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Kevin Godbee - Jun 7, 2013
- 6 min read
A. Miller
In a downtown market in the capital city of the southwestern-most province in China, Mr. Zhang shows me his extremely limited imported pipe tobacco selection. He jokes with me about a shop he ran a few years ago where he sold exclusively fake tobacco. He giggles a bit, it’s a short halting giggle suitable for a 75 year old man like himself, and says, "You just make more money when it’s fake."
Welcome to the world of tobacco in the earth’s most populous nation. A land where cigarettes sell for as little as a dollar a pack, or as much as several hundred dollars. A land with Great Wall brand cigars which taste more like a wall than anything great. And, much to my good pleasure, a land beginning to fall in love with the pipe.
Mr. Zhang, from his tiny stand, sells everything from Burmese cigarettes and Camel Lights to water pipes and Captain Black Red. Currently he also has three types of MacBaren tobacco including the only-available-in-Asia Royal Box. He assures me his tobacco is real now, which I also know from first hand experience. But then he hands me a corn cob pipe and again begins to giggle. The difference between this cheap Chinese version of a Missouri Meerschaum and the real thing is truly remarkable. The bit feels brittle enough to break off in your teeth, but it always outlasts the bowl which usually burns through by the fifth smoke. As he points at the cob he leans in a bit and tells me with pride of a foreigner who came by and was "foolish enough" to pay too much for this thing. Usually sold for $2 he asked the westerner for $12, and when the unassuming response came back with $5, Mr. Zhang slapped it in his hand and gleefully took the deal. Apparently this story amused him enough that he’s been hanging on to it to tell to me later.
The culture of smoking has sunk deep in the Middle Kingdom. Once I watched two electric bikes collide and both drivers stand, with visible flesh wounds, begin to scream at one another to establish fault. Then after two or three minutes of screaming they simply stopped, one grabbed a box of cigarettes and handed them out to the crowd that had gathered. He then handed one to his new "adversary", helped him light the cigarette, took a few puffs himself, and then began screaming again. This cigarette meant, "I mean you no harm, this is just the process we must go through." I long to someday see something similar with pipes, but that journey has just begun.
Tobacco here is still primarily limited to cigarettes. However in the last few years a small contingent of people have taken notice of the western concept of a pipe. They see owning a pipe as a means of showing off wealth, and knowing how to smoke one as a demonstration of unusual skill.
There are still some big issues however, like the fact that almost all pipe tobacco sold online in China is sold illegally. The government closely monitors tobacco sales for taxes, but people have found a way around it on popular e-commerce sites by
listing empty tobacco tins in their pictures online and then shipping with the full product. That said, there is a surprising variety of tins available online, and even a few dealers who have tobaccos available by the pound.
But a bigger problem is the fact that almost no one knows what they’re doing when they first light up a pipe and they have no one to turn to for help. Smoking my pipe among a group of local friends; one, we call The Fish, told me he had purchased a very expensive pipe but smoked it once, hated it, and never used it again. With a little digging I find he was smoking a dried out Borkum Riff Whiskey, didn’t know how to pack the pipe, and attempted to re-light with every puff. Of course his experience was terrible. I hand him my pipe to try a puff of Samuel Gawith’s Full Virginia Flake. He then takes a puff, inhaling as deeply as many cigarette smokers do, and coughs profusely telling me, "This is much too strong for me." I try to reassure him you don’t have to breathe in. But at this point all five cigarette smokers in the room gather to tell me there is no point to smoking if you don’t inhale, and I fail to convince them otherwise.
What keeps people intrigued and sometimes coming back, however, is the widespread acceptance of tobacco and smoking in general. Another pipe salesman Mr. Fu sells almost exclusively water pipes. It looks and works like something you might more comfortably know as a bong. These "pipes" sell for between twenty and two thousand dollars based on material used for the making. In the picture of him above, he’s holding two bongs, his cheapest made of bamboo, and most expensive hand carved from a Chinese yew tree (ironically imported from Burma). However at the back of this shop, and right behind him in the picture, he has a small selection of about twenty western style pipes. For sale here is a glue-pressed meerschaum pipe available for about two dollars, but he also has nice Greek Amadeus briar in a billiard for around a hundred dollars. Some of the fancier places in town sell meerschaums in the thousands of dollars.
There are a few other interesting cultural smoking methods of pipe smoking. Such as small hand-held bamboo pipes for sale through which people smoke just like you or I would, albeit with much less tasty tobacco. And then many of the elderly will purchase large sheets of tobacco in big bundles, take them home and roll them into cigars which they shove in to metal pipes and then smoke slowly all day.
The province I live in makes it’s own local "pipe tobacco" available at most tobacco places in town. But this tobacco is the very same as what is sold for the water pipes and for roll-you-own cigarettes. It makes a decent cigarette, but I wouldn’t want this in my pipe. Many locals, not knowing any better however, do smoke it, some probably even in a Dunhill or expensive meerschaum. Unfortunately this tobacco is as dry as newspaper and tastes about the same too. But it is cheap, about four ounces for two dollars.
We all know how subjective the taste of tobacco can be, and how sometimes even our own tastes for Virginias or Latakias can change with the seasons. One time in a taxi on the way to the airport I lit up with the help of the driver’s lighter, and he spends the majority of the trip telling me my Astleys 109 is not as fragrant as the local cigarette tobacco. "It tastes different than it smells," I try to assure him. Yet he insists that I’m just a foolish American who can’t understand the wonders of the Chinese Tobacco Monopoly and the quality of their products. He doesn’t smoke himself of course, but he spends all day enjoying the smoke of others. I suppose I should have picked something with a better "taxi note". But then I remember, I don’t really mind the complaining as long as I can smoke in the cab.
There are great international tobaccos here, and even some wonderful pipes, though they are not always easy to find or differentiate from the fakes. But, however new pipes may be to China, things are beginning to shift. The availability of quality briar and German vulcanite on Chinese e-commerce sites makes that plain. The first crop of local pipe tobaccos have emerged from places like Shanghai, and while they likely leave much to be desired, they are a step in the right direction. I fully expect within 5-10 years there will be well known Chinese pipe craftsman displaying their pipes at the Chicago (or Beijing?) pipe show. And, with a little luck, in due time, a quality Chinese pipe tobacco brand might even rear it’s head.
Written by Kevin Godbee
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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! 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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Great article! A friend of mine now is in China (he is a travel guide). He has instructions from me to buy local tobacco in any country he visits if possible. Hope he brings some good stuff back home.
Interesting stuff. Thanks!
Great article. It’s always interesting hearing how things are in other parts of the world. I hope one day we can have a pipe in a cab.
Very interesting article. I remember seeing a couple of briar pipes for sale in a Shanghai department store about ten years ago, but I doubt most people knew what they were; and there was certainly no decent pipe tobacco available then.
But two years ago, in Guangzhou, the hotel gift shop where I was staying had a couple of pipes marked as “Savinelli” (I’m not convinced they were genuine) for upwards of a hundred US dollars each, and some MacBarens tobacco tins.
Well done, and thought provoking. Any thought of starting a pipe club there? That would smooth the process.
@lestrout there is a local here who ran a pipe club for several years, but the fees to maintain a chapter were too much for him to continue. That doesn’t mean it still doesn’t take place informally….
I wonder if rich Chinese are ordering their tobacco from US online sellers. Also, I have heard that Dunhill and many high end pipe makers sell a lot to China. I wonder if this is all through mail order or if there are any local dealers selling as well?