One Hundred Kilograms In, Five Kilograms Out
茶膏 — tea paste — is a uniquely Chinese form, older than it looks. It began in the Southern Tang, matured under the Song, and reached its height in the Qing, when Yunnan's local chieftains extracted it by simple large-cauldron boiling. The Qianlong court's imperial tea bureau refined that into 压制制膏 — a room-temperature pressing method run through as many as 186 separate steps, reserved entirely for palace use. No one outside the court drank it.
The modern process replaces the cauldron with low-temperature, multi-stage extraction — biotechnology separating the tea's fiber from its liquor, then reducing that liquor back down into a solid, instant form. The yield is the whole story: roughly 5 kilograms of paste from 100 kilograms of loose tea. Almost everything is left behind; what remains is concentrated.
This particular paste, 涤尘, started as 2018 ripe puer from ecological old-tree gardens in Menghai, blended and extracted in 2019. Each piece is close to a gram, meant to dissolve directly — in a gaiwan, in a thermos, in a cup of hot water with nothing else needed. The Qing-dynasty pharmacological text 本草纲目拾遗 described old puer paste, black as lacquer, as the finest cure for a hangover. Whether or not that still holds, the paste is doing the same thing it always did: turning a hundred kilograms of leaf down into something small enough to carry in a pocket.