All This in Tea

There are a couple people I know who are mad about tea. Tea probably does not get the love that coffee does in America, despite being a much older and more widely enjoyed drink internationally.

This documentary is about a Westerner, David Lee Hoffman, who travels to China often to buy tea directly from small farmers for his premium tea store.  Hoffman has cultivated his expertise over many years of visiting China, able to smell a bag of tea leaves and determine if it has taken up the chemical odors of fertilizer or pesticides.  He seems to have made quite a lucrative business, paying out several hundred yuan for a big bag of tea that I'm sure in the grand scheme of things, are worth several thousands in the West. 

Hoffman tells us he prefers to go with small farmers instead of factory farms, as they have better quality and cheaper prices. Unfortunately he has to deal with a lot of China's red tape and bureaucracy, and being a Westerner, he finds that part quite a chore. Sometimes he's annoyed to have to play the game even though he knows he has to, with bribes for instance.

While the film shows how he is supporting small farms with his patronage, the tea-selling also feels exploitative in many small ways, for both buyer and seller.  But it does let us in to parts of China that we don't often see, reinforcing images about Chinese bureaucracy that persist today.