Marketing is all about getting you to pay for something that you may not even need or particularly want. Worth the money? Of high quality? That's often irrelevant.
Producers and distributors use lovely words to describe aged white tea cakes. And these teas may or may not live up to their product descriptions. That's for the consumer to decide.
You may also get the idea that these cakes have been around forever, but as I said in my first post of this series, white tea cakes are new.
Yes, tea was made into bricks centuries ago. In compressed form, tea could be more easily stored and transported. Bricks better withstood damage by air, moisture, light, aromas, breakage, and so on, which was a boon for those months-long camel caravans and sea voyages.
So why did tea bricks mostly disappear in favor of loose tea leaves? And, aside from pu-erh, why are so few teas compressed today?
We might thank (or blame) Emperor Taizu, who founded the Ming Dynasty. In 1375, he began abolishing caked tea, starting in Guzhu in eastern China.
At that time, each province paid taxes, or tribute, to the emperor in the form of their region's specialty products. Back in the year 770, Chinese tea master Lu Yu had praised the tea cakes of Guzhu, accolades that ended up establishing that product as the required tribute to China's rulers.
But, bucking centuries of precedent, Emperor Taizu required Guzhu to provide whole-leaf tea instead of caked tea.
In 1391, the emperor went further and ended tea cake production in Fujian, one of the two most important tea-producing regions in existence. With one word—"obey"—he ended hundreds of years of tea tradition!
Tea cakes had originated very early in the first millennium. A piece of a cake would have been combined with other ingredients as a sort of soup. Laurie Barnes (2014:8) lists a perhaps unappealing mix of "water, rice, ginger, salt, orange peel, spices, milk, and sometimes onions."
Lu Yu described tea cake production in 780 CE, and by the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), it was a yet more complicated affair, especially when destined as tribute:
requiring the picking and selection of the smallest buds, frequent washing of leaves, steaming and pressing to express water, juices, and oils, pounding and kneading into a pasty pulp, filling decorative molds, alternately heating and boiling the hardening cakes, drying over a low fire, curing lightly with smoke, passing over boiling water, and fanning to the luster of dark lacquer. . . . [They were then] placed in pouches of yellow silk gauze, wrapped in bamboo leaves and cushioned within linings of more silk, and sealed in a red lacquered casket with a gilt lock. (Owyoung 2017)
This lengthy process, noted Emperor Taizu, "greatly strains the resources of the people," and he decreed that tea farmers instead pluck "only the buds to present as tribute" (Tsiosophy). By simplifying the production of tea for tribute, he also gave tea farmers more time to tend to their own chores. (He didn't stop there: he exempted them from forced labor and he addressed tea industry corruption [Owyoung 2017].)
As Owyoung explains, the emperor could issue such a decree because he firmly controlled the two most important tea regions: Suzhou and Fujian. He also may have been finally acknowledging prevailing trends—i.e., the tradition of tea cakes, which had to be pounded into a powder and whisked in hot water, had long been abandoned for tea brewed from loose leaves.
In other words, people preferred the easy brewing and the flavor of loose teas!
So, why are tea cakes coming back?
Of course the leaf damage is nothing like that done in those first centuries of production. But why are producers damaging tea leaves at all, in the hopes that aging will improve the tea? And why are they adding production steps, which surely adds to cost?
White teas originated in Fujian Province during the Song Dynasty, in the years of Emperor Hui Zhong (Sanlier et al. 2018)—in the province where tea cake production was banned a few centuries later. Its production methods "remained concealed for countries outside of China for centuries" (Sanlier et al. 2018) so other countries, including Nepal (photo below) and India, are just now trying their hand at white tea.
In the late 1880s, tea varieties with the largest buds were cloned for white tea production (Sanlier et al. 2018). Still, "white tea is regarded as one of the most expensive types of tea for consumers and is more profitable for producers," says Arpit Kanwar (2023:1999). For one kilogram of silver needle tea (below), you must hand pick some ten thousand buds (Heiss and Heiss 2007:74), making it relatively rare and certainly not inexpensive!
To enlarge the white-tea category, new-style white teas were developed in the late 1960s. These types vary. For example, they may contain the budset and first leaf; the budset and first two leaves; or just the first leaf (Heiss and Heiss 2007:75). Not only can more white tea be produced, but new-style teas have a stronger flavor than traditional white tea and are generally less expensive. (Another benefit is that when buds are damaged, they can be used as a new-style tea and therefore not wasted, as Heiss and Heiss note.)
With tea cakes, we again have an innovation that expands the white tea category and may appeal to different consumers. Especially those who may be beguiled by the eye-catching packaging, the idea of the tea being aged, the ease of storage, or the novelty of the product.
White tea cakes are a way to convert lower-quality white tea leaves into, ostensibly, a higher-level tea cake. This may bring a better profit to the tea producer, especially if the tea is deemed to have improved by aging. (See what happens during aging.)
Which brings me back to the idea of social construct, which I addressed in my earlier post. Presentation, expectation, marketing, "expert" opinion. These can all make a person think a tea is better than it is. I recommend you judge for yourself. Do you truly like the tea—white tea cake (or any tea at all)—and is it worth its purchase price?
Just know that whatever tea cakes you acquire, they are unlikely to be the same as those produced centuries ago, regardless what's claimed (Owyoung 2017).
Sources:
–Barnes, Laurie E., High Tea, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, 2014.
–Heiss, Mary Lou, and Robert J. Heiss, The Story of Tea, Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, 2007.
–Kanwar, Arpit, "Comprehensive review on tea processing," The Pharma Innovation Journal 12(5):1995–2002. 2023.
–Owyoung, Steven D., "The abolition of caked tea by imperial decree," Tsiosophy, December 2, 2017.
–Owyoung, Steven D., "Emperor Ming Taizu and the abolition of caked tea," Global Tea Hut archive.
–Sanlier, Nevin, et al., "A minireview of effects of white tea consumption on diseases," Trends in Food Science and Technology 82:82–88. December 2018.
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