China | Tea Bubble Bursts

I have written many times about Puerh Tea and the Maliandao Tea Market in Beijing.

Puerh Tea in the Maliandao Tea Market.

Now the Puerh Tea Business has gone the way of Wall Street. See A County in China Sees Its Fortunes in Tea Leaves Until a Bubble Bursts.

Saudi Arabia has its oil. South Africa has its diamonds. And here in China’s temperate southwest, prosperity has come from the scrubby green tea trees that blanket the mountains of fabled Menghai County. Over the past decade, as the nation went wild for the region’s brand of tea, known as Pu’er, farmers bought minivans, manufacturers became millionaires and Chinese citizens plowed their savings into black bricks of compacted Pu’er.

But that was before the collapse of the tea market turned thousands of farmers and dealers into paupers and provided the nation with a very pungent lesson about gullibility, greed and the perils of the speculative bubble. “Most of us are ruined,” said Fu Wei, 43, one of the few tea traders to survive the implosion of the Pu’er market. “A lot of people behaved like idiots.”

But hey, it sounds like a buyer’s market to me. I may have to pop down to Beijing and buy a couple of tons of Puerh.