In Yunnan, with its booming tourism industry, tea is promoted as an important tourist attraction that highlights the distinctiveness of the ethnic drinking ‘culture of tea’ there. Each Yunnanese ethnic group has different ways of drinking and preparing tea and different kinds of tea. Therefore, ‘ethnic’ tea has been adopted by the market and, when people drink the teas associated with a particular minority, they are in a sense consuming minority culture . Thus, in the era of the cultural economy, the Chinese culture of tea is being activated for the booming tea market, while the ethnic drinking of tea is being interwoven into the cultural landscape and sales of tea. The consumption of both tea and ethnic culture in the market is characteristic of today’s cultural economy, which shows a more general ‘tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization’. The De’ang sale of tea in the periodic markets and tea factories transforms tea from a locally consumed product into a commodity for sale. These sales reveal relationships reflecting interactions between peasants and merchants that demonstrate an essentially still petty capitalist mode of production and exchange. The places where the De’ang villagers sold their tea were not only reserved for commodity transactions, but also expressed the continuing importance in the economy of personal relationships, such as kin relationships and friendship, which shows how the trading relationships between the De’ang and their tea buyers are themselves embedded in a complex of both personal and impersonal relationships. The social relationships manifested in the villagers’ various forms of tea sales still reflect the power of friendship, ethnic and kin solidarity in the commercial network of the local Chinese market economy.
