A Tea Addict's Journal

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Where everybody knows your name

August 25, 2007 · 2 Comments

I went book shopping today… except the bookstore was closed :(. I was bummed, since it’s a marvelous academic bookstore tucked away on the 10th floor of an apartment building.

The second stop was to find another tea shop around the bookstore, so I went back to the Yongkang area, since it wasn’t too far. I took Corax’s recommendation and went to Off-Chaism. I could’ve picked from the other places on the list, but figured I’ll work my way down.

The store is unassuming — you can’t really tell what they do from the outside. I walked in and nobody was there. We chatted a little, I mentioned Corax (who they remember fondly) and then we were off to drinking…

While trying various teas, mostly Wuyi yancha at first, people kept coming in and out. It’s obvious that most of them are regulars. One guy came in and started a scathing critique of a show of teaware being exhibited at the National History Museum, which I was not aware of and will now definitely go look. Another man came in, obviously a regular, but just sat down and didn’t say a word. In fact, for the most part he didn’t say much of anything until the first man left. Apparently they have a history… which I discovered when he finally started speaking. Then, a couple came in, and were there to pick up some stuff they had ordered. Some people emerged from downstairs who seemed to have been doing yoga or something while I was drinking tea upstairs. Couple A left, and couple B walked in, them from another city in Taiwan but have been living in Taipei for a while. etc etc…

You get the idea. This reminds me of the line in the opening song “where everybody knows your name” for the tv show Cheers. This place is, indeed, a place for the group of people who discovered it to go and hang out, to meet people they know, and to generally have a good time. A few people bought things, but others just went for the sake of going — in between errands, stopping by for an hour for a cup of tea or some such. In some ways, I was an anamoly — somebody who sits there for hours drinking various things. There were a few tourists who happened to drop by, but by and large they left pretty quickly. I was the odd man out.

It’s the same reason why I keep going back to the Best Tea House or Xiaomei’s shop in Maliandao. I rarely buy things there. In fact, I’ve almost never bought anything at Xiaomei’s, and I rarely buy things from the BTH. I go mostly to chat with people, some I know, some I don’t, but always a good time and an interesting discussion. Teahouses have always served this sort of function, and as my friend Joe’s paper shows… Taipei teahouses have an interesting history that made them what they are today.

I probably won’t have enough time here to really get to know a few places really well, but this place, I will probably go back again.

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Water troubles

August 22, 2007 · 1 Comment

Everybody knows that only two things go into making tea — the leaves, and the water. We talk about tea often enough. Despite the attention paid to it from time to time, however, water is still a rarely discussed subject. My drinking today is a good reminder of why we should always be mindful.

I pulled out an old sample that I haven’t tried for a long time — the 2nd puerh trade fair cake from Houde. I got what appears to be the center piece

So I broke off a chunk, about 7g in all, into my young puerh pot and brewed.

The first two infusions were fine


(this, by the way, is white adjusted, while the other one was not)

It was crisp, a little sweet, somewhat bitter, and had a decent finish. You can taste the Menghai area characteristics in this cake. Nothing too fancy, but a solid performer.

Then… as I added water to my kettle to reheat, I poured in some of the mineral water I bought recently from the local supermarket. It’s a water from France, of a lesser known brand, and quite heavy in minerals. I usually only add a splash of this sort of thing to my regular source of filtered tap water. That’s what I did today, although I may have added a little more than just a splash or two.

I reboiled the new water, and brewed…. and something seriously wrong happened. The tea became quite bland, rough, and generally less pleasant to drink. I don’t think it has to do with just the temperature. I brewed another infusion…. same thing. I can’t believe a tea will turn on me this fast. I tried some of the water on its own… hmm, tastes a little different than usual, no doubt because of the few splashes of the mineral water I used. I then poured all of it out into a glass and refilled the kettle with filtered tap water, boiled it, and brewed again… and the tea returned on the trajectory it was going on before I switched water on it, skipping two infusions. It was still a bit rougher than earlier, but that’s often to be expected. It also brewed up slightly weaker, which is definitely expected.

The lesson here, though, is not that tap water can be better than mineral water in a bottle. That I think everybody already knows. What I have noticed over time is that different teas require different water. That might seem an obvious point, but what I have found is that even different kinds of the same tea can often have completely different water requirements.

I have brewed young puerh that want opposite kinds of water. Using two kinds of water with two kinds of young puerh, they will behave in opposite directions with the two waters used. I’ve done this side by side with Tiffany before, so I don’t think it’s just placebo because you would at first expect most young puerhs to behave similarly. The difficulty is to know what it needs, and that, I am afraid, will only come with experimentation with each particular kind of tea in hand. If you want to get really technical, perhaps weather, air temperature, humidity, and all those other things also affect the water requirements, but since we can’t really control all of that, it’s almost not worth our time and effort to do so.

I don’t think there’s one or two kinds of water that’s universally good for all teas. There is, of course, cost and practical considerations involved in this. The carbon footprint of a bottle of water traveling all the way across the globe from some pristine location to your home in the middle of a metropolis is huge. The price is often high. The differences often subtle. Whereas ages ago people can write that “spring water is the best, and do not use well water” or some such absolute statements when talking about water to make tea, they can do it because I think the variety of teas they had was much smaller than our current day market. They could not possibly have had access to many more than a few kinds of tea, and the means of production were also more similar than it is today. Nowadays teas are made using a wide variety of methods, many of which are quite new. How that changes the way the tea reacts to the minerals in the water is going to involve a lot more complications. That’s not even counting the fact that there’s spring water, and then there’s spring water….

I like having a few bottles of different kinds of water around, and usually only add a little bit of one or the other to my kettle while brewing tea to experiment with such changes. For teas that I drink often, I sometimes try to figure out better what best to use for it in particular. At some point, though, it becomes too much work and detracts from the enjoyment of the drink itself. As long as one is satisfied, perhaps it doesn’t matter at all.

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Further thoughts on conditioning

August 20, 2007 · 2 Comments

As Wisdom_sun pointed out in his comments to my post a few days ago, talking about “storage” of puerh is not just merely storage… it’s conditioning. He’s absolutely right in that regard, so I will try to remember to use this term from now on 🙂

I think I have talked about this in passing before, but what I have noticed more clearly this time around visiting Hong Kong and also talking to the owner of the teashop here in Taipei is that there are clearly two trends, or two schools of thought, in puerh conditioning.

The first is the old school. Wet storage is good. Wet, however, doesn’t mean soaking in water, mould growing all over wet (that’s cooked puerh). Wet means a high level of humidity in a more or less controlled environment. It does involve a fair bit of skill and know how, as well as experience in doing these and to know what teas will need how much in the conditioning of such teas. Talking to old tea drinkers in Hong Kong, they will almost all tell you that a cake with a touch of wet storage age much better and faster. It was interesting to see the teashop owner here echo the same view.

The other school is the pure dry storage school. Dry, of course, doesn’t really mean bone dry either. I think what dry storage means really depends on the person you talk to. Many consider dry storage to be simply a tea that has not entered a traditional “wet” storage facility. Others take it quite literally — recall my experience with Xinjiang conditioned tea (Xinjiang has desert weather) that tasted thin, sharp, and unpleasant overall. I have met many a drinker and shop owner in Beijing who will refuse to drink anything that tastes remotely wet stored. Anything stored in the Guangdong area they deem to be wet, even after a year or two, when to me they taste quite normal and pleasant.

The overwhelming reason I’ve heard with this particular trend is that it is unhealthy to drink wet stored puerh. The mould really turns people off, and they think it is a health hazard. The same view is echoed by many on Sanzui, a Chinese forum for tea. It’s an interesting thing, really. After all, many people grew up in Hong Kong drinking wet stored puerh, and the city’s population isn’t exactly suffering from some serious puerh-related sickness, so why people worry about it is beyond me. It’s like mouldy cheese… it looks gross, it smells gross, but can be quite tasty, albeit an acquired one. I think puerh is even less of an acquired taste than, say, Roquefort.

I can see why there’s an argument. People in Beijing, for example, used to drink jasmine, mostly. They then switched to green, and then green tieguanyin, and now, young puerh. Their tastes are light in general, and therefore a heavy, wet stored puerh might not suit their style (though oddly enough, people who refuse wet-stored puerh have no problem drinking cooked puerh). This sort of preference is reflected in tastes for other kinds of tea too. It’s difficult to find a good roasted oolong in the north. It’s much easier to find one in Hong Kong or Taiwan. Perhaps we can chalk this down to regional preference.

As for who’s right in their theory on conditioning… I suppose it depends on who you’re talking to. I have, however, noticed a slight trend — more often than not whoever owns the new cakes will tell you dry storage is good. Whoever owns some old stuff to sell will tell you wet storage is good. Given that, I tend to trust my senpai who only buy for their personal consumption. I think some wetness is not a bad thing, and in a home storage condition, care must be taken to make sure the tea is not too dry. That’s partly why I decided to stick my tea in Hong Kong in the family home (although mid-Ohio, curiously enough, is awfully wet). Is it wise to buy slightly wet stored tea to store at home? I suppose it might be. I also wonder if whatever’s gathered in a cake of wet stored tea will pass on to the dry stored one in a house. It should, I’d think. That’s why I want to see if there’s a way to figure out what an optimal condition is… I’m curious, for example, to see what happens to the cakes that Phyll put in his wine storage. I’m also curious to know what will eventually happen to the cakes that happen to be stored in the perpetually wet but cool climate of England. We’ll probably only find out in at least a few years’ time, and I certainly am not as brave (although I have a few cakes that travel with me in the US as I move from place to place).

But at the end of the day… maybe it’s the fact that we keep these cakes and watch them age that makes it fun. Of course, nobody wants a cake to turn out horrible, but if it tastes quite ok 10 years from now, it’s probably worth much more to the owner than if he were to buy it off the market 10 years from now.

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Storage

August 16, 2007 · 8 Comments

Puerh storage has generally been classified as dry and wet. Of course, dry and wet are absolutes, and nothing in reality really operates like that. It’s more like a sliding scale of wetness — from bone dry (say, sticking it in the desert) to extreme wetness (say, immersed in water). It’s obvious that neither of those are desirable, but how much wetness is good?

I’ve been thinking about this problem recently because I’m been fretting over how to store my tea in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a reputation for being humid. It is also the place where all these fabled wet stored teas are from. I myself have drank many such teas. They’re fine. They can be quite tasty. They’re, by some accounts, how puerh should taste. I’ve met quite a few extremely experienced tea drinkers in Hong Kong who hold this view.

Then you have the dry storage proponents, who say that wet storage fundamentally changes the tea in a negative way. You can’t get rid of the “storage” smell. The tea is less “lively”. You trade in the “liveliness” and the “freshness” for sweetness and smoothness. Many people who sell new cakes are people who will talk about this as if it’s the gospel. That, also, has a large following and many believe this to be the best way to proceed.

As with most things that have to do with taste, however, there’s probably no one real truth behind this. What I think there are though are misconceptions.

What happens to the cake I think is two fold. Since we know that mould grows on the tea when in wet storage, it’s obvious that those are part of the process of turning a tea into a sweet, mellow brew. There’s also, of course, oxidation that must be going on all the time. Pure oxidation, however, probably doesn’t work so well, since teas stored in very dry areas tend to perform poorly. I’ve had some that were truly hideous. So, the trick must be to get enough moisture to get the little mould spores going, but not too much so that it overwhelmes the tea…

What a lot of people in China, especially in the north, believe is that any sort of wetness is bad, and that the tea must be really dry. This is why I’ve tried the really dry teas — people who literally rented storage spaces in places with desert like conditions. The teas suck in those cases. Truly wet teas end up being a little boring and a little flat, and sometimes can taste too much of the storage and lose its charm. “Dry storage” as proposed then must really mean “wet, but only a bit”. After all, places like Hong Kong and Taiwan are quite wet to begin with. You don’t get a really dry environment unless you do serious climate control, and as far as I know, most of the dry storage facilities for tea merchants in these places are not climated controlled, only mediated by things like closed windows and sealed entrances.

What are the conditions that would produce the optimal amount of bioactivity, without overwhelming the tea and at the same time without it being too slow so as to make the whole exercise pointless? Somebody really ought to do experiments to figure this out. How about fluctuations in the humidity? I would think that fluctuations allow the tea to go in and out of the bio-enhanced aging phase. So sometimes it’s just oxidation, and sometimes it’s both. That, I suppose, must change the way it ages compared to a constant humidity environment. What, again, does it actually do? I’d imagine it can’t be that difficult to figure out.

Meanwhile… I am just praying disaster won’t befall my stash of tea.

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Shipping tea

August 15, 2007 · 1 Comment

I was really worried when I sent my tea out from Beijing. I haven’t shipped tea before, not in a large quantity like this anyway, and I think I learned a few things

1) Do use lots, and lots, and lots of bubble wrap. I didn’t use enough and some cakes took a bit of a beating.

2) China Post has really bad boxes. They look fine, but they get battered very fast. Which means more hazards for the tea itself.

3) Seemingly strong metal cans can be crushed easily by tea cakes in the same box.

4) Teaware actually do ok if wrapped enough, but some, like the delicate, thinner cups, aren’t meant to survive.

5) Some cakes survive better than others, interestingly enough. Having a tong wrapper REALLY helps and there was virtually no damage to any of the cakes wrapped in those things. You couldn’t even tell they went through the mail.

6) I don’t think I’ll do it again if I can help it.

I ended up following Hster’s advice — I thought given what I had it was the most sensible thing, to put some tea in the cupboard — about a tong of cheap cakes. The tea smell quickly overwhelmed the wood smell, so I think I am probably going to be ok with multiple tongs of tea in there. I also used the spilled tieguanyin from the crushed can to help soak up some smell. They’re still in the cupboard, along with all my puerh. Hopefully, when I come back in a few months… they’ll all be good and happy, mould free, and tastes a little better than when I left — which is tomorrow.

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Storing tea…

August 14, 2007 · 14 Comments

I’m trying to find a permanent home for my teas here.

One problem — the only suitable cupboard in the entire house smells.. like wood. Whatever wood it’s made of…. it’s got this smell that doesn’t seem to go away and reappears when I close the door. It’s the best place because it’s quite closed, is away from a window, and is the perfect size.

I don’t really like the idea of having my teas soak up the smell of the wood. In fact, in this case a cheap MDF board cupboard might be preferable, since those are usually pretty quick to dissipate their smell after a little while. The fact that it uses real wood is making it more problematic…

Any ideas on how to handle the smell problem? I fear this might not go away permanently 🙁

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Old teapots

August 13, 2007 · 1 Comment

Today I had a lesson in older teapots. I went to the Best Tea House today, as my usual haunt in Hong Kong after doing some errands. Tiffany was there, along with some other tea drinkers who frequent there and whom I’ve met before.

What’s different today is that somebody brought with him two teapots he recently acquired, both with claims to old age. He brought it for another tea drinker to evaluate, since he’s known as an experienced collector of particularly zhuni pots. It was really an eye opener for me, as there were things that I didn’t previously know that he told me about how to check for older teapots. For example, he thinks (from all the pots he’s seen) that the clay and the way the clay behaves under fire is really important. It’s interesting that he brought with him a 30x magnifying glass — the kind jewellers use to evaluate precious stones. He uses it to examine the surface of the pot and to see how, semi-microscopically, how the teapot reacted to the heat. By looking at that, he thinks that both pots are of an older age — one being a late Qing pot, while the other one being an early Republican period one. It’s difficult to explain everything he said without having a real life example, but it goes to show that much of it has to do with simple experience and having seen a large number of such things.

The other thing interesting is that we talked about the art of making tea — or the lack of an art of making tea. After all, what we’re doing is to make the best out of every tea we’re presented with. So, for example, with inferior quality tea, you want to use lower temperatures with longer steeping time, because if you use high temps with short infusion time, the tea won’t behave well — it will become bitter, astringent, rough, etc. Whereas with a good tea, you want to maximize the good qualities by pushing it as hard as possible. Using lower temperatures and longer steeping times is simply wasting the leaves — you’re not getting the most out of them.

So to illustrate, one of the tea drinkers talked about how one time he tried a tea made with a 12 minute infusion in a small yixing pot. 12 minutes… is a long time. It was, as he said, a brew of a really low grade tieguanyin, but that doesn’t matter, because the resulting cup was excellent. The long time, the relatively low temperature, and the expert manipulation by the brewer made sure it was a good cup.

That’s something we can all aspire to — again, it’s all about experience and knowing what to do with what you’ve got in your hands.

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Restaurant teas

July 2, 2007 · 2 Comments

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China.  It’s been 10 years already, even though it seemed only like yesterday when the handover ceremony took place on a very rainy night.  There were many things that set Hong Kong apart from China.  There still are, even after 10 years.  One such thing is the way tea is served in restaurants.

In Hong Kong, if you go into a Chinese restaurant or a Hong Kong style restaurant serving localized western or Chinese food (typically known as “cha chan teng”*, literally tea restaurant), tea is automatically served.  The type of tea served depends on where you are.  If you walk into a usual Chinese restaurant, the tea served is determined by you among the usual selection of “polay (puerh)”, “soumeh (longevity brow, or soumee, etc, a white tea)”, “teek guoon yum (tieguanyin)”, etc.  You pick among the ones they have.  In a “cha chan teng”, it’s usually some severely watered down red tea.  It’s more like flavoured water.  Tea is often free, or priced fairly low with a “tea and (Chinese) mustard” charge on the bill.  It’s usually the same no matter what you order.

In China, however (with the exception of Shenyang, interestingly enough), teas have to be ordered.  Even at pretty bad restaurants, the teas are often quite expensive, often rivaling a main dish or more.  A pot of puerh can often cost you 50 RMB or even 100 (at the fancy places) even when it’s just a really bad, insipid cooked tea.  I’ve been to places where the whole meal for two costs maybe 200 RMB, and a pot of tieguanyin would cost you 250.  They’re almost never worth that much, and very overpriced.  It makes ordering tea a real hazard here, without first checking the prices.  You could be adding a lot of cost to the food bill without knowing it, and not getting nice tea in return.  I often never order tea here at restaurants, but eating without drinking some tea makes me feel like I’m missing something.

Tonight, for example, as we’re having a dinner gathering with a few other grad students from my school here in Shanghai, we ordered a pot of longjing.  I think it was something like 50 for a pot, but the tea we got wasn’t even longjing.  It was at best what they would call a “Zhejiang longjing”, which basically means super low grade longjing that is merely a green tea, and called longjing for the simple reason that they’re grown somewhere in Zhejiang.  Everybody noted how cheap the tea is.  The food was good, the tea was not.  It’s a shame that even when charging somebody for the tea, they couldn’t give us something slightly better.

I hope that eventually, China will have restaurants that start offering good tea for not much money (at least proportional to the quality and not outrageous).  Right now though, I’d advise anybody coming here to avoid teas in restaurants.

*This is non standard romanization, as I am merely trying to replicate the Cantonese sound and not following any romanization scheme.  Besides not knowing any well enough, there are a few competing ones and I feel that none of them make intuitive sense for people who aren’t already familiar with Cantonese.

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TenFu

June 25, 2007 · 5 Comments

One of the things that I never really said much about in the 10 months I’ve been here is Tenfu, also known as TenRen, or in the States, Ten Tea. For those of you who don’t know them, they are a very big organization, and at least in China and Taiwan, they’re everywhere.

When you walk into TenFu here, you’ll be greeted by a salesgirl (they’re all salesgirls) who will ask you what you might need, and especially if you look foreign (as I, mystifyingly, apparently do sometimes) they will be presenting you with a cup of jasmine tea. On one wall you will see an array of those golden colour tea canisters, with name of tea on them and their price. On the other wall will be a slew of teaware.

The array of teas that TenFu sells basically goes something like… a few kinds of green, some with a few levels, a few kinds of other oolongs, and maybe a million different varieties of tieguanyin, all of the relatively green kind. Prices range from the 100 RMB/500g to the 20000RMB/500g (or even higher, I think). Their puerh are extremely overpriced, and so are everything else, for that matter.

They are ubiquitous in China. Everywhere you go, as long as you’re in a reasonable sized city, you will see at least one. I’ve seen them a few times in Shenyang already, usually in the most central shopping areas, or next to certain sites, or… next to the provincial government, in this case (for the gift-buying crowd). They are one of the few tea stores in China that will sell tea in packaging that is one level up from the ugly foil bags, and they are also a place where they will actually let you taste whatever you want, pretty much (a lot of smaller tea stores that are not in tea markets are a little reluctant about that, sometimes).

The good thing about them is that they do introduce a lot of people who otherwise don’t care much about tea a first entry to decent tea. My friend L, who now runs a tea business, got started with TenFu. He said his family, two generations ago, were tea merchants in Tianjin. Then came the revolution and communism, through which they lost their company, but he picked up interest in tea again when he got involved in tea lessons at TenFu. He’s just one example of many people who are like that. TenFu is actively involved in giving lessons to people in tea, and they have a nice community going. The amount of work they do in promoting tea is certainly worth commending.

The downside is, of course, their price. They are expensive. Everything they sell is overpriced. When I first got to Beijing, I bought a small set of teaware from them that cost me 100 RMB. I probably could’ve bought everything in that package from Maliandao for about 20. That was a lesson learned. A lot of ex-TenFu customers I know now no longer buy stuff from them, because over time they have learned that TenFu sells them stuff that are way overpriced. Far more people, however, just keep buying from them because they just trust them, somewhat blindly, I think. I think it is mostly because it is just too much trouble sometimes for what isn’t really that much money, or uncertain quality, or something like that. Many are happy with what they provide, and that’s that. At the end of the day, I suppose it’s just a matter of “to each his own”, regardless of what it is, where it’s from, or how much it is. So long as TenFu doesn’t lie about their teas (which I don’t think they do), it’s not really a problem. I think when lying starts happening, it’s a different matter entirely.

I do blame them for popularizing the ever lighter oxidation/roast of tieguanyin though, making it hard to find the higher roast stuff. Oh well.

Back to Beijing tomorrow. I think while Shenyang is nice… it’s enough to spend a week here especially with the lack of tea. The archives are not too useful here, for me anyway, although it’s a good thing I finally got to see the old palace here and some unexpected cultural treasures.

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Shenyang

June 24, 2007 · 2 Comments

Sorry for not posting updates the past day and half. I’ve been out touring the city, but also because the internet here is really spotty — up and down whenever it feels like. I’ve never had a stable enough connection to do much of anything — even my emails are only getting checked slowly.

Mind you, there isn’t a whole lot to report on the whole tea drinking thing here in Shenyang. One big reason is because they don’t seem to drink much of it here. Unlike most of the places in China that I’ve visited, which are either big cities or in tea producing regions, Shenyang is not a big city (I guess it’s better called a second or maybe third tiered city in China) nor in a tea producing region. It seems like people here aren’t really into tea drinking. There are very few stores that are dedicated to tea, even in the touristy areas, and the few that do have your very generic selection of regular offerings — jasmine, greens, a few tieguanyins, some oolongs, and maybe a puerh or two. I’ve encountered two puerh only shops, but the prices are not exactly low, and the selection lacklustre. All in all, a boring place for tea.

The “tea” we had today for lunch was a good example of people’s attitude here towards the drink. This is what was in the 500ml metal pot

See those black specks? Those are the only leaves in the pot. I should add that they were reused from the previous sitting — i.e. they brew out the same leaves, from what I can tell anyway, for the whole day. Yeah. In fact, I haven’t had a single cup of tea here that isn’t ultra bland, except what I had this morning

Which is from…..

Shoot me now.

So as you can probably imagine, I haven’t been spending much time with tea, and drinking the Assam and the Lapsang Souchong I’ve brought along as my supply of decent tea.

I have, however, been doing some touring of this rather pleasant city (apart from the lack of tea). As I’ve stated before, this was the capital of the Manchus before they conquered China, and so there are some historical sites here. Yesterday, we went to the Zhaoling, or the Luminous Mausoleum, for the second Manchu emperor Hong Taiji. The place is big…

If you look very carefully… you might be able to see a hint of the yellow roof of the main building in the distance. Or not. It’s big. The best part of the park was our ride around the park on a rented tandem bike (all 3 of us). Otherwise… it’s a lot of walking to get to places.

The actual mausoleum complex is not that impressive… but it’s the most elaborate this side of the Great Wall.

See that mound in the back? That’s where the ashes went.

The park has a conspicuous absence of any sight of a tea room — nowhere to drink tea. This further cemented my impression of the place as having not much tea.

We went to the Liaoning provincial museum today, which is a must-go. I was very very pleasantly surprised by both the quality of the museum itself, which was brand new despite the slightly ugly architecture

But they had a lot of Qing imperial collections, along with artifacts from earlier periods. Among which is one of my favourite calligraphers, Song Huizong, who is also the author of “Daguan Chalun” or the Treatise on Tea in the Daguan reign”. I took one picture of one of the stuff they had on display.

Among other collections, there was a nice jade gaiwan… note the more rounded lid (as opposed to the modern gaiwan with usually flatter lids). Gaiwans back then were used more for sipping tea out of (with leaves in there, I think) than just for brewing…. which I think might be part of the reason why.

We then went to the imperial palace, and the mansion of the last warlord who lived here, but that’s far too many pictures and probably not terribly interesting. Maybe another day, if it seems interesting enough. But if you ever come to Shenyang (4 hours train ride from Beijing, for those of you who might go to the Olympics or after) just remember to 1) bring your own tea and 2) go to the provincial museum!

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