some froze to death in blizzards. Others fell to their deaths from the narrow switchbacks that climbed into the clouds.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 3 1/2
This all ended in 1949 when Mao had a road built to Tibet and farmland was redistributed from the wealthy to the poor. “It was the happiest day of my life,” said Luo Yong Fu, a 92-year-old dressed in a black beret and a blue Mao jacket, whom the author of the National Geographic piece met in the village of Changheba.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 3 2/2
Before ending the four posts on Puer [Pu'erh] tea and moving on to Kombucha Fermented Tea in Post 5, Numi Organic tea, Emperor’s Pu’erh, the one I buy at Whole Foods, says, “These old-growth rare Pu’erh trees are communally owned by the local villagers who pick them for their livelihood, ensuring that they continue to grow for generations to come… Pu’erh is an ancient healing tea picked from 500-year-old organic wild tea trees in Yunnan, China. Pu’erh has more antioxidant than most green teas.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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The fermentation of “Puer” tea demands a perfect mix of water, moisture and air. This provides the conditions for the development of microbes and the necessary fermentation.
The fermentation of broad leaf “Puer” tea produces a substance called theaflavin often called the soft-gold of tea.
Clinical experiments show that theaflavin reduces blood fat and cardiovascular disease among other benefits.
In animal experiments, the mice fed theaflavin had their blood fat reduced by 30% compared to the control group’s 10% blood fat reduction.
Due to the process of producing “Puer”, the tea may be stored as long as a century without losing its flavor or health enhancing benefits.
The 110 days of fermentation for “Puer” is important to achieve the best flavor and enhanced, health benefits—the time must not be shortened. The temperature and humidity must also be stable and many warehouses are built partially underground to achieve this.
I’ll bet you didn’t know much about the process the tea you may be drinking went through before filling your cup. The process to produce Puer tea represents almost two thousand years of China’s tea culture.
“Puer” got its name because it used to be sold in a town by the same name.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Puer tea is mellowed by aging, the period by which it is transported and stored.
The largest, tallest tea trees in the world grow in the mountains of Yunnan. This region also produces black, green, Oolong and other kinds of tea.
The leaves for “Puer” tea are divided into three sizes and the largest contain more of the health benefits attributed to “Puer” tea.
For centuries, the process of making tea from picking, to washing, to boiling, mixing, pressing, clustering, baking, and packing has been improved to enhance the flavor of the tea.
Chinese Puer tea – Part 2/3
Dao Linyin, the governor of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous region in China says, “Puer tea contains many vitamins. Very few Puer drinkers get high blood pressure.”
Standards for selecting the thickest broad leaves for “Puer” tea means only about 30% of the tea leaves that are picked pass inspection to be processed into the final product. This selection process is important because the wrong leaves will have a negative impact on the fermentation process.
The fermentation step in the process of producing “Puer” tea takes 110 days.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
My weekend cup of Numi Organic Pu’erh teareaches back into China and Tibet’s history almost two thousand years. The journey this tea takes starts in China’s Southwest Yunnan province along the border of Laos and Vietnam.
There are several varieties of tea — white, black, scented and green to name a few.
The mountainous region of southwest China in Yunnan Province produces a special tea called “Puer”.
The custom with “Puer” is to pick new tea and drink old tea. This refers to a practice unique for “Puer” tea of aging the tea in storage to obtain the unique flavor.
In addition, modern science has recognized “Puer” for its health benefits beyond black tea.
Chinese Puer tea – Part 1/3
In 225 A.D., when China was divided into the three kingdoms of Wei, Shu, and Wu, the prime minister of Shu led a military expedition to Yunnan.
Historical records say that many of the Shu troops came down with eye diseases. After they drank the boiled tea, it is believed that the troops were cured.
The leaves came from a tea tree in Yunnan. Over time, tea drinking for health benefits became a tradition in other areas of China including Tibet.
There is an old saying in Tibet. “Better three days without food than a day without tea.” Historical records show that Tibetans started drinking tea during the Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD) in 641.
Tibet does not grow tea trees, so the famous Tea Horse Road from Tibet to Yunnan was opened. Over the centuries, tens of thousands of horses were traded with China for tea.
In the early 19th century, Emperor Daoguang named “Puer” tea as a “Divine Tribute to the Kingdom of Heaven”.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
Having spent over four straight years in the Chinese Mainland without leave, it was with both anticipation and apprehension when I finally crossed the southern border into Asia’s wealthiest city – Hong Kong.
Who wants to fly into Hong Kong?
Despite its one-stop-shopping popularity with Mainland expats needing new clothes and a new visa, I truly had no idea what to expect in the former crown colony that supposedly makes even rich men feel poor.
Rather terrified of exacting reverse culture shock, I hence saved English-speaking Hong Kong and its “One Country, Two Systems” self for the tail end of my journey across the 33 Chinese provinces.
And it is from there I report that all my preconceptions and fears about Hong Kong were—true.
To quote the under-appreciated American author Thomas A. Carter (me!) upon his brief sojourn in the legendary Chinese city, “I’ve never felt more poor than when I was in Hong Kong—I’ve never felt more ugly than when I was in Hong Kong.”
DAY 1: Cross the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border at Louhu and catch the immaculate KCR railway, immediately impressed that nobody is staring, shoving or spitting.
Arrive in Kowloon’s southern peninsula and emerge from the underground into the land of lights – Tsim Sha Tsui.
Blinded with excitement, I have to ask a resplendent group of Indian women draped in saris where the Mirador Mansion is.
They point their gold-ringed fingers straight up. A towering, rust-stained concrete block, one of Hong Kong’s only affordable accommodations.
I check in to a claustrophobic dorm room (three times the price of a Mainland dorm and three times as small), then hit Nathan Road.
Peering up into the neon lights, tripping in the crush of the crowds, I feel just like a migrant worker back in Beijing.
DAY 2: Awoken at 6am by one of my bunkmates stumbling in after a long night.
His name is Pat, a young American backpacker with long red hair whose introduction is immediately followed by a long-winded narrative about his two-week romp in Hong Kong, including scoring with the mythical “Asian girls who LOOOVE foreign guys.”
When I counter that I never had any such luck, the fast-talking but likeable Pat proffers some off-the-cuff advise (“Dude, lose the beard”) before launching into more useful information.
“It’s Sunday, okay, and there’s gonna be, like, 120,000 Filipino nannies and maids on their only day off – and looking for boyfriends!”
I’m a little dubious of Pat’s generalizations, but sure enough his mobile rings continuously with calls from adoring cleaning ladies he met the Sunday before.
An afternoon stroll around Statue Square indeed reveals a literal blanket of thousands of picnicking South Asian women (Hong Kong’s largest migrant communities) whose collective chatter sounds just like a large flock of seagulls.
When I attempt to candidly photograph one attractive young Filipino, she shouts “Hey! I klick jor ass!”
So much for getting a date.
DAY 3: Fieldtrip to Shek O beach on Hong Kong Island’s south side, savoring the soft sand and splashing in the subtropical South China Sea.
Supposedly this place is packed out on the weekend, but that’s what weekdays are for, no?
It’s one of those moments when I enjoy being unemployed and chase my fun in the sun with a tram ride up Victoria Peak for a breathtaking evening vista of skyscrapers, which appear to be constructed entirely out of lights.
Photo by Tom Carter
Dafnit, an Israeli girl clearly in awe of the Hong Kong skyline, remarks, “We have no tall buildings in Israel. Oh wait—we have one!”
DAY 4: Spend the day traversing Kowloon, the fashion billboards of TST segueing into seedy massage parlor billboards as I descend northwest down the Nathan Road side-streets, the sun lost behind precipices of neon signs stretching horizontally over the sidewalk.
The markets of Mong Kok are mobbed with uniformed students on lunch break: long-haired boys with untucked white shirts and loosened ties, and made-up girls in little outfits out of a Japanese kogal/hentai fantasy: knee-high black stockings, short skirts and a Louis Vuitton bag to carry their pencils and books.
They have tattoos, tongue piercings and smoke cigarettes.
After commenting that they are the hippest students in China I’ve seen, one 15-year-old boy replies in perfect English, “Yes, so cool, but so young.”
Photo by Tom Carter
DAY 5: I want to see how the other half lives and spend the day in Central, Hong Kong Island’s microcosm of capitalism. Cross Victoria Harbor by the centuries-old Star Ferry through a morning miasma of pollution and follow white-collared crowds of businessmen contending with cell phones, briefcases and lattés into their respective skyscrapers.
Later observe as many women shopping in designer department stores – these must be the wives. I notice that they all clutch their purses as I walk by, then realize why as I catch a glimpse of myself in the reflective facade of the Bank of China tower.
My head cast down in self-consciousness, I almost get rolled over by a Rolls (driving on the wrong side of the road, damn Brits!), then almost again by a double-decker cable car.
Everyone in Central must be against me.
My insecurities are firmed up that evening in Lan Kwai Fong, a gentrified neighborhood of upscale restaurants and bars on the Island’s northern escarpment.
Photo by Tom Carter
The steep streets are congested with young, well-to-do westpats toasting yet another successful day of money-making. I can’t believe there are so many white people in China who aren’t English teachers!
They are all smartly dressed and have well-groomed hair; I am wearing cutoff army pants, low-top fake Converse, an eight year-old t-shirt that I bought used, nor have I shaved or cut my locks in the 2 years I’ve been on the China road.
I want to belong, but I don’t. It’s one of those moments when I regret being unemployed.
DAY 6: I give the Island another chance and take the night ferry across the harbor to the north end’s older and seedier nightspot, the infamous Wan Chai.
Recall it is where Richard Mason penned his 1950’s tale of forbidden love, “The World of Suzie Wong,” though a lot has changed since he wrote “take a minute’s stroll from the center and you won’t see a European.”
The pick-up bars still line the road, yum-yum girls luring passersby into their neon-lit dens, but these are the illegitimate daughters of Suzie Wong, not of Chinese but Thai dissent, wearing not elegant silk cheongsams but cheap miniskirts raised to immodest heights.
And unlike the kindly ladies of the Nam Kok Hotel, these modern-day working girls are vicious, mercenary, cold.
When a group of obviously disappointed white boys emerge from one venue exclaiming, “In Thailand they take off ALL their clothes,” the brown-skinned door girl in plastic go-go boots is quick to shout back, “Then go to Thailand!”
Further down Lockhart, I follow a couple of older Europeans primed with drink and flirting heavily with a lovely bouquet of girls looking for generous company.
After making their arrangements, one of the men leans on me and confides, “Wy mife, I mean my wife, thinks I’m *HICCUP* at a conference.” The remaining girls give this poor writer a cursory glance then quickly cross the street away from
me.
DAY 7: I wake up feeling dejected and classless; the expatriates of Central don’t want me, nor do the waterfront girls of Wan Chai.
I take a stroll around TST, passing by friendly knots of third-world hustlers hanging out in front of the Chungking Mansions, the immigrant ghetto of Kowloon that serves as temporary living quarters for Hong Kong’s financially insolvent émigrés.
Photo by Tom Carter
A street corner tout from Kashmir says to me “The Mansions is where anyone not wearing pastel shorts or a suit stay.”
I realize this mad cauldron of multiculturalism is the only place I truly feel at home in Hong Kong.
The Africans on the never-quiet front steps always high-five me, the Pakistanis all think I’m a Muslim (must be the beard), and the Indians bat their eyelashes at me.
The Chungking Mansions are the international haunt for anyone who is no one, and I am one of them. It is a peasant’s epiphany – in Hong Kong, I am the ‘nongmin.’
A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China - a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
God bless moms!
The consulate informed me that, while I was locked up, my mother had sent money to Western Union to cover the costs of my flight ticket home.
But when we went to pick up the money, the police wanted some for a “fine” and to pay for my exit visa.
The U.S. consular assistant explained to my police escort that the money was only for my trip home, because I had spent eight days in jail in lieu of a fine, and I was not legally required to pay.
Jobless in America unless you have the right skills.
It must have been a ploy by the escorting officers to earn a little on the side. Nice try!
I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the immigration office at Pudong Airport waiting for my exit visa to be processed.
The upside to my deportation was that the immigration official informed me that because of my good attitude, he would allow me to come back to China whenever I wanted instead of blacklisting me for five years as was the usual policy.
After acquiring my exit visa, I was booked on a flight. I had no idea where I was going to land in the United States, but the ticket cost 13,800 RMB (USD $2,160!!!), which seemed outrageously expensive (this is about what my wife and daughter each paid the summer of 2011).
I suspect the police and immigration officers had worked out a way to get extra money for themselves. The two police officers escorted me to the gate to make sure I actually left China.
As I type this true to life story, I’m back in my room at grandma’s house in Middle America. I still haven’t found a job. When I touched down in the U.S., I felt as if I were walking on the ashes of a once-great country that had been nuked by economic collapse.
The jobs are few and far between and the wages even lower than when I had left for China.
Even if I found work, I don’t believe I could handle an office job, because I don’t feel comfortable being caged in a cubicle, which, when you think about it is like a cage surrounding the mind and isn’t much different from the Chinese jail cell where I spent eight days.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China – a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
On the 7th day of my incarceration, an assistant from the American consulate appeared with a translator. I signed some papers and he provided me with two English-language magazines to pass the remainder of my time.
He explained that after I was released, I was to hurry to the consulate before 5 pm to acquire my new passport and then get on a flight home that same night, because I was being deported.
The next morning came, and the police said they would take me to my apartment to pack my belongings.
Caution, do not overstay your Visa in the United States.
I wished the police had not been with me so I could have called some people I’d met in Shanghai and explain my situation.
Since I didn’t want to go home for fear of unemployment—and mom’s wrath, I wanted to negotiate with the consulate to go to Japan or Korea or somewhere, anywhere, in Asia instead of back to America.
As a child, I had fought and beat cancer (I’m in my early twenties now), which is why I decided to see the world instead of spend the rest of my precious life delivering Dominos or standing at a Walmart register.
My mom had been so proud of me for venturing off to China to find my fortune in spite of my physical limitations, but I had failed to find steady employment abroad and had gotten myself arrested and deported instead.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China - a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
During roll call, inmates are required to line up their stools in the hall and sit on them in orderly fashion. When your number is called, you stand and then sit back down.
One day, an inmate argued with a guard, and I have no idea what it was about.
However, the next day during roll call, the officer called that prisoner’s number, made him stand up, then sit down, then up again, and did this repeatedly for some time.
After roll call, we either had morning exercise or just stared into space. Morning was also used by the warden to question new inmates about their cases.
The Truth behind Deaths in U.S. Immigration Jails and Prisons
Lunch arrives at noon and sometimes we were escorted out into a big sitting room to eat while listening to jazz music or watching a movie.
Once, they put on a pirated DVD of “Apocalypto” just for me, but I was subsequently charged 5 RMB for that viewing pleasure.
After dinner is bath time and those that want to clean their clothes washed and hung their stuff to dry on their bunks.
The rest of the night was spent watching Chinese television or socializing until bedtime.
Air conditioning did not exist.
Instead, there were two ceiling fans, and during the day if it was too hot and stuffy, the two helpers brought giant blocks of ice, which we put in wash basins in the middle of the room to help cool the air.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China – a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
During the first three days in jail, all inmates are required to skip naptime after lunch.
This may not seem like much of a punishment until you realize that every day starts at 6 am and ends after 9 pm. Most of the time, I felt exhausted, not from any physical exertion but from extreme boredom.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s chain gangs, tent prison and no television for prisoners – in the U.S.A.
In prison, sleeping or dreaming is an inmate’s only salvation, and I dreamed about many things that week
For example, I dreamed about a cute Chinese girl I’d once met in Nanjing. I even began having delusional fantasies that I was in the video game Final Fantasy having sword fights.
Each day begins with an officer on the intercom yelling something in Chinese (I’m guessing it means, “Get up!”).
The first thing we did was make our beds. Inmates need to fold their bed sheet everyday, like in a military boot camp, and it must be folded correctly. The supervisor comes in each morning after roll call to inspect the rooms.
Then somebody empties the trash by throwing it through the bars of the door. Two inmates out in the halls do the task of collecting garbage. In fact, those same two guys did all the tasks for the jail house (garbage, deliver food, water, etc), which is kind of gross when you think about it.
Next, came the hot water (in a giant metal barrel with a tap). Soon after that, the helpers bring the breakfast cart.
U.S. unemployment, poverty and then atrocities in the prison systems
Prison meals always consisted of rice and vegetable soup with the exception of breakfast, which was some kind of orange-colored root. No meat! But since I was a foreign guest, I was allowed to also request a Chinese steamed bun.
Although the food was tolerable, it produced torrents of gas. Imagine being trapped in a cell with nine Chinese men ripping farts all day. That is the true definition of torture.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China – a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
Apparently, however, homosexual encounters do happen in a Chinese prison (as they do in U.S. prisions too).
One night I crawled up into my top bunk preparing for bed. I tried to fall asleep but the other inmates were still shuffling around and talking; one young man lit up a rolled piece of newspaper and began smoking it in lieu of actual tobacco.
Eventually everyone turned in for the night in spite of the fact that the lights stay on all night—I have learned that the Chinese can sleep through anything.
I thought I was the only person still awake when I heard one guy whispering to another.
Five minutes later, my metal-frame bunk bed began rocking back and forth. At first, I thought my bunk mate below was just getting up to take a leak, but the rocking never stopped.
Moaning and slapping noises ensued.
- rape inside American prisons -
Daring to peek over the edge of my bunk, I saw one guy atop another. When the top man had finished, he slid off and another inmate came over and climbed on top of the same bottom man (seems risky with that close-circuit camera watching what goes on inside the jail cell).
I didn’t know if I was witnessing a rape or if this threesome was consensual, and I was glad I wasn’t going to be in Chinese prison much longer to find out.
Overall, life in a Chinese prison is very boring. We never left our cells, and going outside was not allowed.
There are no sports.
We did exercise but to a short training video on the cell’s TV where we start off marching, swing our arms around, then touch our toes, and then perform jumping jacks.
There was no library, so books were very hard to come by; I was lucky to find an English book, one of those woman’s romance novels with a long-haired beefcake on the cover , which isn’t the kind of reading you want in a men’s prison.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
