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Chinese vs Japanese Narratives about Matcha · Specialty Matcha Podcast

0:06
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Match Podcast.
0:08
My name is Ryan. This is Michael Ho Zhongjun, who
0:11
also goes by Sam. Hello, hello.
0:12
And with the cofounders of Sanko Match Products.
0:15
Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey,
0:17
Macho, share startup stories and interview experts.
0:20
How's it going? Doing well, doing well.
0:22
I'm currently sitting in Changsha and we just did a very
0:26
interesting trip up north into Hubei and Hunan to see some
0:33
Chinese matcha. I wish I could have been there.
0:35
It was unfortunate timing on my side.
0:38
I'm, I'm here in France, but I was just at the Paris Tea
0:42
Festival and coincidentally around the same time as your
0:45
trip, went to a very interesting talk at the Paris Tea Festival
0:49
on Chinese matcha. And, you know, you were telling
0:52
me about your trip and I was like, hold, like, wait, wait,
0:55
wait. Let's just do an episode because
0:58
you have such interesting fresh takes that I've just never heard
1:01
before. It's quite a 3rd deputy in a
1:04
way. Yeah, and actually I think we've
1:06
we've learned enough that it's sort of warranted to record
1:09
another episode on Chinese matcha.
1:11
Before I do that, I actually came up with a very interesting
1:15
observation. So I recently been drinking a
1:18
lot of Xyrai tea. In particular, I bought some
1:22
Xyrai sencha from Oscar Breckel's company Senchaism
1:26
through Marcel who has unearthed gallery in Munich.
1:29
And I've been experimenting with water temperature for his 100
1:33
year old Zai Rai sencha. And I've actually discovered
1:36
that it tastes like much better at like just off boil, like 98°.
1:42
Like the fragrance is so nice. It's not a very umami tea to
1:47
begin with. And you know, does it express
1:50
some bitterness? Yes, but like not really either.
1:53
Like it's much more in like a Chinese tea spirit.
1:57
You know, where they say that the best green tea can take
2:00
boiling water. What I'm realizing is.
2:03
Yeah, for Chinese green tea. Like in Chinese, in China, you
2:06
know, or Taiwan, you meet people and they're like, yeah, if you
2:09
need to use like low temperature water, it's like not good tea to
2:12
begin with. You don't want to extract all
2:14
that stuff. You know, if you have high
2:17
enough quality tea, it's OK. And I've heard a similar
2:21
sentiment echoed by Anna from Global Japanese Tea Association
2:25
and one of their online meetups, saying that some of the more
2:28
naturally produced Japanese teas, you know, Zyra or more
2:32
natural farming in general can take much higher heat.
2:36
And that she also prefers them with sort of just off boil or
2:40
much warmer water than standard convention requires.
2:45
So at the moment I'm deep in some research for a new topic
2:50
that I want to record both the podcast about that I'm writing a
2:53
research piece about what happened to all of Uji's old tea
2:57
trees. I have discovered that through
3:00
looking at some documentation for about 100 years ago, I found
3:03
100 year old like Uji Tea Guide on like what makes good GT and
3:08
how to spot fakes and this kind of thing, as well as some really
3:12
old agricultural reports. And I keep seeing over and over
3:15
and over that old trees were preferred.
3:19
That old trees, like over 100 years old actually made the best
3:23
matcha, which is like the exact opposite sentiment we hear not
3:28
only in Uji but sort of across Japan from all the people we've
3:31
talked to. That's very interesting.
3:33
I I must wonder like how consumer the preference on
3:37
flavor also changed throughout all these years.
3:40
What people consider are high quality matchas nowadays must
3:44
not be a thing or of the consideration of you know what
3:49
people evaluate matcha back in the days.
3:51
Yeah, exactly like what happened.
3:53
Why did the scorecard change and how did it change?
3:56
It's like, you know, like people's reasoning about all
3:59
these mommy bomb matcha is that, you know, it's baked in into the
4:03
dietary preference of of Japanese people.
4:05
Like people like fish, like khumbu, like all these umami
4:08
stuff. But that preference I don't
4:10
think has changed that much throughout history in Japan.
4:13
Like people has been eating sushi and sashimi and khumbu and
4:17
making dashi for so many years. And that didn't necessarily
4:22
crystallized into the flavor of matcha back in the days, but
4:26
somehow you end up crystallizing right now in modern days for
4:30
Mata. So that's very interesting.
4:32
I'm trying to map out that journey, like the structural
4:35
reasons why it happened, because it's a really weird disconnect.
4:38
Because when we interviewed Kungan from Teism Explorer, who
4:42
works at Bison Nakamura and who is the first Thai national Nihon
4:46
Thai instructor, at the very end of the interview he said he had
4:49
read a book. Because I went back and listened
4:51
to this interview. He'd recently read a book
4:53
written by the emoto of a Moto Sanka in 1955, had written that
4:58
the best tea for koicha is made with trees over 100 years old.
5:03
And I was like, wow, that's like, that makes so much sense
5:06
If you come in with the tea contacts from China or from
5:10
Taiwan or from Korea, right? Like, old trees are really
5:12
revered, generally speaking. But like, what happened?
5:16
Like, so. And I think, you know, it ties
5:19
into this larger story about the shift from Zairai to the
5:23
cultivars. But also like, just like modern
5:26
farming limitations in Japan. Interesting.
5:29
And weirdly enough, so I'm drinking this sencha with nearly
5:32
boiling water and it tastes just unbelievably delicious.
5:36
If anyone, I highly recommend all of our listeners to try
5:38
Oscar Breckle Sencha ISM, especially as IRI products and
5:42
and if you're in Europe, you can get them from Marcel very easily
5:45
and unearth gallery and it's just so worth trying.
5:48
I it really, I actually don't like Sancha, but I love these
5:52
teas. I keep going back to them in the
5:55
same way that I go back to like kind of a young Chung poor.
5:58
There's just like structure and minerality and fragrance and a
6:03
little bitterness, but it's like additive bitterness.
6:06
It's, and then I had this flashback when we did this
6:10
interview with David from Tazumi and, and he was making the
6:13
observation that back in the days, if you look at the
6:16
development of tea ceremony, there is no step to cool your
6:20
water, right? It's coming straight off the
6:23
comma and the comma is over charcoal.
6:25
And that water should be pretty hot, probably much hotter than
6:28
what is generally recommended for tea nowadays, right, where
6:32
people say around 7080°C, but you know, straight off the
6:37
comma, there's no structural step to cool down that water.
6:40
But then I had this realization, well, probably, you know,
6:44
hundreds of years ago when this was developed, they were using
6:48
much older trees. And it might have been able to
6:51
take the heat in the same way that these Zyri, you know,
6:56
Sanchez could totally take the seat because they come from
6:59
plants with like, a real taproot because cultivars can't have
7:02
taproots and that it's just a different ball game and that the
7:05
base material is just so different.
7:07
Yeah, most likely. It's really hard to make the
7:11
judgement on if it's people's preference changed or drift that
7:15
led to the creation of the modern flavor of matcha, or it
7:20
was the practice of agriculture changed and just people end up
7:24
making a different product and end up shifting people's
7:28
preference. I think that's the latter.
7:29
And in my research journey, and it certainly helped the by the
7:34
fact that tea ceremony practitioners generally don't
7:37
know anything about the product that they're drinking, right?
7:39
That's not like modern wine consumers or even wine consumers
7:43
from 100 years ago that were obsessed with terroir and the
7:46
different locations and what they were drinking, right
7:49
throughout the 20th century, these tea ceremony
7:51
practitioners, you know, were basically had to be told what
7:54
was good. They weren't forming their own
7:56
preference references based on objective realities of the
7:59
product. This transition is probably much
8:02
easier. Yeah, you and I have both
8:04
participated in Channel Youth Schools before.
8:07
And for everything that we learned about much, it's one
8:10
thing that we don't really learned about is the product
8:12
itself is the agriculture is how the product is being made and
8:17
being prepared into its very unique form.
8:22
You know, and how basically everything before the powder
8:25
being put into a natsume that gets served during a tea
8:28
ceremony. I think that's really a good
8:31
lens of looking into the traditional Japanese society is
8:35
that there is really, really rigid class segregations between
8:40
the different, you know, demographic cohorts and tea
8:43
practitioners. And participants of tea
8:45
practitioner are just so systematically insulated from
8:49
the farmers, which are historical, has been
8:52
historically considered as lower class of the society.
8:55
They don't really want to touch or learn about them.
8:58
I think that was the reality. Yeah.
9:01
And you know, some of what our previous guests have said, I
9:04
think it was David, is a part of the role of the Tashi or the tea
9:07
blender, the tea purveyor, the brand that you were buying from
9:11
was kind of bridge that gap from the agriculture.
9:14
They need to understand the agriculture in order to create a
9:17
consistently tasting product, but then they also need to
9:21
understand down the insurance and outs of high society and
9:23
sort of, you know, insulate them exactly as you said, almost and
9:28
learn how to sell it to the scoop of people.
9:30
It's it's fascinating. The whole, the whole story is
9:33
fascinating, but I'm, I'm just so intrigued that in about 100
9:36
year times span a little bit less actually.
9:40
We went from treasuring old trees and maybe they didn't have
9:45
the language at the time, but the net genetic diversity of
9:48
seed propagated teas to a handful of of genetically
9:52
identical clones. Like there's like Attack of the
9:55
Clones on Japan that will happen systematically from the 1960s to
10:00
like the 1980s. And it's like wiped out a lot of
10:03
inherent genetic diversity. I'm sure some of it was saved at
10:06
the T research institutes, but 100% not all of it was saved.
10:10
I mean, after picking Zyri and picking cultivars ourselves, we
10:16
really had come to the understanding of how much easier
10:20
to deal with cultivars versus thyroid cultivation, harvest.
10:24
Everything is just so much easier with cultivar.
10:27
And I believe it's really a financial and economical
10:30
decision for people to make at the time to switch from thyroid
10:34
to cultivar. And for anyone that didn't
10:37
wanted to switch, they probably end up just getting out compete
10:41
and died by all these other tea farmers or tea companies.
10:45
And and I think similar things happened in China too.
10:49
It's just that China is so vast that so many of these Goo shoes
10:53
and Cyrus just end up getting forgotten in the mountain.
10:55
And you know, for so many years really in China too, goo shoe
11:00
was not priced. It can be sold for a slightly
11:03
higher price, but like there's no collectors or connoisseurs
11:07
chasing after them with big money.
11:09
It was really until the 1st poor bubble that the people start to
11:12
notice this concept and, you know, value this concept.
11:16
And China was just so lucky that there's so many of these Zai
11:19
rise with Tai Cha that's, you know, or Chun Tijong.
11:22
That's the names that they use here.
11:24
And obviously those trees gets past 100 years old will, you
11:29
know, gets called gushu that just end up surviving because
11:32
they got forgotten and. Well, China's at a unique case,
11:35
right? Like, you know, in the 1800s,
11:37
you had the century of humiliation right after the war,
11:42
right? Like China went to Cultural
11:44
Revolution and collectivized agriculture, right?
11:47
There are a lot of external forces too that were preventing,
11:51
you know, high society from enjoying 100 year old trees.
11:56
I was just in Laos earlier this year and but the northern part
12:02
of Laos is basically you're not. It's the same mountain, it's the
12:05
same climate, it's the same tree.
12:08
And they share a lot of similarities.
12:10
But the difference between the Laotian side of the mountain is
12:14
that teas are not making as much money as, you know, teas being
12:18
harvest on the Chinese side. They have less commercial
12:22
outlets to sell their tea. And it makes much better
12:25
economical sense to plant bananas and rubber trees in the
12:30
mountain versus saving all the goo shoes.
12:32
So it was really unfortunate and saddening to see that in some
12:37
facades of some very beautiful mountains, trees are getting
12:41
eradicated. It was a desert of banana trees
12:45
in all those places. It was really, really sad to
12:47
see. But on the other hand, people
12:49
needs to eat. People needs to survive.
12:51
Laos is in much worse economical state than China.
12:56
And people need to find ways to, you know, fill up their stomach.
12:59
Yeah. So it's, it's the sad reality
13:02
about tea being a business, right, Being a human activity.
13:06
And people need to survive. And if people doesn't survive,
13:11
you know, the tea trees won't survive either because, you
13:14
know, the lands need to be repurposed for other, you know,
13:17
agriculture activities. No business, no tea.
13:20
Yeah, I mean, no business, no tea.
13:22
And even with a lot of these, you know, with a lot of these
13:25
old trees, with the fall of the Shogun and the Meiji
13:28
Restoration, right, a lot of these macho farmers who were
13:32
basically, you know, you know, benefactors of a state
13:36
controlled monopoly on shaded cultivation and during the Edo
13:39
period completely lost their pay patrons and they went out of
13:42
business. I actually, it's probably a more
13:44
existential, the most existential event that ever
13:47
happened to matcha was this Meiji Restoration, right?
13:51
And then even, you know, you know, even 100 years ago in the,
13:54
the early 20th century, you know, the, the practitioner base
13:58
thankfully shifted to girls schools and, you know, the good
14:02
wives and wives mothers policy that, you know, made a whole new
14:06
generation of, of matcha practitioners to support that
14:09
industry. Like the, the demand for matcha
14:12
has really ebbed and flowed and waxed and waned and gone through
14:16
these cycles. And you know, it's as we moved
14:19
into the mid 20th century, that shift from seed propagated
14:22
design right there just probably wasn't enough of a market and
14:26
enough people making quality distinctions on tree age
14:28
anymore. You know, people stopped caring
14:31
and, you know, yields matters, frost resistance matters.
14:35
And even like the secondary implications, right?
14:38
Like how do you value a xyri plot when you produce, I don't
14:43
know, 100 KGS of Oku Midori or Salmidori, right?
14:47
It has a commodity, right? People generally know know what
14:51
the yield is. That can be tons of research
14:54
dumped into how to best fertilize those cultivars, how
14:57
to best, how to do pest control for those cultivars, how those
15:01
get valued on the market and traded between people, right?
15:05
Like I don't think anyone's paying like $600 a KG for Oku
15:09
Midori wholesale, right? Like but people would do that
15:12
for Asahi right? Like it's so much easier to
15:15
value, right? And even the job of these
15:17
chashis probably drastically changed.
15:20
This is my dream research project, but I I think it's a
15:23
little ambitious given my language skills is to document
15:27
the skill difference and transition from xyra to
15:31
cultivars. All of these blending masters,
15:34
how do you go from blending like 10,000 unique plots of tea from
15:40
genetically diverse places grown all over Japan and blending them
15:44
into a product into a few dozen cultivars, right?
15:48
Like the mental model and the shift, Like, how did that
15:52
happen? It was from using, you know,
15:54
mixing paint, essentially what they're doing now from a few
15:58
primary colors to like dealing with like, I don't know, all of
16:02
the natural pigments of the natural world and trying to
16:04
blend them into colors. Like there must have been some
16:07
skill that was lost or much. Easier job for everybody
16:11
switching from thyroid to cultivar.
16:14
Everyone so many benefits too. And of course there's loss in
16:18
genetic diversity, which I want to get into in the piece anyway,
16:21
that's not what this episode is about.
16:23
Although we every time we talk about Chinese matcha, I feel
16:25
like we have to sort of front load our our Japanese matcha
16:29
nerdness because it sometimes Chinese matcha feels like a
16:33
little bit of a taboo topic. But recently we both got some
16:36
very interesting context as to what's going on in the matcha
16:39
world. And this will be released after
16:41
we release the rise of Chinese matcha.
16:44
But we're learning even more. And you know, a large part of
16:47
this podcast is to document our learning journey.
16:49
And we both independently have had some really interesting
16:52
experience and knowledge with Chinese matcha.
16:55
So Sam, you just came back from a very interesting trip into two
16:59
different places, doing matcha cultivation or part of the
17:03
matcha cultivation supply chain in China.
17:06
Yeah, so my friend and I actually went to two places, one
17:11
in Hubei and the other one is in Henan, which are geographically
17:15
pretty close to each other. The one in Hubei was actually a
17:19
farm set up by a Japanese farmer working with local governments
17:23
and local farmers that are making some pretty interesting
17:26
tea on the menu. Not on the menu on the
17:29
introduction, a panel. They actually set up a ginormous
17:32
panel that that shows their company information in the
17:36
middle of the T fuel. And they didn't, they did, they
17:39
did. It was just some generic
17:41
information about, you know, the, the, the size of the farm.
17:44
It was 30 acre, which is pretty large actually, and also the
17:48
cultivar. So on the panel, they said they
17:51
planned launching 43 Zhongcha 10108.
17:56
And then there was a #1, which is a kind of like a Hubei Tea
18:03
Institute cultivar that were historically all used for green
18:07
tea. And now they're planning them to
18:09
get turned into tensha. But we've heard that they were
18:13
planting Japanese cultivar too. And it was pretty obvious when
18:17
we visit the farm because there was this like little plot of
18:21
land out of a seed of green Trent bushes that was sitting
18:26
underneath raised Tana. And everything else was either
18:29
unshaded or direct shaded with white cloth to actually one
18:33
layer of white cloth and one layer of black cloth.
18:35
But there was this like little plot of land sitting right next
18:39
to the tea processing factory that has raised Tana.
18:42
And by the thin shape of the tea leaf, we think it's probably
18:47
avoquita. But that it's not that much.
18:51
It's not a lot of tea, I tell you that.
18:54
I think the reason why they're not saying that they're planning
18:57
Yaquita is because I don't think those bushes were legally
19:02
imported into China. And which, you know, comes a
19:07
very interesting question like where they get their tea from.
19:11
And that leads to our second visit in this farm in Xinjiang.
19:16
So my friend and I was were thinking about setting an
19:19
experimental plot in Guangzhou and we were looking for some,
19:23
you know, seedlings from all over China.
19:25
And we, you know, during our research, we end up encountering
19:29
this tea farmer selling tea breeders selling seedlings in
19:33
this place in Xinyang that supposedly selling Yabukita and
19:36
Oku Midori. And we were like, oh wow, that's
19:38
interesting. So we decided to visit them and
19:41
it turns out that they were supplier for this Hubei farm.
19:45
In the early days, they were selling them seedlings of
19:48
Japanese cultivar. And how they end up getting
19:51
those cultivar was even more interesting.
19:53
So back in the 90s, there was this honeymoon period between
19:56
China and in Japan. And, you know, China was just,
19:59
you know, trying to walk out from the devastation of Cultural
20:02
Revolution and collectivization. And there were a lot of these
20:06
poverty elevation project and they were attracting a lot of
20:11
these foreign capitals to trying to elevate, you know, different
20:15
areas of people from poverty. And one of the project in
20:19
Xinjiang was that the local government was working with a
20:22
Japanese tea company trying to set up Japanese tea farms.
20:26
Japanese style tea farms in the local area and they brought in
20:30
Japanese tea cultivars. They brought in Japanese tea
20:33
processing equipment. There was a, we didn't actually
20:36
see it, but supposedly there were two lines of very old timer
20:40
Japanese tea steamers on being set up in one of the the tea
20:45
factories. And at the time they were trying
20:47
to produce Sentra and Gokro, but later on they're repurposing
20:51
them for producing A tensha. But I've heard that, you know,
20:55
it was not very high quality tensha.
20:57
The setup was not tuned to make tensha to begin with, but people
21:01
were trying anyways. It was super interesting.
21:04
So Xinyang is famous for making a very specific and reputable
21:10
type of green tea called Xinyang Maojian that can be sold for
21:13
actually pretty high price within China.
21:15
And when we arrived at the farm, the tea farmer brought me a part
21:19
of Xinyang and brewed green tea. And the tea has this very weird
21:24
tingly spice kind of flavor in it.
21:29
And that didn't taste like, you know, other Japanese or other
21:34
Chinese green tea that I've tried before.
21:37
And he told us that this was 80% Yabukita.
21:43
They used Yabukita just as it is, as any other Chinese tea
21:48
being grown in the area. And they, they used Chinese
21:51
method to process that into green tea.
21:53
And that was super interesting. Anyway, so we, we end up
21:56
visiting the tea farms. I sawed a lot of these actually
22:01
very old trees, and so they were planted there in the 90s.
22:05
So they're about 20-30 years old by now.
22:07
And they were supposedly all yapuquita, and they look like
22:12
yapuquita from afar. They all have these like very
22:15
thin kind of narrow shape of tea leaves.
22:17
But when you look up close, some trees definitely look different
22:23
than the others. Like they plan a lot of these
22:26
Aspen trees in the tea farm as kind of like a natural coverage
22:30
or to boost, you know, biodiversity.
22:33
But underneath some of these tree canopies, some leaves, some
22:38
Yappaquitas just look significantly more like shaded
22:43
tea leaves than others. Like some Yabuki had really
22:46
developed these like very glossy fat Sheen on the surface of the
22:50
leaf versus some other, you know, tea bushes just sitting
22:54
right next to it. And none of these tea bushes are
22:57
shaded. Now these, this is a seedling
22:59
propagation facility, a garden. They're not, you know, turning
23:04
out of these tea into tension. They're just trying to produce
23:07
more seedlings. So that's when I asked them like
23:10
how how come they look so different?
23:12
And the tea farmer was telling me that, oh, some of these are
23:15
actually sea propagated. So they were, yeah, they were
23:19
using Yabukita seeds and then replant them into the local
23:23
area. So that was super interesting.
23:27
Apparently that's how a lot of the Wazooka Zyrai came from were
23:30
from Yabukita seeds, and it's sort of not xyri lineage comes
23:36
from a cult of our seed. Yeah, yeah.
23:38
And also the landscape really matters.
23:41
This whole tea farm that we visit sitting on a once was a
23:46
riverbed. So it's both very clay, clayish
23:50
soil and sandy soil, which is very similar to soil conditions
23:55
in Uji. And the farmer was telling me a
23:58
very identical story that we heard from Sooji Song is that
24:02
pure sandy soil is actually not good for planting Yapukita
24:06
because it needs fertilizer and you need some clay soil to be
24:10
able to retain the fertilizer in the land.
24:12
And so they somehow independently discovered that
24:15
too, because that's really not a criteria for you to to produce a
24:19
high quality Chinese tea. You want more drainage versus,
24:23
you know, less drainage, which was also very interesting.
24:25
Wow. It's quite difficult to resist
24:28
the urge of just trying to Commission a plot of land and,
24:32
you know, trying to make some tensile out of it.
24:35
So, so this is interesting. So it came in the 90s in the
24:38
form of poverty alleviation where during the sort of golden
24:43
era between golden period or honeymoon period, I think you
24:46
guys call it, between China and Japan.
24:49
And then they tried making sencha and gokoro.
24:51
And then later matcha imported some Japanese processing
24:54
equipment. And then at some point, the
24:56
Japanese kind of abandoned this project.
24:58
There's all the Shabukita here, which they're turning into local
25:01
green tea. And now we have this matcha
25:03
explosion. I'm sure this guy has a very
25:06
good business for like I was supposed to be so many producers
25:10
all over China that want these Japanese cultivars or these
25:16
plants with this Japanese heritage.
25:18
I think he's underdiscovered in the sense that there are a lot
25:22
of fakes, there are a lot of fake seedlings, propagation of
25:26
being done in Japan, in China too.
25:28
So he was telling me that it's apparently not that easy to tell
25:34
a Yabaquita or Oka Midori seedlings versus a Chinese
25:38
cultivar. So sometimes some breeders were
25:41
trying to sell you some, you know, like local Chinese
25:45
cultivar or some other random cultivar they end up access has
25:48
access to as as Japanese cultivar.
25:51
So that happens a lot. This guy doesn't necessarily
25:54
have direct control of all these tea gardens.
25:58
These tea gardens are actually owned by separate farmers and he
26:02
has to navigate through all these farmers to be able to
26:06
cultivate all these tea bushes pending his criteria and doing
26:11
all these politics underneath the table.
26:13
Apparently it's very deep water and, and it's part of the reason
26:16
why the Japanese pulled out in the early 2000.
26:19
And what's also very interesting is that the Hubei Tea farm, the
26:23
Japanese owned tea farm that we visited earlier, actually tried
26:27
to negotiate with this Xinjiang, with this Hunan tea farm and the
26:31
local government to initially wanted to start their tea
26:35
plantation and their tea processing facility in Henan
26:38
versus Hubei. And somehow, you know, they
26:41
didn't end up reaching to a deal.
26:44
And this uncle was kind of hinting on, you know, it was the
26:48
politics that let those Japanese end up choosing Hubei versus
26:52
Henan. Yeah, it could be very
26:54
different. And they could actually have a
26:56
lot more access to Yabukita. And older Yabukita and all of
27:01
these seed growth teas. It's at the Paris Tea Festival.
27:04
There are a couple French producers of tea.
27:07
Some of them were from Brittany and the West Coast of France.
27:09
Some of them were in the Pyrenees down closer to Basque
27:12
Country. And what's interesting is
27:14
they're all kind of, I don't want to call them hippy dippy
27:16
exactly, but they're much more like naturalistically minded
27:20
people. And you know, it's easy to make
27:23
judgments about European, you know, produce tea, but all of
27:28
them or like when you talk to them, they're like, it's like
27:30
super important to them that they're not using cuttings and
27:34
that they've imported seeds and they're planting from seeds so
27:37
that these seeds have a taproot and can access the local
27:41
minerals, etcetera. And it's like much more
27:43
important to them for the health of the land, etcetera.
27:45
And it's interesting, I really feel like it's the future or you
27:50
know, these seeds where you don't have perfect clones, but
27:52
you know who the parents are. So you have some sense of what's
27:56
coming, but you still let nature do do a little bit of mixing and
28:00
matching, probably a lot more more labor.
28:02
But I really like this kind of movement that's going on.
28:06
And it'd be really cool if someone in China, you know, is
28:08
doing it from this. Like we planted a seed
28:11
propagated plot but from a known linear genetic lineage.
28:15
So Ryan, you told me that you went to this talk in the Paris
28:20
Tea Festival that was also about Chinese matcha.
28:23
So what about it? So yeah, it was very
28:26
serendipitous. I literally went to the only
28:28
talk that was going on at that time.
28:30
I didn't even know what it was when I was entering.
28:32
And it's like, oh wow, it's about Guejo matcha.
28:35
Unfortunately, the talk is in French and I can understand a
28:39
decent amount of French, especially if this if it's about
28:41
tea, because the words that were not in the French were from
28:44
Chinese, which I recently vocabulary.
28:47
But I've also learned that this Google live translation feature
28:50
is pretty good. So I listened to the full talk
28:54
basically with subtitles, which the side benefit of get, you
28:59
know, live transcription and translation is that I was able
29:03
to take screenshots in real time of sort of the narrative that
29:06
was being presented to this French audience about Chinese
29:10
matcha. So the speaker's name I'm
29:13
unfortunately going to butcher because her last name is it's a
29:16
little too difficult for me to pronounce, but I'll try my best.
29:19
And the speaker was Catherine Legevant.
29:22
My apologies for for mispronouncing that, most
29:25
likely. But she's the author of a very,
29:27
very famous book written in French on Chinese tea called
29:31
Empire of Tea, Le Empire du TE, a very famous French author.
29:35
And I think it's one of them, considered one of the most
29:37
knowledgeable people on Chinese tea in France.
29:40
And she gave this talk about Chinese matcha, and the audience
29:44
were over 100 French people. And I was thinking, wow, it,
29:48
this is such a weird and interesting talk.
29:50
Is it? Everyone seems so open minded to
29:54
this idea of good matcha being grown from anywhere.
29:57
And she opened this talk where she said, you know, a couple
30:00
years ago, she didn't know much about Chinese matcha.
30:02
Everyone, we're saying all of these negative things about it.
30:06
But, you know, she's an expert in Chinese tea.
30:08
She knows, you know, she's been to China many, many times.
30:11
She wrote a book on Chinese tea. The Chinese are perfectly
30:15
capable of producing extremely high quality tea.
30:18
And she was like, she was like, I don't totally understand all
30:21
of this negativity probably coming from the Americans around
30:24
Chinese grown matcha. And she said, you know, she did
30:27
a lot more research and she's done trips now, many different
30:29
trips to Hubei, to Guizhou, to Jijiang to learn directly from
30:33
the producers about what's going on with the machisen in China.
30:37
And she's like, you know, the view that China is producing
30:41
industrial grade destined to go into food matcha and that it's
30:47
very low quality is entirely outdated and that they are
30:51
indeed producing a fantastic product that tastes good with
30:54
good color. And she also mentioned what
30:57
we've been saying too, is that a lot of the tea that's being
31:00
grown in China is actually commissioned by the Japanese
31:03
either through partial ownership or through contract.
31:07
And that it's going back to Japan and getting labeled as a
31:10
Japanese product and that this is is not at all uncommon.
31:14
And it's that that was very interesting, the way she
31:17
presented the argument. And then you know what, what
31:20
I've been thinking about it. And there's such, there's a
31:23
battle of narrative. There's a battle of story over
31:27
matcha between China and Japan, right?
31:30
The the most conservative people on the Japanese side will argue
31:35
that much is from Japan. They were the ones who invented
31:38
shaded cultivation, which makes modern matcha matcha.
31:42
And there's this whole narrative about the centuries of skill.
31:46
And actually specifically, it was really just with an uji
31:48
because they were the only people allowed to do shaded
31:51
cultivation for all of these years.
31:52
And you know, there's various forms of this argument that much
31:55
is Japanese. It's the center of Japanese tea
31:57
ceremony. The Chinese hadn't been
31:59
producing it since the Song dynasty, which is about a 7 or
32:03
800 year gap in production. But I think it's a decent
32:06
argument. But the Chinese also have a
32:09
perfectly legitimate argument that it is a Sinosphere product.
32:14
And she was presenting that. You know, the origins of matcha
32:19
are undisputedly in China, you know, referencing Tang and Song
32:24
dynasty tea ceremony and how it came to Japan, even when tea
32:28
first came to Japan during the Kamakura period.
32:31
But it was really thought of as a Chinese product.
32:34
And it was the influence of Chinese Buddhism and people
32:37
studying Buddhism in China. And then it just kind of got
32:39
preserved and perfected in Japan.
32:42
And you know, you can argue both sides of this narrative, but
32:45
there's absolutely no question that China has a legitimate
32:50
claim to having some narrative control over the fact that they
32:56
touch matcha history. And that's never going away.
32:59
And we've heard that so many times, so many Chinese matcha
33:02
people, people promoting Chinese matcha is, you know, this
33:05
cultural tie. And these French people are
33:10
honestly much more open minded than Americans are to this
33:15
argument, this concept that products can be good anywhere.
33:18
These cultural ties. You know, she also talked a lot
33:21
about, you know, overproduction and pesticides and how most of
33:26
which is a very strong argument for a European audience that
33:29
modern Japanese agriculture is is not very environmentally
33:34
friendly if you care about pesticides.
33:36
And most of it is above the EU pesticide residue limits,
33:39
especially the best matcha. And when you stack all of these
33:43
narratives, it's a really compelling picture, especially
33:46
when it comes to supply and demand.
33:48
So she also mentioned what everyone does is the Japanese
33:51
farmers are aging and they don't really have the infrastructure
33:54
set up to scale much of production to meet global
33:57
demand. And that China is just so much
33:59
better equipped. And not only are they better
34:02
equipped to scale because of land, because of government
34:05
help, because of the fact that they already have Japanese
34:08
cultivars and Japanese processing equipment, but they
34:11
are scaling with global exports in mind, right?
34:14
They're not doing this level of intensive pesticide spraying
34:18
because they know that the Chinese domestic market for
34:21
matcha is so much smaller than the international demand.
34:25
And that's what this whole modern Malta matcha industry in
34:29
China is built off of, is built off of exports and that it needs
34:32
to be export compliant. And she was mentioning that they
34:35
have, you know, export to over 60 countries now and that
34:38
despite the sheer production numbers, if you count that as
34:41
matcha, then it's the largest matcha producing country in the
34:45
world. And for the case of this
34:47
podcast, I'd like to refer, we're going to call it Chinese
34:51
matcha and not mota. And I think the distinction
34:53
should be in its characteristics.
34:55
The more I think about this matcha that looks and tastes
34:58
like Japanese matcha, they're processing Japanese cultivars.
35:01
They come from proper tension processing equipment that looks,
35:04
tastes and feels like Japanese matcha should be called matcha.
35:08
It's matcha with Japanese characteristics, right?
35:10
And anything that's like very obviously not whether or not
35:14
it's using Chinese cultivars or some other method, you know,
35:17
maybe this can be called Mota. I I think this is a better
35:20
working definition. But what's interesting is that
35:24
in in Chinese, whether or not it's the kanji that has the hand
35:28
radical that the Japanese used to spell out matcha, or without
35:32
the hand radical, more cha. In Chinese they all pronounce
35:35
more cha, so it's the same thing.
35:37
So she mentions, too, that, you know, Japan has really hit its
35:40
ceiling and that the ceiling is structural, like labor, aging
35:44
farmers, no one to take over and it's really capped.
35:47
And like we're almost fortunate to have China to sort of re
35:52
bring back their own culture and how and it's been readapted and
35:56
to bring it back and to have a new era sort of of Chinese
35:59
matcha. And it was a really compelling
36:01
argument. She was also talking and then
36:03
she spent the rest of the time talking about different Chinese
36:06
tea production regions for matcha, Guizhou, Hubei,
36:09
Zhejiang, and, and presenting a real tawar argument saying, you
36:13
know, it's, it's very good conditions.
36:15
They're using Japanese processing equipment.
36:18
And this is a really compelling narrative.
36:19
And what was interesting was 1, she got no pushback from the
36:23
audience. And when I looked around,
36:26
everyone was legitimately open minded and were, what's the
36:31
right way to put this? They were really receptive to
36:34
this idea of Chinese matcha being sort of the origin.
36:38
They're taking back some of their own culture and this like
36:41
very American idea of cultural appropriation and like the fact
36:46
that the, you know, people shouldn't be doing that to
36:49
someone else's culture, etcetera.
36:51
I didn't get any, any of that from this audience.
36:54
And I, I was, you know, sitting, I was standing at the back of
36:57
the room and I was thinking to myself, wow, You know, if you
37:01
look at a battle of narratives between Chinese matcha and
37:05
Japanese matcha, the Japanese matcha needs to step up.
37:09
Because this was such a compelling and interesting
37:13
argument to all like this group of 100 French people.
37:16
I could feel it. I could tell, I could see it on
37:18
people's faces. I could tell by the questions
37:20
that they asked that they are much more receptive to this than
37:24
the Americans. I don't know how much you can
37:26
project that onto other European countries.
37:29
But for a French audience, at least, it was a very powerful
37:33
narrative. And you have this sort of
37:35
silent, not silent battle of narratives going on between a
37:39
Chinese and Japanese product. But, you know, the reality is
37:43
too, and she talked about this as well, is it the reason the
37:47
Chinese are doing this is primarily for poverty
37:50
alleviation. There is still a lot of very
37:53
rural places in China that are very poor.
37:56
We heard this when we were at Canton Fair.
37:58
She was saying this is a major effort of the Chinese
38:01
government. And even in the 1990s, as you
38:04
learn, the Japanese were trying to help fight poverty
38:08
alleviation in China by planting Japanese cultivars there.
38:12
And honestly, I find that to be an incredibly compelling
38:15
argument. It's designed, the whole system
38:18
is designed to use less pesticides.
38:20
They're using similar cultivars that are very suitable for shady
38:24
cultivation. And you're supporting people and
38:26
an industry where people are like, I don't want to say
38:30
starving, but they're living in poverty.
38:32
And you need, you're helping lift up a group of people that
38:36
really need the help. And I don't put it like want to
38:40
knock down Chinese matcha just because, you know, it originated
38:44
in Japan. I think they have every right to
38:46
do what they're doing. And I think it's actually doing
38:49
more social good in China buying Chinese matcha than it is in
38:53
Japan, which, you know, you have people knocking down people's
38:58
door trying to get supply. Like Japan has a demand problem,
39:04
meaning it's too much demand, it's too much headache, it's too
39:08
much inquiry, it's too much dealing with these foreigners
39:12
that it's complicated to export. It's complicated to have like
39:15
paperwork that's complicated to pay people in Japan, but it's so
39:19
much headache. You can get this feeling that a
39:21
lot of Japanese tea producers just don't want to deal with all
39:25
of this influx, right? Like it's, they have the exact
39:29
opposite problem. And, you know, I think in just
39:31
so many scenarios, if you're just looking for a very tasty
39:34
product or even a specialty product, there's a lot that
39:37
China has to offer and it's going to lift people up who
39:41
honestly need the help more than the Japanese tea farmers.
39:45
I'm not saying we shouldn't support them.
39:47
I'm just saying I would rather help someone that is in poverty
39:51
than someone who's driving a nice car and has no problem
39:55
selling their tea and who's been educated and who has social
39:58
safety Nets, right, who has assets, you know, rather than,
40:02
you know, this poverty alleviation.
40:05
Yeah, it's, well, I'm Chinese and I'm definitely biased, I
40:09
tell you that. It's a lot to unfold.
40:11
I feel like I think in a parallel universe and the best
40:15
outcome would be China and Japan working together to define a
40:20
narrative together because this has always been a product, a
40:26
result of cultural exchange between China and Japan.
40:31
And for the large part of the Japanese narrative, I don't
40:35
think there's any doubt that macho originally come from
40:37
China. Like everybody is actually
40:40
talking about that in Japan, which I find a little bit
40:42
unfortunate to see is that in China there is a under
40:47
acknowledgement of Japan's world in preserving matcha as a
40:51
product historically. Like you can say anything about,
40:54
you know, China invented matcha, which is thing largely true, but
40:57
without Japan, there will be no matcha for anyone to enjoy
41:01
there. There will be no matcha boom.
41:03
There will be no matcha latte because there will be no powder
41:05
green tea. The culture will be lost for
41:08
hundreds of years ago. And in China, you rarely see
41:12
people acknowledging Japan's role in this whole thing, which
41:15
I think, you know, deserves some respects and, and mentioned in,
41:20
you know, in, in forming the Chinese side of narrative as
41:23
well. Because you cannot just for a
41:26
lot of these places like Tianmu Shan or Jingshan that proclaim
41:30
that there are the origin of Chinese matcha mucha, there is a
41:34
very obvious missing component about like what happened after
41:39
Ming Dynasty. Like, like there's no matcha
41:42
being produced in China. Like, like, like how can you
41:46
retained a discourse of some culture that has already has
41:50
been lost and and somehow framing that as a continuous
41:53
practice? I think that's not fair, right?
41:55
And I think like you really need to look, you really need to zoom
42:01
out to a broader context. You really need to include both
42:04
China and Japan throughout history to form a very
42:08
comprehensive and coherent story about matcha.
42:12
And I think that's what's really lacking right now.
42:14
And unfortunately, there's really, I would say not enough
42:19
impetus and not enough foundation for both countries to
42:23
work together to, to figure that out because, you know, China and
42:27
Japan are not getting along very well.
42:28
So yeah, I think it's very difficult.
42:31
But but, but, but if you really understand the history and you
42:35
know how much has evolved and also the modern context, I think
42:39
both Chinese matcha and Japanese matcha are matcha.
42:42
It's actually a continuous culture that started in China,
42:48
ends up being preserved in Japan and are and is coming back to
42:52
China again. And in between, it also passed
42:56
through Korea, which is also a pretty interesting matcha
43:00
production tawa right now in the contemporary era.
43:02
But but if you really want to form a coherent and solid
43:05
argument about what matcha is, you cannot just talk about
43:10
Japanese matcha or Chinese matcha.
43:12
You need to talk about everybody.
43:14
Yeah, the idea of a coherent narrative kind of a super
43:16
interesting because everyone usually picks some side, but
43:20
it's really tell actually a full and complete story.
43:24
It's much more nuanced. And you're right, it's really
43:26
actually cultural exchange. And that cultural exchange, if
43:29
you just look between China and Japan, has happened twice, once
43:32
when it went and now it's coming back.
43:35
And probably when it went, there was all sorts of judgment going
43:38
across and information moves slower.
43:41
But I'm sure if information moved as fast as it could, the
43:44
Chinese would be looking over and say, what are they doing
43:50
with our products? It's which I, you know, it's a,
43:53
it's a human reaction. It makes sense that this is the
43:56
reaction of the Japanese when they look at the Chinese.
43:59
But yeah, this narrative battle over the next couple of years is
44:02
kind of interesting and. It's it's what, it's what makes
44:05
Mata life. It's what makes Mata living
44:08
culture. It's this constant flash and
44:11
fusion of narratives and people. It's what makes it interesting.
44:16
Absolutely. Yeah, Well, I'm shocked.
44:19
I'm shocked by your learnings from this trip.
44:22
I did not realize it went back to the 90s and it's literally
44:26
the oldest evidence. I guess we kind of knew that
44:29
like there was something going on, you know, before 2000s from
44:33
stuff we've heard. But this is like the most direct
44:36
primary source story that we've we have blinking it because I
44:39
know that I, the big Nicho producer, set up their first
44:43
subsidiary in Jijiang in 2005, but that that was like the first
44:47
thing that I had heard. The oldest one I direct
44:50
knowledge of anyway. All right, well, I, I think
44:54
that's all we have today. Thanks so much for listening.
44:56
If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing and friend,
44:59
find yourself some interesting Chinese matcha to taste.
45:02
It's very outdated, this idea that it's sun shaded industrial
45:07
stuff that's destined for your cookie.
45:09
And there's absolutely Usacha and even koicha worthy matcha
45:13
being produced in China. You just got to find it.
45:15
All right, thanks so much for listening and we'll see you on
45:17
the next one. Bye.