A Tea Addict's Journal

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Yushan

May 12, 2007 · 2 Comments

I went to see my ancestors’ tombs today to pay my respects. The ones I visited are both on Yushan:

It’s the only mountain in Changshu. It’s not very high. The structure you see is a city-wall gate — part of Yushan was within the city limits and was walled.

There are lots of things on Yushan. Tombs is probably the most numerous things though. There are lots of older tombs there, starting from this:

Supposedly the tomb of one of Confucius’ most famous students, Ziyou. This would date the tomb to something around 450 BC.

So I went and swept the tombs, as we Chinese call it. There are some nice views

You can see the Yangtze River in the top right corner.

It also involves some climbing

And for one of the tombs… the entrace is next to some tea farms where women are picking tea. This is not going to be good tea, methinks. It’s already rather hot…. the leaves aren’t going to be tender!

I did want to stay, but I wasn’t done yet, and so I had to move on from the tea farm. I don’t know if I’ll have time tomorrow…. but perhaps not.

I did, however, acquire three nasty mosquito bites on the way. They were rather swollen — those mountain mosquitos are powerful. Interestingly enough, when I came back to the room and drank some Qihong… they magically disappeared, very quickly too. Now they are reduced to mere small red dots. Is this another healing property of tea I’m discovering!?!?

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Swallow Garden

May 11, 2007 · 7 Comments

Since this

is pretty much the entirety of my tea consumption today (guesses anybody?), it won’t make for a very interesting blog entry. Where I visited, however, might be of interest to some of you. It’s slightly off topic, I know, but indulge me.

After going to the library and reading a whole bunch of family genealogies (that’s my research here) I decided to take another stroll. I was told that there was a… house? mansion? I don’t know what the right word here is … that was owned by one of my ancestors about a few blocks away, so I decided to look for it among the narrow alleys of Changshu.

The place I was looking for was found after a little search. It’s called the Swallow Garden (Swallow as in the bird). It was, for a few decades at least, a property of my great-great-granduncle. If that’s confusing… he’s my grandfather’s granduncle, or my great-grandfather’s uncle. In late age he styled himself the “Old man from the Swallow Valley”, a reference to his residence (ah, this is the right word).

This is the gate to it:

It’s firmly shut.

The place was apparently under renovation, but after looking around, I saw that it was accessible by a side door, and after asking the workers there if I could go look… they let me in.

This is what you see after taking a few steps inside

It’s really quite a nice place. I never knew that a relative of mine owned this place. I do know that it was owned by another prominent local family, but whose fortunes waned. It was apparently a classic case of son gambling away the house, like in the movie To Live. My ancestor eventually bought it after it changed hands a few times.

Much of the house was relatively inaccessible, but it was rather large with a few different gardens. The most distinctive thing is that you can never see too far once you’re in it… you have to walk around and gradually discover the place, piece by piece. Something looks like it’s really close, but you can’t get there easily. It’s a maze.

So I turned right and walked through this corridor

Which eventually got me to the other side

I then walked into the back garden

There were more buildings further back, but the way was pretty much blocked by construction materials and that sort of thing. Oh well. But you can see, for example, a little gazebo overlooking another pond with some rocks. I would kill to drink tea there.

Apparently quite a few structures in this complex was destroyed after 1949, and so the current size is already reduced. It’s a pity, really, but at least they’re restoring it as much as they can.

The same thing cannot be said of our other family residence, this one being where my grandfather spent his first 20 years or so. The battery on my camera was running low so I was only able to grab a few pictures. If people are interested, I’ll post some tomorrow as I’m going back there, along with seeing other residences, pay my respects at some family tombs, and look at some more local sources. This is all work! 🙂

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Changshu

May 10, 2007 · 2 Comments

Turns out my hotel room has internet access! I was surprised, to say the least, but I can’t complain really.

I went to the museum today to find what I needed, and then after it closed, I walked around the city a little.

Changshu was a county seat, which means that it was a city with a wall, like every other county seat in China at the time. Unfortunately, also like most cities, the wall is now gone. All that’s left is the moat.

And even here… you can see sure signs of development

I ended up at the “Square Pagoda” park, where there is, indeed, a Square Pagoda.

Construction for this thing began in 1130, and it was finished by the mid 13th century. It was a “Feng Shui” pagoda in the sense that it was primarily built for Feng Shui purposes. Changshu apparently had a Feng Shui problem, and so to fix it, one needed to build a tall pagoda to remedy it. They did, and it’s still here.

By the time I got there, the park was closed, but in the summer, the afterhours is open for tea drinkers who want to go and relax in the park (until something like 9:30pm). I figured… why not, so I went in, paying 20 RMB for a local green tea.

This is the ubiquitous setup when you drink tea in parks

The tea brews slightly cloudily, with a lot of hair. The leaves are tender, but not that uniform — some larger, some smaller. The taste is sweet. I think it’s partly because of local water (which I’ve tried now). There’s a slight minty taste in the end, and the tea never got too astringent, which is very nice given the rather large amount of leaves I got in the cup.

I was way early, and the only person in the park aside from the two old men who take care of the tea station. I wandered around, taking quite a few pictures while carrying my glass, going back to the hot water to fill it up as necessary.

Then the sun was setting, and I was getting hungry… tomorrow will be a long day, so it was time to get some dinner, and head back to my hotel room with pink sheets. Changshu is not quite what I remembered last time… somehow everytime I come it seems more crowded, but at least for an hour in the park, it was really tranquil and peaceful.

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Where do the wrappers go?

April 28, 2007 · 4 Comments

A constant on CCTV these days during prime time are these programs that essentially try to educate the viewers on the virtue and the intricacies of copyright.  As everybody knows, copyright in China is almost an oxymoron.  However, there is some real attempt, at least through government controlled television, to educate people to the problems with piracy and the importance of respecting copyright.  All the participants in these programs seem well versed in such matters, and when they get it wrong, the program hosts will quickly correct them and everybody will nod and smile.

Contrast this with the following image:  a tea store that is packing teas for shipment to somewhere else, and they do it by stripping the neifei, neipiao, and wrapper of each cake and rewrapping it with something else, or nothing at all.  However, all those wrappers (all the ones I’ve seen are Zhongcha) are saved carefully and meticulously.  They unfold the wrappers, put them in neat stacks, and obviously stock them away somewhere.  I don’t know where exactly, but somewhere.  This is stuff that you would normally throw away, but not here.  Instead, they are probably going to somehow reuse it.

I’ve seen this done at least twice now at two different places.  I can’t help but wonder where these wrappers go.  I’m sure they go somewhere, and I’m sure that of the many many new or semi-new cakes out there wrapped in Zhongcha wrappers…. at least some of them are faked this way.  Some will be used to fake older teas.  What can you do about it?

Then you have the practice of repackaging a tea with some other wrapper and calling it by a different name.  Lots of people do that.  Lots of factories do that — essentially the same tea but using a different neifei/wrapper, and all of a sudden, you have a different tea!  While some people might be able to tell you the minor differences between one and the other, many regular drinkers probably cannot (if there is any difference to begin with).  Since puerh changes over time, even in the span of a few months, it is not too hard to think that they taste different if it’s an idea already lodged in your head.  That’s one way that some factories could use to bolster their own lineup and also encourage more buying by tapping into the “I must collect all” mentality.  I’ve tried some factories’ cakes that are really very similar… and makes me wonder if they are really basically the same thing with a different name.

A variation of this is where one company buys a bunch of cakes from somebody, and strips the packaging from that company and puts on their own or none at all, and sell it as something else.  I’ve had a teashop owner complaining to me about this practice as he has been a victim of it.  He and a few others made a lot of one cake.  His had his own neifei in them.  Somehow most of his were sold, through a third party, to somebody else (let’s call him Person A) in that group who had sold out his own version of the same cakes, and that somebody else stripped the neifei out of the cake to prevent people from knowing they have a different provenance.  The tea is now a known item in puerh circles, and the name that it is known for is the one that Person A uses, not the original tea store owner’s.  He still has some of it left, and I saw it with neifei and all — it does look the same as the cake with the more famous name. I wasn’t entirely sure of the story, and since he now charges the same price as person A’s store… why would you buy the no-name one (even though the no-name one is actually the original)?  His loss all around.

Last but not least, there are just the out and out fake stuff.  There are lots of them, with big factory teas being the most commonly faked.  Some are poorly faked.  Some are well faked.  Some, at least according to those who’ve tried, are even better than the real stuff.  I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s possible.

This is all really depressing.  At least it’s reassuring that they’re trying to do something about all this through education.

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Tea Expo Shanghai 2007

April 27, 2007 · 5 Comments

I went to the Tea Expo today.

First of all… the thing is a little surprising given the amount of puerh tea vendors in there.  Granted, puerh is all the rage these days and is the new darling of the tea industry in China, but I didn’t expect quite so many of them.  A fully 80% of the stalls, by my estimation, were puerh ones, and the best attended/decorated ones were definitely the puerh ones.

All the usual suspects were there… Menghai, Xiaguan, Mengku, etc etc.  Mind you, the Xiaguan stall was deserted (while the Menghai one was pretty well attended).  There were some green tea ones, and a few tieguanyin stalls, but not many.

The other thing odd about this thing is timing.  It’s obviously designed with green tea in mind, because this is a perfect time for manufacturers to showcase their newly picked green tea in late April.  However, for puerh it is too early.  Most factories present didn’t have their spring tea ready… many showed up with only the packaging of the teas, but not the teas themselves…. because they haven’t finished making them yet.  It’s a rather odd situation.  The “official puerh vendor” of the expo only had one spring cake ready — the rest were still in various stages of production.  It was a strange thing.

Here are a few sights from the place… it wasn’t too big, and we went through a backdoor (we don’t even know where the front door was) and just walked right in.  You don’t need to pay anyway to get in, so it doesn’t really matter.

The prices at the expo were actually fairly high by Maliandao standards.  One store quoted me something that was 4x what I could fetch at Maliandao… so why should I buy from the expo?  I don’t know.  Prices in general were quite high, and no bargains were to be had, as far as I am aware, especially considering this was the “trade” day.  Non-trade visitors were only supposed to visit tomorrow and Sunday.

Then again, as at all expos, there were freebies to be had.  Action Jackson, especially, got a free cake from some gentleman from a relatively unknown factory

Sometimes, it pays to be a foreigner in China.

I also had my first experience drinking tea from a huge teapot today

The tea inside is similar to what I had at the Xinjiang restaurant, except with a bit more spiciness in the tea.  Maybe it’s the same thing brewed a little stronger.  If it’s what I think it is… it’s Fu Bricks from Hunan.

Thanks to L’s connection, all of us got some freebies as well from the puerh sponsor.  He knows the manager of their factory in Yunnan, who was there today, and he gave us this:

Which, if opened, reveals the goodies:

This is maocha from all six of the Six Mountains.  In order from top to bottom they are Yiwu, Yibang, Wangzhi, Manzhuan, Youle, and Gedeng.  Yes, I’m going to try them all, and of course, you’ll all hear about them when I do.

After the tea expo, where we only spent about two hours and change, we went to Tianshan Tea City to buy some stuff.  We stopped at a Wuyi store, drank a few things, including a fairly interesting, but very high fired, Wuyi tea.  This stuff was black and tasted quite strong of charcoal taste.  I liked it, Action Jackson didn’t, and neither did L’s business partner from Hangzhou.  L himself wasn’t around, but I don’t think he would’ve liked it either.

We made it out of there with a bit of tea, then looked around for the cheapest gaiwan we could find.  I finally have a gaiwan for the house now for a whooping 5 RMB.  I don’t have a cup, but that is easily fixable.  I also saw some curious cakes on our way out, but I already had enough.

We drank even more tea as we went to L’s office, including a 2003 Purple Dayi and a cooked cake of some kind from Zhongcha.  All this while a few Menghai factory dealers were there drinking stuff and basically saying only Dayi teas are good.  It was too much for me… and my stomach complained when we didn’t get to eat dinner until after 8.  Sigh.

All in all, a long day for tea.  Gotta get some work done tomorrow to compensate, and at some point in the near future, I need to head back to Tianshan to try some tea I don’t get to try in Beijing.

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Breaking news

April 25, 2007 · 8 Comments

It seems like the disorderly exit that I semi-predicted has begun.

L just called me.  He said that there have been news that he heard that the markets in Kunming and in Guangzhou have started the big decline… and nobody is asking for Dayi (Menghai) goods at this point.  Makes a lot of market sense, really, since as soon as the prices start dropping, everybody who wanted to buy will wait till the prices stabilize a bit before jumping into the fray again.  All the tea investors who’ve been buying will want to let go of their goods very quickly.  One of L’s customers in Tianshan Tea City told him that the biggest Dayi distributors in Shanghai has already called him a few times, asking him to help sell stuff for prices that you could only dream of a month or two ago.

This is welcomed news, really.  The prices for a lot of these younger cakes has reached astronomical levels, with new, fresh off the mountain cakes selling for things like 250 RMB each, and a lot of these are cheap plantation teas that aren’t really worth that much.  Many people I know who are the end customers for such things — tea drinkers like you and me, think that prices are simply far too high to buy any more new cakes.

I had thought that given the fact that much of the country still has to tap into the puerh craze, that there might be enough future customers to sustain the run for a little longer.  However, once a fall happens it is hard to stop if everybody wants to exit the market, or at least withdraw from active buying.  I think it started with Xiaguan teas — it briefly reached 220 RMB for a stick of 5 tuochas.  That price was about 7x what I could’ve bought the same tea when I first arrived in Beijing.  Somebody made a lot of money from investing in Xiaguan tea in the short term, but more people have now lost a lot of money.  Xiaguan prices already fell a bit when I left Beijing for Shanghai.  I wondered, at the time, whether it will cause a drop in Dayi teas too.  Seems like people have woken up to the fact that investing in puerh is a risky business, and are no longer willing to take that risk.

We’ll have to see what happens in the next few weeks, but I think it will be hard for prices to pick up anytime soon.  Hopefully this will usher in an era of more rational purchasing, as well as more sustainable development of products and farming techniques.

I am going to go to the Tea Expo in Shanghai this Friday.  If what I’m hearing is actually true — this will definitely make it a very, very interesting experience.

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It’s not a total loss

March 26, 2007 · 1 Comment

I did get something out of the conference, that is related to tea, despite the lack of good tea to drink there.

I bought two books that are a collection of older tea texts. It looks very promising, with lots of information on various kinds of older tea practices, etc. Looks like a really fun read 🙂

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Tea in Harvard Square

March 16, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been living around Harvard Square now for four years, and really, I’ve been blessed by the number of tea stores that are around this little area. Over the years, it has gotten more tea vendors. This is not to say that they are all of high quality or sell exotic things, but for the US of A, I think my selection here is not too bad.

So what do we have around Harvard Square?

I guess we’ll start with A. Dado Tea. They have a nice tea menu, as you can see. But you can also see that they’re not cheap. 2.25 for a basic cup to go, and very little leaves at that. If you want Korean green tea though, this is the place to go. It’s also nicely decorated/setup so that drinking tea there is actually rather pleasant. It’s also a bubble tea place… and I think that’s where they make their money.

Tealuxe is sort of the original tea store around here, as far as I know. They only sell tea — and one kind of coffee (which nobody buys, as far as I can tell). I remember they used to carry a superb selection of teas, some of which I’ve never heard of, and there was always something interesting to drink there. Unfortunately, I think they overexpanded a few years ago and had to cut back (probably took on more than they can chew). Nowadays, they offer mostly black teas and, horror of horrors, flavoured black teas and herbal teas. Their oolongs and greens are nowhere near what they used to be, and they have yet to offer any kind of puerh. Oh well, that doesn’t matter so much. They’re rather expensive, but good for a reliable cup of tea when I’m in a rush.

Then there’s Peet’s, which stinks of coffee when you walk in. The tea menu, however, is not bad, and has some really strange things. There’s this one tea that I tried recently called “Imperial Red”, and I honestly have no idea what it is. In some ways, their offering of teas might actually be the best among all the stores in Harvard Square now, surprisingly enough. As much as I’d hate to admit that a coffee store is selling decent tea, this one actually does. I should probably go visit their home in Berkeley at some point.

There are a whole bunch of places that sell pretty decent teas, but which are not listed in the google results, because they are primarily coffee joints. These places, such as Toscanini’s (an ice cream bar), Cafe Gato Rojo (a cafe in a Harvard building), Cafe Pamplona (a little place in the basement of a house with 6ft clearance — if you’re too tall, you won’t be comfortable there), among others. They are all supplied by a business called Mem Tea (G). It’s a great service, as they are just a wholesaler doing mostly restaurant and cafe business, but the consumers, like me, get to drink loose leaf teas that are actually decent. These places, if not for the existence of Mem Tea, would all be selling me teabags of various kinds, most likely Stash or Twinnings or Lipton or some other such thing. Instead, they use the “loose leaf in a bag” system and have various kinds of teas on offer. They don’t do retail, except through stores that buy them, but I’ve met the owner of the thing and he is quite a nice person. I’m always glad to see those signature tea containers that they use, because it means I can order a reasonable cup at that place.

There’s a new store in town that isn’t even on the maps yet, at the corner of Massachusetts Ave. and Remington St., called Karma…. something. They’re downstairs from a Yoga Studio of the same name, and offers tea up front. It’s a sleekly designed place, and I tried one tea there already… a Yunnan black of some sort. It’s not bad. I couldn’t figure out where they source their teas. Sometimes it’s obvious where a store gets their teas, but this one isn’t. I might go back again and try something else they have to see if it’s up to any good.

So, while the offerings around here isn’t fantastic, I have a feeling that this is probably better than most. At the very least, I can always count on a cup of tea that is brewed with loose leaf tea and not have to worry about the horror that is a teabag. Then again, when I’m despearte enough, I can even drink McDonald’s tea…

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Tea storage in Hong Kong

March 5, 2007 · 1 Comment

I went to the Best Tea House again… and tried that Yiwu small arbour sample that I have. Interesting observation — the tea got better, and changed character, since last time.

I don’t know what it is, but last time the tea brewed a rather insipid and boring tea, but this time, it’s much more flavourful. It’s still a bit on the weak side, but it came out a lot better. Part of it has to do with the sheer amount of leaves used, but I think the other reason is because it’s really changed a bit…. it’s different from the last three times I’ve had it.

Humidity here today is 98%. Somehow I think the taste change has to do with the very high humidity in Hong Kong. I think it ultimately makes teas change faster, and probably better. After all, almost all the older stuff we have on the market today came through Hong Kong. I am more and more convinced that a place like Beijing will develop terrible tasting teas.

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Storage problem

March 3, 2007 · 5 Comments

I am looking for a place to store my teas in Hong Kong, and there’s a cabinet in the house that will do the job well, I think. One problem though — it smells of varnish still, mostly because the door is rarely open. What can get rid of the varnish smell quickly? Any thoughts? Will charcoal do it? Should I go buy a bag of charcoal, open it, put it in the cabinet, and so when I return to Hong Kong next time, I can stick my tea (from Beijing) in the cabinet without having to worry about them all smelling like varnish?

I don’t have many days left in Hong Kong, so I might do a little last minute shopping around, although mostly, I am just going to hang out at home. Then it’s back to Cambridge for me.

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