ABSTRACT
Yunnan’s frontier region has a long history of cultivating and marketing cash crops, including Pu’er tea. The tea has been cultivated for several centuries in Yunnan’s Sipsongpanna region, a part of China within the Zomia area. From Emperor Kangxi to Qianlong of the Qing dynasty (1662-1796), several groups of Han Chinese migrated and settled in the trading centres associated with Pu’er tea. The boom in the Pu’er tea trade transformed this remote indigenous area into a dynamic zone of commercial exchange and cross-cultural interaction. By focussing on the Pu’er tea trade in Sipsongpanna, this chapter examines the various roles played by four groups of people in fostering such interactions in the trading networks: the local administrators of the imperial government, the local lowland people known as the Tai-Lue, the highland peoples, and the Han immigrants. The author argues that that activities associated with the trade in Pu’er tea helped mitigate conflict among the above-mentioned ethnic groups with regard to environmental adaptation, social structures, languages, and religions. The trade in Pu’er tea contributed to the shaping of Sipsongpanna as a trans-ethnic and cross-cultural commercial frontier, which in turn led to unprecedented economic prosperity in the region.
