Chinatown Chen pu

It was a jab at you know who. Hopefully the wrapper differences don't come down to a blemish. You're right you can only open a wrapper once. My favorite Antiques Road Show segments the China antiques which ain't. My Chinatown Chen pu is #2 from Guess the Wrapper post. The fonts match and it is cheap and not Chen. Sasha don't bother at all except if you every have a yard sale on puer let me know. I know in Chinese black is red except puerh where it is blue. I added the new word Gansu to my puerh vocabulary. It means the finishing taste of puer.

Jim

Michael Plant wrote:

snipped-for-privacy@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com4/12/05

demand

imperfections in

Jim, the wrapper differences do come down to minuscule differences, which might be called blemishes "only" if you were trying to yank my chain. These differences are well documented!

You actually proved my point because you now say that your Chinatown cake is #2, yesterday you said your Chinatown cake was identical to a whole different cake. The 2 wrappers look so similar you didn't realize that they were different teas. The reality is that they were both made at the exact same factory, and the same wrapper was used to wrap any number of totally different teas potentially even hundreds.

The price is definitely more believable at a wholesale cost $1.29 each and a retail $4 each; however your assumption that your Chinatown cake is #2 cannot be substantiated by simply looking at the wrapper alone. You Chinatown tea could have been made from the leaves of an entirely different farm and an entirely different processing recipe. The "generic" wrapper won't make those distinctions. Think of these CNNP wrappers like you would think of the generic "white label" products you see in a drugstore, they simply say Yunnan Qizi Pu'er Cha and not much more. Any number of different teas from different years can be inside of these wrappers.

Here is a solid example from my private collection showing that the wrapper is NOT a comprehensive identifier:

Look at

Now look at tea that is inside of the first wrapper

These 2 teas are on opposite ends of the pu'er spectrum yet they have identical looking wrappers!

Now both of these wrappers look identical because they ARE indeed identical. Both cakes were made at the same Meng Hai factory for the Import/Export distributors. The factory used the exact same wrapper for every cake destined to this Import/Export distributor unless the distributor specifically requested otherwise. In order for them to "request" a different wrapper the distributor would have had to purchase a minimum of 5000 cakes and there would have been a small surcharge. This is seldom done by the Exporters, they are trying to save every RMB/Yuan they can. They don't cater to our "truth in advertising" sensibilities YET!

Mike

I made a mistake, this was a bad example, these 2 wrappers are different.

The brush strokes on the large Chinese font across the top on #2 are slightly thicker than on #1. The English font is about 1 point size larger on #2 as well. The CHA symbol in the middle logo is also different, look at the large cross in the middle of the logo, the arms of the cross on #2 are shorter than the arms on #1. All of these things can be used to point to specific production runs within the factory.

Also on # 1 the word "NATIONAL" was misspelled and actually reads "NATICNAL". This type of misspelling is fairly common on Export wrappers. Another letter that is often wrong is that a "U" will be sometimes be represented by a "V". The misspelled wrappers can usually be associated to a specific date range and factory location with a little bit of research. This is the type of information that gets documented in the Chinese Pu'er books.

Sometimes the differences are on the inner label or on the insert instead. The same outer wrapper might have been used for all production during 7 months where a certain inner label (with a specific typo, defect, or other unique feature) might only have been used for one of those months and then only on a certain specific recipe run. Other differences might be how thick the outer red circle is in mm. Or the diameter of the stylized CHA logo, or even the measurements of the whole sheet of paper, not to mention paper fiber content and thickness.

It is every bit as involved as coin or stamp collecting and the nuances easily mean the difference of thousands of dollars. Yes, I said thousands, a single cake of appropriate pedigree and vintage can easily fetch $3,000 or more at auction in Guangzhou, this is NOT an exception but is rather commonplace.

Mike