普洱

Puer (普洱, pǔ'ěr in Mandarin) takes its name from Pu'er, a prefecture in southern Yunnan Province. The characters pu (普) and er (洱) designated a trading town on the ancient Tea-Horse Road, known in imperial records as Pu'er Fu. From this prefectural seat, compressed tea cakes were shipped north to Tibet, east to central China, and south through Burma into Southeast Asia.

The distinctive post-fermentation that defines puer tea appears in Chinese texts from the mid-seventeenth century. The Yunnan writer Fang Yizhi noted in 1655 that teas from Pu'er underwent a secondary transformation during the long caravan journey to Lhasa. Humidity and microbial action along the mountain routes converted raw sheng (生, raw) tea into a darker, earthy product. The process was later replicated artificially in 1973 by the Kunming Tea Factory, which developed the wet-piling method that produces ripe shou (熟) puer in weeks rather than years.

Pu'er the place received its name before it gave that name to tea. Tang dynasty records of the late eighth century mention the town as a staging point on the southern Silk Road, before tea became its defining export. Puer tea entered the imperial tribute system under the Qing dynasty in the seventeenth century, and the emperor Qianlong reportedly maintained a collection of aged puer cakes at the Forbidden City.

The English spelling puer has competed with pu-erh, pu'er, and puerh in Western tea literature since the 1980s. Pu-erh dominated British and American specialty tea writing through the 1990s. The simplified form puer has gained ground in the twenty-first century as Chinese Pinyin conventions standardized. In 2011, the Chinese government established Pu'er as a Protected Geographical Indication, limiting the designation to tea processed from large-leaf Yunnan cultivars.