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author | zhang weiting

editor | zhan tengyu

title image | dragon well

the wind blew, and the scent of citrus filled the streets.

a large red truck loaded with small green oranges had just arrived at xiping town, anxi, fujian, followed closely by the townspeople on electric donkeys and motorcycles. the truck squeezed through several bends and stopped at the ancestral hall square. the entrance to the square was almost blocked, leaving only a narrow passage.

bags of bulging snakeskin bags were unloaded from the truck, and the people who came with the truck took turns to claim them and take them home.

residents of xiping town line up to receive small green oranges. (photo taken by a reporter from new weekly)

wenqin looked at this scene, and the familiar citrus smell brought her back to last year: she worked ten hours a day, manually hollowing out and draining small green tangerines, then selling them to tea merchants at 1.8 yuan per catty by weight of skin, and finally earned more than 10,000 yuan.

she somewhat missed this hard but steady feeling. after nearly a month of insomnia, she felt pain all over her body and had no strength. "i dare not think about it anymore."

in june this year, wenqin emptied her family savings to buy fancha, a "financial product" named after tea, after hearing the introduction from her relatives and friends. everyone told her that the owner of fancha was from xiping, that the products were stable and had high returns, and that she could earn the same as she had earned in the past year in just one or two months, so they all bought it.

just like any ponzi scheme that ended in failure, the dream that had been brewing in the small town was shattered overnight. on august 3, pantea issued an announcement: a large amount of the company's funds were restricted, and after discussion, the company would undergo debt or equity restructuring.

(photo: longjing)

most people in xiping who have lived in the mountains for many years don’t know what the reorganization means. they only know that the previous company stopped responding to messages overnight, and all the tea shops in the town were closed, as was the head office in guangzhou.

the money is gone, and life is lost.

like a carnival, after the excitement of money and dreams, the town was left in a mess. the remaining people stayed there, aimlessly searching for something useful.

tea history

wang yumei poured a cup of tea and began to recall the past.

she is 76 years old. when she was young, the mountains were all tea plantations. she was a tea plantation worker, and her husband was a team leader in the town, leading the team to open up roads for tea fields and tea plantations in the area under their jurisdiction.

she has participated in almost every step of tea making, from picking, selecting, drying, shaking, frying, to rolling, wrapping, stir-frying and assembling.

anxi is the hometown of the famous tieguanyin tea in china, and tea is the main source of income for the area. it is no exaggeration to say that the road leading to xiping town is paved with tea.

liudou village, xiping town. (photo/photo taken by new weekly reporter)

regarding the history of tea, the people of xiping have basically the same answer: the mother tree of tieguanyin was discovered here during the qing dynasty. in the early republic of china, meiji tea, one of the oldest tea shops in xiping, became the largest tea shop in anxi county. more than half of the tieguanyin produced in anxi is sold abroad through meiji tea.

after that, xiping town became more famous and people benefited from it.

after 1985, xiping had more than 120 tea processing companies, and thousands of tea joint ventures or tea shops in various places at home and abroad. by 1996, xiping town had more than 150 tea companies, of which more than 90 were large-scale production companies.

it is reported that between 1995 and 1999, xiping tieguanyin repeatedly set new highs in the domestic and international auction markets, with 100 grams of tieguanyin tea sold for between hk$34,000 and hk$110,000.

at the end of 2006, the population of xiping town was less than 60,000, but the tea garden area in the town reached 2,467 hectares, the total tea production was 3,430 tons, and the total social sales output value reached 396 million yuan. more than 90% of the town's population is engaged in tea-related work, and the tea farmers' income from the tea industry has increased by more than 20% compared with 2004. in 2008, the per capita net income of farmers in the town was 7,310 yuan.

(photo/"cha jin")

in those years, the town's economy revolved around tea.

wang yumei recalled that during the most prosperous period, merchants and tourists from all over the country flocked in. many restaurants, homestays, and hotels quickly opened up on the streets in the town center, and the streets were often packed with people.

those were busy but happy days. the people in the town depended on tea for their livelihood, and their lives were like tea soup, bitter but sweet. like many small towns, the children of this generation grew up, went out to work, started families, and rarely came back.

what will never come back is the grand occasion of being proud of tea. according to xinmin weekly, in 2008, the quanzhou tea laboratory found that the pesticide residues in xiping tea exceeded the standard.

in 2011, a master's thesis from fujian agriculture and forestry university conducted a survey on pesticide residues and rare earth content in tea samples from five major tea-producing areas in anxi county. the results showed that seven pesticides, including carbofuran and triazophos, were detected in the xiping tea area in the past two years. in addition, the rare earth content in the xiping tea area is also high, concentrated in 2-3.5 mg/kg. according to the "limits of contaminants in food" that year, the rare earth content of tea is ≤2 mg/kg, and the rare earth qualified rate of the entire tea area is only 20%. the total amount of rare earths in the soil and the external spraying of rare earth elements are the main causes of rare earth pollution in oolong tea.

in xiping town, the tea mountains that once supported the town have gradually become deserted. (photo/photo taken by a reporter from new weekly)

as a chain reaction, the local land conditions began to deteriorate. tea fields became clumpy, which made it impossible to guarantee the quality of tea leaves, and even failed to grow qualified leaves, making it impossible to deliver to suppliers. subsequently, some farmlands were abandoned, tea companies closed down, and tea culture parks and exchanges were deserted.

people left the town, and the town gradually moved away from tea.

after the pain

most of those left behind were the elderly, women and children.

li yang and his wife opened a bamboo products store on the street in the center of the town, mainly selling bamboo baskets and winnowing baskets.

business was not good, sometimes there was no customer for the whole day. in order to support their two children, the couple found a side job and set up a barbecue stall near the town basketball court. it was very lively there at night, "whatever makes money", they worked from 6 pm to 2 am the next day, and they did it for ten years.

there are also people who insist on working in tea-related industries.

when li yang and others were trying to make ends meet with various small businesses, the demand for small green tangerines emerged in xiping. some of them were family-style workshops, where several people would unwrap bundles of small green tangerines, pour them into water, soak them, dig out the pulp, remove the skin, and wait for someone to collect them.

people in xiping town are washing small green oranges. (photo taken by a reporter from new weekly)

some are tea factories that have transformed into producing tangerines and pu'er tea. when there is supply, they hire some part-time workers, and a group of people dig the pulp day and night in the factory. wenqin worked in the tea factory last year. because there are equipment and sufficient space, the factory receives more goods. the bamboo trays that were originally used to dry tea leaves are now used to hold green tangerines with only the peel left. after the green tangerines are baked and dried, special people are responsible for stuffing the ripe pu'er tea shipped from other places into them, packaging them, and selling them to other places.

but not everyone can do this kind of high-intensity assembly line work.

elderly people of the same age as wang yumei can only assist with baking, drying and assembly, and it is difficult for them to participate in other links.

about ten years ago, wang yumei's husband suddenly fell ill and needed external support to stand up. every step he took was difficult. the barefoot doctor in the town said it was rheumatism.

but the situation was more serious than she had imagined. soon her husband's fingers became twisted, his knees and feet became swollen, and he could no longer work.

(photo/pexels)

they lived in a two-story building they built themselves, with the second floor basically abandoned. to make life easier, they moved to a small room on the right side of the first floor: the chopping board and stove were on the left side of the door, against the wall; the small door on the right was the bathroom; diagonally opposite was a 1.2-meter wooden bed covered with a colorful quilt; opposite was a refrigerator and a simple wooden storage cabinet, with a pillar in the middle serving as a partition between the kitchen and the bedroom.

the tea market is sluggish, so she can only go wherever there is a shortage of people and do a little bit of everything. more than two months ago, wang yumei found a sanitation job with a monthly salary of less than 2,000 yuan, while her husband's painkillers cost more than 1,000 yuan a month. rural elderly people are strong, and wang yumei never takes the initiative to ask her children for money outside, so she can only do odd jobs everywhere to support her family.

she repeats this life every day: she gets up at daybreak to prepare breakfast; at around four in the morning, she staggers down the gravel road with a slope of 40 degrees to clean the primary school one kilometer away; she has to rush home to cook at noon; and her work for the day ends at 4:30 in the afternoon.

one of the few entertainments in wang yumei's life was chatting with friends of similar age. it was from them that wang yumei first heard of pancha.

"kill the familiar plate"

fujianese people value family and are hospitable. except for rest time, the door of their home is always open, and passers-by are welcome to come in for a drink or two and chat about family matters.

in the past three years, residents have repeatedly seen bentleys driving back from other places, with "fan cha" signs on the body. last june, anxi county held the first "fan cha cup" martial arts invitational competition; during the spring festival this year, the villagers of liudou village watched a grand fireworks show for free. they heard that the fireworks were worth 500,000 yuan.

(photo: longjing)

pancha shops with golden exteriors and white signs opened one after another in the town. at its peak, there were more than ten in the town, with "there was a pancha shop about every 50 meters."

zheng chaogen, the owner of pancha, is a local in anxi. a man who claims to be zheng chaogen's elementary school classmate said that at that time, people believed that investing in pancha products was "guaranteed to make money" and that they could make a year's money in a few months. they firmly believed that there would be no problems with the company, so they just invested in it. he added that he heard that zheng chaogen would come back to worship his ancestors in august of the lunar calendar this year, and the ancestral house he rebuilt with his investment was particularly magnificent. "those who don't believe it can go up the mountain to take a look."

"can such a big thing as ancestor worship be used to deceive people?" the locals said.

according to the recollections of many locals, the road from anxi county to xiping town, as well as the village roads from xiping town to various villages on the mountain, were once covered with advertisements for pancha. the closer you get to zheng chaogen’s hometown, liudou village on the other side of the mountain, the more obvious traces of pancha are: the street lamps in liudou village were covered with signs, which had not been removed until early september.

there is a pancha advertisement hanging high on the road near liudou village. (photo taken by a reporter from new weekly)

some people could not help but try. a friend of qin an started investing 1 million yuan in may last year, and before the incident this year, he added an extra zero to the number.

in february this year, qin an invested 110,000 yuan and earned 37,000 yuan in april. money seemed to have become a string of strange numbers, doubling automatically without any effort. at this time, fancha launched several new products in succession, and he couldn't control himself, "just thinking about making a little more money."

after tasting the sweetness, he invested more and more. in order to invest more, he went to three banks for loans, but only one bank was willing to sign a contract with him.

while qin an was running around in this money game, his mother, who was moving sand at a construction site, also believed her friend's words and secretly used her only savings of more than 10,000 yuan to buy pancha.

the attention and wealth in every corner of the town were quickly drawn to pancha. almost everyone had heard that this was a smooth road to get rich quickly, and they could safely step on the gas and reach the end.

qin an said that some vegetable vendors also pooled their money to buy, each contributing 3,000 yuan and then splitting the money when it arrived. many people also used their business licenses and houses with unpaid loans as collateral to get more money from banks and credit unions in a desperate attempt.

this fellow villager, who was said to have great powers and would grant any request, became their hope of changing their lives.

"if a stranger came to my house and said that selling pan-tea would definitely make money, i would definitely not believe it. but what if it was your relative who said that? that's just taking advantage of the familiarity." li yang recalled that his relative used to ride a bicycle, but a year later he switched to driving a land rover, "i would be lying if i didn't feel tempted." so he and his wife emptied their savings and even used their personal accounts to take out online loans on multiple platforms. without discussing it with each other, the two invested a total of 1.2 million yuan.

li yang's 70-year-old mother lives downstairs from her home. she usually goes out to pick up empty bottles and cardboard, earning only a few dozen yuan a month. similarly, the old woman also secretly joined forces with others and bought nearly 10,000 yuan.

by april and may, more and more people in the town joined the game, all of them recruiting people from their surroundings, friends and relatives, hoping to keep the money within the family, introducing each other and encouraging each other. buying pan-tea seemed to be the "right and smart" thing to do. "if you don't buy it, people will think you are a fool." many people said so.

they watched their friends one after another join the game and make a fortune, so they voluntarily jumped into this vortex and spread it further, pulling their family and friends in until they were submerged.

everyone was dreaming of becoming rich overnight. cracks appeared, but in the frenzy, no one noticed.

an anxi taxi driver recalled that in march this year, the roadside pancha shop quietly changed its name to "liudoucha". one day he picked up a 60-year-old grandmother, who was on the phone in the car: the pancha dealer wanted to transfer the 600,000 yuan principal and more than 100,000 yuan interest to her card, but she refused, saying that she had borrowed more than 1.2 million yuan and would invest more after collecting 2 million yuan.

he couldn't help but interrupt and reminded her about the store name change. "i told you not to invest anymore. get your money back as soon as you can." he patted the steering wheel, his tone getting excited. "but she didn't believe me. she said angrily, 'you're a driver, what do you know?'"

putting life back together

looking at the loan information that was about to be overdue, qin an murmured: "if i couldn't get the loan then, i wouldn't be so miserable now."

many investors said that locals invested thousands or tens of thousands of yuan, hundreds of thousands of yuan being the most common, and some even invested millions or tens of millions of yuan. these figures represent their entire fortunes.

the frenzy that swept the town ended abruptly, and the townspeople were helpless. they couldn't figure out two things: why did they act on impulse and invest all their money even if they had to borrow money; and why would a fellow villager cheat a fellow villager?

it was like a dream, and suddenly everything was gone.

the pancha bankruptcy incident dealt a series of blows to the town. most of the houses in the town were self-built, and building a house was the top priority for every household. wenqin and qinan both built houses, but because they lost money, they did not finish decorating them. the empty house only had a few simple pieces of furniture, and it was unknown how many years it would take to fill them up.

as a result, the decoration business is also not doing well. "no one has demand," lamented a merchant.

pancha's advertising billboards were once posted on many buildings, but now many have been torn down. (photo/photo taken by a reporter from new weekly)

at night now, there are almost no people walking on the streets of xiping town, and the doors of nearby shops are closed. locals say that in the past, there were still many people eating supper and drinking on the street at 3 a.m. now there are no customers, and the restaurants close early when it gets dark.

after losing all his money, li yang never set up a stall again. "how can i continue to bake when i am weak?" said his wife.

people frequently move around, discuss solutions, and seek comfort. most people dare not tell their families, and can only bear the regret and pressure on their own.

an elderly person couldn't understand why the money he had saved all his life was suddenly gone. he couldn't eat or sleep, so he got up in the middle of the night and walked up the mountain to the door of zheng chaogen's hometown, hoping to find his savings.

zheng chaogen's home is on a mountain in the southwest of xiping town, far away from the town, and it takes more than 40 minutes to drive there.

starting from the market in the small town, we circled to the middle of the mountain. we had to be careful not to miss the intersection. several villages were scattered among the mountains. self-built houses stood along the mountain road, like lonely elderly people left here. occasionally, people sitting at the door of their house looking down the mountain would ask: did you buy pan tea? the answer was almost always yes.

zheng chaogen's ancestral home was destroyed by investors after the collapse of pancha. (photo/photo taken by a reporter from new weekly)

time passed in an atmosphere of anxiety and depression, but there was little substantial progress.

they can only fall asleep when they are extremely tired, and within a few hours, they wake up as if in a nightmare. "how can i sleep when i close my eyes and think about so much money?"

many younger people have taken out loans. “we didn’t have any debt before, but our living standards were a bit low. now we have nothing and are still in debt,” li yang sighed as he and several friends sat in the store.

on the roadside of xiping town, most of the pancha advertising signs were pushed down or torn down, but some were still standing. (photo/photo taken by a reporter from new weekly)

qin an is willing to get his money back later, and he hopes to give priority to returning the principal to the disadvantaged groups. young people still have the possibility of starting over, but qin an has seen too many elderly people who don’t know what to do. they were able to make ends meet with odd jobs at first, but now they can only sigh and admit defeat.

wang yumei still went out at 4:00 a.m. every day, and went home to take care of her sick husband after work. she didn't have a smartphone, and asked her daughter to buy her tea. her daughter had started a family in anxi and had two children. her daughter invested 1.6 million yuan with the money she saved from getting up at 4:00 a.m. to make dumplings, plus borrowed money from here and there, but also lost everything.

she is more worried about how her daughter's life will continue than her own pension.

everything costs money. the children each have their own families, and she didn’t want to cause trouble for them. she didn’t dare to ask her daughter for more details, nor did she dare to talk about this with the other two children.

recalling the tearful phone call from wang yumei, "my daughter choked up and told me that she felt like a sinner, but she also had a big hole that she couldn't take care of. she didn't dare go home to see her parents. she would only go home when she had money."

the hard life has to go on. li yang said that he had to get himself together and start selling again in a few days, "every bit of money he can earn is good money." his mother also started collecting plastic cans to supplement the family income.

the most emotionally stable person may be wang yumei's husband. he lies on the bed or sits on a chair, eating whatever his wife cooks. he doesn't think much about the future because he has long lost the energy to seek change.

the town that was once famous for tea was hit hard by tea.

when a tile starts to break and just starts to form fine cracks, no one pays attention. it is not until they hear the sound and see the tile shattering to the ground that people realize there is no way back.

(wenqin, wang yumei, qin an, and li yang in this article are all pseudonyms)