A Tea Addict's Journal

Buying tea from taobao (1)

January 5, 2010 · 4 Comments

So it seems like those crafty Chinese finally found a way to make some money by acting as middleman between that emporium of all things Chinese, Taobao, and the Western buyer who wants stuff on there.  For those of you who don’t know, Taobao.com is basically China’s eBay, only worse.  Since it does not charge listing or final value fees, anybody can list pretty much anything on there, and much of the business on Taobao is conducted off-site.  What it is, then, is basically a huge online catalog, and if you like something there, you contact the buyer and arrange a deal, often with a discount off the Taobao listed prices.

That is if you’re in China.

Since I am not in China, and most of my readers are not either (by definition, because Xanga is still censored,) buying from Taobao requires more work and less discounts.  In the old days there was just no way, unless you want to arrange a bank transfer, etc, which are all too much hassle and too much risk.  These days, there are a bunch of new proxy service that have sprung up that will help you buy stuff off Taobao.  They charge a 10% fee on the value of the item, and will help you arrange payment and shipping.  I’ve used one before and it worked quite well, and from what I’ve heard, other services (some in English) will also do the job.

For the tea drinker, this is quite a boon, because for the first time it is possible to have a selection far, far wider than whatever is available through a select number of vendors.  Places like Yunnan Sourcing have been providing a fairly wide selection for a while now, but this expands the selection by multiples.

How, though, do you buy and choose tea from Taobao?  That’s always a hard question.  I thought it might be useful to talk about it, since I’ve talked to people who are getting quite excited about the prospect, and rightly so.

Let’s talk first about the scope.  What I think Taobao is good for, mainly, is puerh, especially cakes of a more recent (past 10 years) vintage.  While you can find more oolong, green, wuyi, and all other kinds of tea there, in general I would be very cautious buying those off Taobao.  The main reason is because by and large, the other kinds of tea are immensely difficult to distinguish between one and another.  Physically, the difference between a $10/kg and $1000/kg dahongpao, for example, isn’t really big enough so that you can tell right away on pictures, especially when you consider the potential for photoshopping, bait and switch, and other things that can happen.  If you really want to buy loose leaf tea, buy small amounts, ask for samples, and in general, buy at your own risk.

So, you don’t read Chinese.  How do you get to the tea anyway?  Here’s the link in its full glory

http://list.taobao.com/browse/50002766-50003862/n-0——————————2——-b–42-grid-coefp-0-all-50003862.htm?ssid=r18-s5

This is the link to Taobao’s puerh section.  If you want to go to the section for other teas, with over 400k items, you have to navigate there, but once again, I’m really not sure if it’s such a good idea.

So you’re in the puerh section.  Where do you start?  Well, let’s take a look

This is the basic screen.  The bottom is where the listings start.  The top, however, is where you navigate, and it’s much more important.  There are three categories that they use to subdivide the cakes, and I’ll go over them one by one.  The first, circled above, is the type of puerh.  They are, from left to right, round cakes, tuocha, bricks, mini tuo, melons, loose tea, and what they call “artistic” tea, which really means super compressed junk (they’re called that because they are used as decoration.)  Now, the second category:

These are the brand names.  If you know what you want, you can select one of those to narrow down the list of items you have to go through.  The list is long, and the orange icon with the + sign will give you a full list of brands, which includes a list of 28 major brands, plus a “misc.” that includes more items than the rest of the brands combined.  I generally don’t search by brand, especially since I like the smaller factory stuff.

The third category is the most useful — raw, or cooked.  Cooked comes first, raw second.  This will instantly half the number of items you need to look at.

Now, what they don’t show you is that if you pick a style (i.e. cake, brick, melon etc) you will have one more option:

This lets you select the age of the cake.  If you know you want something that is, say, from 2007, then you can use this to narrow it down.  However, this is self reporting, and since listing stay on the site for quite a while, I can imagine some needing update and never gets it.  It’s useful for narrowing down the list further though.

Once you’ve narrowed your list down a bit instead of the tens of thousands of cakes, you’re ready to browse.

There are some navigational tools that you can use right above the cakes, but most are fairly useless.  You can specify what type of item you want (i.e. auction, buy it now) but I don’t think we need to go into all that.  If you need to, you can go to the dropdown menu I circled above and choose the option you like — arranging it by highest or lowest price first.

Let’s leave this for now.  Next entry will be about actually looking at items.

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Space

December 30, 2009 · 3 Comments

We all love to hate the teaball, that invention that should have been destroyed when first thought up.  It limits the amount of space that is allowed for the leaves to move, and inevitably, it creates a bad cup of tea.  It’s pretty common to see a tea ball being filled with soaked tea leaves, obviously unable to extend themselves and reach their full potential.

The same thing can happen to yixing pots, however, and is sometimes a danger if one doesn’t take care to brew carefully.  There’s always an optimal amount of space needed for a given tea, and sometimes that can be exceeded with negligible, or even negative, effect.  It ends up wasting tea, and achieving little else.  It also depends on the shape of the pot, and sometimes some pots are more likely to be “stuffed” like a tea ball than others.  I am just reminded of that today, when I used a gaiwan instead of a shuiping to brew my youngish puerh.  I’m not at home right now, so my regular teaware is missing.  The effect from my gaiwan was much better than that from the pot.  This is not to say, of course, that gaiwans are always better than pots, or vice versa, but just that sometimes parameters can drastically change the taste of a tea.  It’s easy to get into a routine brewing something, and then forgetting all together the other dimensions of the tea.  It doesn’t even have to be that one is necessarily better, but simply that the taste achieved can be different, and the amount (and type) of space is crucial to this equation.

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(Mis)appropriating wares

December 23, 2009 · 5 Comments

Using wares for new purposes happens all the time, and I am quite guilty of doing that fairly often.  Most of the time, it involves using some teaware for slightly different purposes than they were originally intended.  Other times, I am using things entirely out of context to suit my needs.  Some are mere modifications, others are complete changeovers.

For example, when there’s a lid-less yixing being used for a fairness cup, I’d say that’s at least somewhat misappropriating the pot. Lots of people do that, for reasons that may be quite varied, from a yixing that has a missing lid in need of some use, to wanting to season a pot for no particular reason.

In my case, the most often misappropriated ware is my pewter bowl, originally intended for fruits and other goodies, and now I use for holding my pot.

Over time, I noticed that it’s doing some damage to the mother-of-pearl decoration to the bowl, so I’ve stopped, and instead am using a dish for that purpose.

The wooden tray you see in the picture here is for the Japanese sencha ceremony, which basically means it holds the cups with saucers.  For me, the tray is where the action takes place, and does the job of framing the area over which I make tea.  I used to use a water-holding tray with slots, the kind you find from all sorts of teashops in China and Taiwan and Hong Kong, but I no longer like those.  In fact, I no longer own one of those as I’ve gifted or discarded them all (except a traveling one, but that’s kept only for mobility purposes).

Many cups I use these days are also not intended for tea to begin with.  The smaller cups are generally sake cups, such as these:

The gaiwan is a gaiwan, but the cup is a sake cup.  Many are nicely decorated, with a good size for gongfu tea purposes.  Some might not like the straight edges, but I don’t mind them.  They work.

And then you get into territory that’s a little more muddy.  Take, for example, the gaiwan.

This is not a gaiwan meant for brewing.  This is a sipping gaiwan, where your tea is supposed to sit and you sip from it, gently pushing the leaves aside with your lid and holding it by the saucer.  Instead, I used it to make some green, with a much higher leaf to volume ratio.  These days, we’re so used to using gaiwan for that latter purpose that the original is almost completely lost, except in period dramas.  That cup, though, is a teacup of sorts, although it can just as well be used for wine (Chinese, that is — this is not a sake cup).

But then, what is a teapot, a gaiwan, or a teacup anyway?  It’s just whatever you make tea in.  It doesn’t really matter if it’s a brown betty or a silver Korean teapot.  It only matters what you do with it, and sometimes, items find a second life, much like buildings (or in some cases, people) do.

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Qingxiang tieguanyin

December 21, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I haven’t had a proper Qingxiang tieguanyin in ages.  I can’t remember last time drinking it — it must have been at least a few months ago when a guest came, if not more.

It’s one of those teas that come in little pouches, which are handy for people like me who go through their tieguanyin in years, not months or days.  A zhuni pot seems appropriate, especially since it’s roomy enough for the tea to expand and brew.  When you drink a tea very infrequently, you often come across notes or tastes that are not always obvious when you drink it frequently, and it happened here as well.  Once again, I’m gravitated to what I mentioned as the “true” taste of tea, noticing how it was very strong underneath the veneer of fragrance that you get with this type of tieguanyin.  In fact, I started wondering if it might be time for me to revisit some of these lighter teas, since my normal diet of tea consists of aged oolongs and wet stored puerh, with some younger puerh thrown into the mix.  At least I didn’t get dizzy drinking this.

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Storage

December 12, 2009 · 6 Comments

These days I’m storing my tea thus

The cabinet is small, but just big enough to hold all my cakes and random puerh chunks.  My aged oolongs I leave in the plastic bags and in drawers that are away from light and heat.  There are really a few goals when you store a tea.  Obviously, you hope it’ll improve, but more importantly, you have to first make sure that it is safe.  A tea that grows unknown things is not going to improve, and that, I think, is a mistake that is sometimes made in an effort to speed up the transformation process of the tea.

From my experience with Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc, it is fairly dangerous to leave tea out in the open in an environment that is fairly humid.  If done improperly, mold grows very quickly, often within a week of continuous rain with no reprieve.  I think basically if the leaves are sufficiently moist, you’ll get mold growing, and that’s not a happy thing.

With the weather and the use of heater here, humidity is really not an issue.  I don’t really bother with putting any water in here either — I just let it sit naturally.  I rarely open the cupboard either.  I suppose I’ll have to see how this turns out.  I remember when I was in Beijing, I put a few bowls of water in there, and after doing that you can smell the tea more — moisture does have something to do with that.  I might try experimenting with that again sometime soon.

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Chlorine

December 5, 2009 · 14 Comments

I made some tea for class the other day, a Shuixian and an aged oolong.  I was trying to explain how Chinese have basically “invented” this new style of tea making that really has little historical basis, but is now widely viewed as “traditional Chinese tea ceremony” when nothing can be further from the truth.  What struck me though during the brewing is how different the tea tastes.  The Shuixian was subdued, without much of its natural aroma, while the aged oolong came out a bit bitter, rough, and not sweet at all like I know it to be.  I used all my regular equipment.  What’s wrong?

Water

Specifically, the chlorine in the water.  Bringing a water filter to class and then waiting for it to filter through is really not an option, so tap water, instead, has to be used.  Maine tap water, for some reason, is really, really chlorinated.  When I turn on the tap here I can smell the chlorine.  When I boil it unfiltered, I can also smell the chlorine.  In fact, when I opened my tetsubin after that class, I could smell it in my tetsubin.  Disgusting.

School’s only two minutes away from where I live, so I am pretty certain we get the same water supply.  There’s no other vairable involved.  It has to be the chlorine (and whatever else is in the water, but most likely just that).  If you ever need proof that filtered water is necessary for a good cup of tea, this is probably it.  Bottled water, on the other hand, is a completely separate discussion.

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The true taste of tea

November 27, 2009 · 4 Comments

My regular tea menu includes basically three kinds of teas these days.  Aged oolongs are the ones I drink the most often, followed by youngish puerh (youngish means nothing from the past two years, generally speaking).  Then I throw in some occasional aged puerh of one type or another.  I drink almost nothing else these days, despite having large amounts of yancha and some less aged oolong sitting around.  A friend recently asked to be served green tea, and I must say I don’t really have any fresh green tea to speak of at all, since I never finish them and it ends up being a waste of money.  I used to drink almost only green tea, but those were the days.

I can say though, that there is something universal about tea, no matter the type, that trascends the differing tastes that one gets from them.  I think it is quite a normal progression for many tea drinkers to first be attracted to the higher aromatics from a green or a light oolong tea, then getting more interested in teas that are of a deeper, darker nature.  Of course, that’s only speaking from the point of view of those who are interested in Chinese teas; black tea drinkers, for example, may have different experiences.  Nevertheless, I find that after all these years of drinking tea, that they all share a common “tea” taste.  Sometimes this “tea taste” is well hidden behind the aromatics, but always discernable.  I often find that the best way to taste them is when the tea gets cold, or at least cooled.  Then, drinking it in larger sips, you can taste that universal “tea” taste that you will find no matter what kind of tea it is, and no matter how old it is.  It has a distinctive feeling on the tongue, and a certain amount of aftertaste.  It tastes leafy, but not entirely so, and is not necessarily bitter or anything like that.  Very often, it is only apparent after a number of infusions — after all the easily soluable compounds are gone, I suppose.

I sometimes wonder if this is what separates good from bad tea, and that after long exposure to teas, we learn how to distinguish the good from the bad with these “deeper” taste.  After all, the fleeting, first-infusion tastes are easily discernable, but also very momentary.  On the other hand, some teas, generally the better ones, tend to go on, and on, and on, without giving up no matter how many infusions you put it through.  This applies to not only puerh, but also oolongs.  Greens are less tenacious, but it probably has as much to do with the fact that they are greener shoots than anything else.  Rare are the teas that are great that don’t last very long.

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Sprayed glaze pot

November 23, 2009 · 3 Comments

I have lots of these oddities, here’s one that I unpacked recently from my boxes.

This is a pretty standard julunzhu pot, with a straight and short spout and somewhat rounded shape.  These were popular export items for Japan.  If you look closely, especially on the other side….

It looks a bit pock-marked.  These are glaze spots.  Now, people will tell you that older pots were fired along with glazed ware, and in the kiln, because they were uncovered, they would get sprayed by glaze coming off these other glazed wares.  I’m not sure if that’s actually true, but supposedly, this is a sign of old age.  As with all such signs, however, such as the whole “single hole” thing or “joint line” thing:

You can perhaps rule out pots that are “newer” because they don’t have any of those signs of older methods of construction, but just because a pot has them, it doesn’t really mean anything.  I often see some who say “oh, this pot is xxx and has xxx, therefore it must be old”.  No, it does not, because a new fake can easily reproduce the same.  This one looks old, feels old, and may very well be old.  I am never quite sure, however.  It’s much easier ruling out the new.

It is a curious little thing though, down to the chop mark at the bottom.

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The book of tea

November 17, 2009 · 1 Comment

Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea, published in 1906 in New York, is still a book that many read when they are looking for something on tea consumption, especially with regards to Japanese tea.  It still floats around in the coffee/tea section of bookstores, and I’ve read it before, very quickly, without thinking much about it.  I just assigned my students that book and we discussed it today.  Having re-read it again, it struck me as not really being about tea at all.  Nor is it really about “zennism” or “daoism”.  It’s about Japan, East Asia, and how Japan is the rightful leader of that part of the world.

His ideas about tea, while not all wrong, are not all quite right either.  It’s too bad that this book probably still wields more influence in terms of common perception of the Japanese tea tradition than almost anything else written on the subject.  It’s amazing what starting earlier gets you.

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More teaware

November 12, 2009 · 8 Comments

More teaware

This is a chaozhou teapot, uncharacteristically large for something of this type.  It’s a typical 300-400ml size.  I’ve never seen one that big before.  It’s supposedly from turn of the century — bought from someone who claimed it was a grandma’s leftover.  It looks the part though, as it has an older feel and look.  Only lightly used.  The chawan is there for size comparison.

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