Mr. Yu Guanting delivering a speech at an event of the Hejing Tea Cultivation School. Photo by Liang Yan
On the evening of October 22, the funeral committee of Comrade Yu Guanting issued an obituary: the renowned tea figure Mr. Yu Guanting passed away at 6:30 p.m. on the 21st at Beijing Fuxing Hospital following a sudden heart attack. He was 82 years old.
As recently as September 7, Mr. Yu Guanting had been invited to the Hejing Tea Cultivation School in Songzhuang, Tongzhou District, Beijing, to attend an event and deliver a speech. His humorous remarks and words of encouragement for young tea people won round after round of applause from the students; his kindly and amiable manner was deeply loved by everyone, and tea people took turns pulling him in for photos. Yu Guanting’s sudden passing left the tea community of the capital deeply shocked and grieved.
Having once held important posts in national tea administration, after retirement Yu Guanting also served as Honorary President of the Hangzhou Tea Research Institute of the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, Vice President of the China International Tea Culture Research Association, and Vice Chairman of the Overseas Chinese Tea Industry Development Research Foundation, among other positions.
Bonding with “tea”: self-taught into an expert-type leader
Yu Guanting was a native of Weifang, Shandong. In school, he dreamed of becoming a scientist or a writer; who would have thought that on the eve of the college entrance examination he would be recommended for admission to a military academy. Putting on a military uniform, he began dreaming of becoming a general. During his four years at the military academy, Yu Guanting worked hard, joined the Party politically, excelled professionally, and was rigorously trained in every respect.
In 1965, on the eve of graduation, he suddenly received notice from the school that he was being transferred to the International Liaison Department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. Taking off his military uniform, Yu Guanting no longer dreamed of being a general and instead began hoping to become a diplomat. This was because the leadership at the time placed great expectations on this group of new employees selected from military academies: Western countries were attempting to blockade China diplomatically, so they were not only to become backbone professionals, but also to study foreign languages and diplomacy at the foreign affairs college, so as to become outstanding red diplomats in the future.<\/p>\n
Mr. Yu Guanting being interviewed by the news media.
However, changes in the political situation interrupted his “diplomatic dream.” After the decade of catastrophe, Yu Guanting returned to Beijing in 1975 and was transferred to the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives. The organization assigned him to the Tea and Animal Products Bureau; when the leadership learned he had studied military engineering, they arranged for him to work on tea processing in the tea division. From then on, Yu Guanting officially took his first step toward becoming a tea man.
To improve the backward state of tea factories, promote the development of tea processing, and reclaim the ten wasted years, Yu Guanting taught himself the undergraduate tea science curriculum in two years, spent five years traveling through tea regions across the country, and inspected several hundred tea primary-processing and refining factories, learning from experts and professors and from grassroots tea-making masters.
After reform and opening-up, the Tea and Animal Products Bureau, its mission complete, exited the stage of history. But Yu Guanting \u2014 then deputy general manager of the China Agricultural and Sideline Native Products Development Corporation under the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives and chairman of the National Tea Production and Marketing Group \u2014 remained steadfast in the tea industry. At the time, to solve the problem of poor communication between tea buyers and sellers in the early market economy, they organized two ordering fairs each year, building links between the sales regions of the north and the production regions of the south and carrying out supervision and mediation work as a third party. Serving as a bridge in this way, they bridged a decade, until the production-marketing problem was basically solved.
Through untold hardships he traveled famous mountains and great rivers; discerning a hundred flavors, he tasted the teas of all under heaven. Yu Guanting finally realized his “tea man dream,” becoming one of the few experts in the tea world to combine management and professionalism, tea science and tea culture, in one person.
Retired but not idle: aspiring to realize the dream of China as a great tea power
In 2000, Yu Guanting formally retired from his post, but though retired he did not rest \u2014 he devoted his energy once more to tea culture research. A few years ago, when summing up his achievements of those years, he said that more than twenty years of retirement had been another springtime in which he had done a great deal of work and had not lived his splendid life in vain.
In his many years of research and practice, Mr. Yu put forward the tea philosophy of “clarity, tranquility, harmony, and elegance.” Mr. Yu held that clarity is tea’s integrity; tranquility is tea’s nature; harmony is tea’s soul; and elegance is tea’s charm. He published more than a dozen monographs, including “Handbook of Chinese Tea People,” “Handbook of Tea Processing Technology,” “An Illustrated Classic of Chinese Tea,” and “A Concise Reader of the Chinese Way of Tea,” and wrote over a hundred papers.<\/p>\n
In 2017, Mr. Yu Guanting guiding tea work in Haiyang County, Shandong Province. Photo by An Mingxia
For more than 40 years \u2014 from government offices to tea gardens, from factories to markets, from home to abroad \u2014 Yu Guanting mainly did two things.
First, in tea science and technology he championed the “mechanization of tea processing.” Yu Guanting greatly approved of integrating modern technology into tea processing and supported intelligent production and intelligent processing; he did not much agree with the formulation “all handmade, made by masters.”
Second, he summarized tea culture as “five thousand years of tea culture, seven horizontal and eight vertical” \u2014 clearly demarcated yet interwoven, forming China’s unique tea culture. Mr. Yu believed that the Way is carried by matter: to study tea culture, one must first study tea as a substance; the spirit must be based on matter before it can rise to the spiritual level, and only then can it in turn guide the entire industry.
A cultural scholar praised him in verse: “Lord Yu, a rare talent among China’s teas; observing tea, he taught himself into an expert”; “At the top of the tea world stands Lord Yu, versed in processing and trade alike; he went deep into the tea regions to inform decisions, and traveled abroad to borrow the east wind.”
After he passed the age of eighty, his family urged him that he could take a rest. Yu Guanting still did not stop. He said: “I don’t want to wake up from this ‘tea man dream.’ With the spirit of a tea man, I will work together with everyone to realize the dream of China as a great tea power, to bring China’s tea industry back to the peak of leading the world, so that all seven-plus billion people on the globe can drink Chinese tea and understand Chinese tea culture \u2014 nurturing health through tea, and harmonizing the world through tea.”
May Mr. Yu journey well \u2014 there is tea in heaven, where the bond with tea continues!
Produced by: China Co-operation Times · Tea Weekly All-Media<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Author: Lam Sam (LamSam), the Old Tea Head
ZENTEA MANOR
Alliance Supply Chain Services Limited
Unit 902-3, 9\/F, Mini Cube, 10 Sam Chuk Street, San Po Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
www.zentea-shop.com Email:info@zentea-shop.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mr. Yu Guanting delivering a speech at an event of the Hejing Tea Cultivation School. Photo by Liang YanOn the evening of October 22, the funeral committee of Comrade Yu Guanting issued an obituary: the renowned tea figure Mr. Yu Guanting passed away at 6:30 p.m. on the 21st at Beijing Fuxing Hospital following a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-yun-tea-mountains-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13659,"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13658\/revisions\/13659"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zentea-shop.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}