A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘travel’

Dongguan tea shopping

February 29, 2012 · 6 Comments

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Upon the recommendation of Nicolas, I decided to venture up north to the heart of world manufacturing and to see the Dongguan tea markets for myself. Alas, I underestimated the difficulties of traveling in this part of the world, and by the time I arrived it was too late to go shopping. One meal and some food poisoning later, by the time I arrived there the next morning, I was really pretty sick, and I’m surprised I didn’t collapse while there.

From my research, Dongguan has two major tea markets, and a whole host of smaller collections of tea shops here and there. I decided to hit up the older, and larger market in Wanjiang district. It’s about 15-20 minutes from town center, depending on where you are and the traffic, which, at times, can be quite bad. The day was rainy, and cold, and generally rather unpleasant. I only took one overexposed picture while there, since I was basically in no mood to do so, and the scenery was depressing.

As is rather common today in China, many of these places have extremely wide roads, with shops on both sides. Here, the teashops are generally one story, and are basically uninterrupted for a few blocks in each direction. The first rule of shopping in places like this, especially if you’re low on time, is not to walk into stores that look uninteresting, which basically means don’t walk into almost all of them. They all have the same features – puerh cakes lined up on one side, big bags (5kg bags, or some variation of it) of tieguanyin or other Fujian oolong on the other side, vacuum sealed. In the middle area between the two walls, there are usually shelves full of either teaware, pots, tables, or more tea. Or there might be boxes or jians of puerh, or other types of loose tea (although you can imagine what it does to the tea’s quality in this super-damp environment). The back wall usually has a tea table set up, with a very, very bored looking young person, often a female, but sometimes male, staring blankly out onto the street, backed by a wall of puerh cakes encased in either glass or, more likely, yellowed plexiglass and set in these yellow artificial silk lined boxes. Even though these cakes are supposedly the more “exotic” or higher valued cakes, often times they’re just more run of the mill puerh cakes of no discernable value.

It is not impossible to find value in these shops. But if you’re pressed for time, that’s not the best way to spend time in a tea market. Instead, look for shops that seems specialized in one particular type of tea, whatever it is that you’re looking for. For tieguanyin, stores that only sell tieguanyin is likely to have more interesting stuff.  Likewise, for puerh, if you want old tea, go to a store that seems to only sell that. For younger tea, you can always spot the top end young tea stores pretty easily, especially if they press their own cakes.

So after having spent about 20 minutes just wandering around, I finally did end up in one store that seems to do their own pressing of young puerh, focusing on Yiwu and Jingmai, two of the most interesting tea mountains. The boss wasn’t there, and only a young male shopkeeper who said he’s from Yunnan was there. They had a number of cakes, although most of them they only had a handful left – the rest were all sold out. What remains are the lower end stuff, which, although not cheap (180-200 RMB a cake) are really not very interesting. Because of my health limitations that day, I only tried one tea, which I eventually bought a cake of – a Jingmai old tree tea, which is very potent, good, and interesting. I need to try it again, but I think this year once their spring tea arrives, I may head back up to Dongguan and buy some more of this. Although it’s not cheap at over 400 RMB a cake, it is, I think, worth the price of admission.

By the time I had a few cups of this tea, I was starting to really feel the effects this had on me, and the general situation was so that I had to go back to the hotel to lie down. It’s too bad I couldn’t spend more time at the tea market there, as I’m sure there are other stores that will present items of interest. Oh well, it’s only about two hours away, and there’s always next time.

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New year in Portland

January 31, 2012 · 7 Comments

A belated Chinese new year to everyone, and sincere wishes that the year of the dragon be a year of good tea for all of you!

I spent my new year in Portland, OR, which is more or less a caricature of what one might think of as a hippie northwest city. It’s a wonderful place, if you don’t mind the six months of rain in the winter, and the scenery is truly beautiful, as is true of pretty much the entire northwest coast.

It also is the home to some famous, mainstream tea companies, most notably Tazo, Stash, and the Tao of Tea.  The city’s offering in better, higher end teas, however, is a bit disappointing, at least from what I have found previously and given the context. I’ve visited a few teahouses in the city, all pretty mediocre, and nothing too interesting beyond what you might find in any run of the mill teahouse in the US. Given the concentration of tea companies in Portland, you’d think there will be more, better tea in this city, of all places.

Running a tea blog, however, has its perks, and one of them is that you get in touch with all sorts of people who lurk and who will let you know they’re in a certain place once you’ve gotten to know them. So while I was in Portland I met up with Abx, whose blog is defunct but who is still drinking tea, at a place called Serenity Arts. The shop is not much – it is located in the same building as an Asian market, and the decor is what you’d expect in a place like that. However, it has that all-important ingredient to the making of a good teahouse – an owner who cares about what she’s drinking.

I met up with Abx at the store, where he clearly knows the owner fairly well.  They were already drinking, but since I hadn’t eaten yet, we had a quick meal at the pretty decent Korean restaurant next door (Portland is full of good Korean places) before going back for some tea. The store can’t really be said to specialize in any particular type of tea, and given its location and clientele, it’s probably difficult to do so, but the owner does seem to take some care in sourcing her stuff, and some of the teas that they sell are things that are harder to find in the US normally – loose, aged puerh (raw and cooked), some pretty decent dancong, etc. Despite its location, or perhaps because of it, it offers up goods that you might not be able to find in one of the more famous places in the city, at prices more reasonable than others.

We must’ve had at least half a dozen tea, while chatting with the owner who was brewing the whole time and some of the other clients who dropped in and out. It is clear, having sat there for a few hours, that the store has good tea from time to time. However, they are not offered generally, but rather sold to familiar clients who are willing (and able) to pay the higher prices that such teas demand. What I liked about it though is that she generally refrained from any overt sales pitch, or overly flowery language in describing a tea. I appreciate the no-nonsense approach to drinking tea, and if I were living in Portland, I can see myself going to this store often.

As I was starting to think about leaving, the owner picked up a ziploc bag with some dark leaves in it, and said she’d brew this one – a 1960s liu’an, she claims, that was given to her by some relative or other. I was initially skeptical, since these claims of old tea are often questionable, but once she brewed it, it was pretty clear that this is a spectacular tea – fragrant, lively, still retaining the freshness of the liu’an base of green tea, while having added on a heavy dose of the aged tea taste that is typical of this genre. Oftentimes liu’an can be quite plain and boring, but this one is anything but. We probably drank 15 rounds of it, and the tea was not at all giving up yet. I had to go, but didn’t really want to.

 

PhotobucketLiu’an in action

So if you ever go to Portland and want to fish for some tea, stop by here. Abx also told me that there’s a new place that opened recently, but I thought Serenity Arts might have more interesting things. I think I was probably right.

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A good tea trip

December 29, 2011 · 1 Comment

Being close to Taiwan is probably one of the biggest perks of being in Hong Kong, at least from the perspective of a tea lover. I count aged oolongs as the tea that I can drink day in, day out, and Taiwan is probably the best place to find such things. Even though MadameN and I only went there for three days this time, it did not disappoint.

The Candy Store is of course my first stop, and I returned to find that the laobanniang still remembers me and that I was a seeker of aged oolongs. I spent a few hours sitting there, drinking tea and digging through big metal cans with her, and among the teas I tasted there were two or three that seemed quite decent. One, the last one I tried that day, was very similar to The One That Got Away, and I dare not make the same mistake twice. So I ended up taking home the whole bag of tea that she had, all 2kg of it.

There were smaller successes too, as I went from shop to shop in Taipei looking for things. I replenished my supply of aged oolong, which, while not exactly running low, is low enough for me to have withheld consumption of aged oolongs for a while, opting instead to drink teas that are more readily available. Now, I am sitting in my office sipping an inexpensive aged tieguanyin that I bought on this trip that has the right mix of aged taste, sweetness, and throatiness. Yum.

Having then punctuated the trip with a visit to the magnificent Taroko park, we returned to Taipei and picked up the tea I wanted. On the last day, before our departure, I met up with a dear tea friend from Japan who is both knowledgeable and incredibly generous, and together we visited a tea lover/maker/seller who brewed a series of quite interesting, younger puerhs, some of which are the best young puerh I have had in a while. That’s the other thing about Taiwan – in addition to lots of shops, it has a high number of people who are very keen on tea and who spend a lot of time thinking about it, drinking it, and in some cases, making it. Others are then attracted to Taiwan and visit, therefore further exchanging ideas and teas. It’s a very fertile environment in which to advance one’s own tea appreciation, and I can’t think of a better place for tea than that.

With our bellies full of good tea, our tea companion took us to the airport and sent us off. Four days is far too short for a trip, but it was an invigorating one. I’ll be back for more, and soon.

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The tea shop island

December 24, 2011 · 5 Comments

Taiwan was called the Ilha Formosa, or the beautiful island, because the Portuguese sailors who first saw Taiwan thought it beautiful. That it still is, but for those of us who are avid tea drinkers, this is more like the Teashop island.

I just got here yesterday for a very quick trip, and stayinag in the heart of Taipei last night, we went out for dinner around our hotel. Just on the pre and post dinner walk alone, in the space of about a few blocks, I think I saw a dozen teashops. Not all of them are necessarily worth visiting, especially when there are many fine shops to go to, but I think it is safe to say that nobody will die of caffeine deprivation here. In fact, I wonder if Taiwan might not have the highest concentration of teashop per capita in the world.

Now I am sitting here in the middle of Taroko national park. It is stunning, and more than validates Taiwan’s former name. More on that later.

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Leaf Tea Boutique

October 28, 2011 · 11 Comments

Last night I visited Leaf Tea Boutique with MadameN.  We were there for a small art exhibit, and the proprietor of the place, who was also the host of the event, also decided to make it a tea tasting. I’ve walked by this store a number of times before, never bothering to go in as it looks, from the street level anyway, to be just another tea shop, situated in Central in an area frequented by foreign tourists and expats, which means, at least for me, that it probably sells uninteresting teas. When I arrived at the place I was a little confused – where was this art going to be had? This being Hong Kong, space is a real premium, and I couldn’t see any space for any art, until, of course, the staff directed us to go downstairs – turns out they have a little space in the basement that is normally used for seats and has been converted into a little gallery.

In Hong Kong, despite its tea guzzling culture, there are very, very few places where you can actually sit down and drink tea. While plenty of places sell tea, and some will brew for you if you want to try something out, if you want to just buy a cup or a pot of tea to drink, or if you (god forbid) want to bring your own leaves to brew, you’re fresh out of luck. There was one place in Causeway Bay that did that in a Chinese setting, but that store is long dead.  For those who need tea in Central or any other place, for that matter, your only solution is to go to Starbucks, Pacific Coffee, or any number of hotel cafes and the like for a cup of bland and overpriced teabag tea. Leaf Tea Boutique, therefore, is a nice, welcomed addition, and as you can buy a cup to go or for on-premises consumption, that’s a much better alternative for those of us teaheads who need a caffeine fix but don’t want yet another Harney teabag.

Of course, drinking tea in a basement doesn’t sound too exciting, but it also offers something that a lot of places in Hong Kong lacks – peace and quiet. You can’t hear the hustle and bustle at all from their basement, which is quite nice.

There are a number of teas on the menu there, and the proprietor lined up ten teas for us to try in succession. It was slightly wasteful, as we only got to drink one cup out of every brew, but it did allow us to sample more of their teas. As is typical in a tasting, we went from green to black (I skipped the mint tea at the end). Some, such as the sencha and the tieguanyin are merely ok, while others, like the baimudan (white peony) is quite nice. They only offer one of every type of tea, and give very little information on the tea itself, which I understand may turn off some people, but given their business model, location, and potential customer base, that’s not such a bad thing.  The young puerh that we had is probably in the 5 year range, seemingly a blend with a bit of smoke leftover.  I think it’s a big factory production, although it’s not quite clear, and I didn’t ask to look. I don’t like to be too inquisitive the first time I visit a store.

I just noticed that they have a flat pricing structure – which may explain the quality levels I found in the teas. Finding a decent baimudan that sells for $25 USD per 100g is pretty easy. Finding a good tieguanyin for the same price is considerably harder. You’ll never find anything near a top flight longjing at that price.

All in all, it’s a nice place, and a welcomed addition to the general availability of teas here in Hong Kong in a different format. For the general public and even those of us who just want a decent cup of tea while in the city doing other things, it’s not a bad place to go.

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Hong Kong tea culture

October 12, 2011 · 6 Comments

Hong Kong’s tea culture is quite complicated, and one can write a whole book about it. I think at the very core, there are three levels of tea drinking going on here. There is the everyday drinking that happens just because you need something to drink. There’s the grandpa style brewed teas that people consume on a daily basis, either at work, at home, or on the road. Then there’s the aficionados who drink tea as a hobby, who spend time thinking about it, and who probably spend an inordinate amount of money doing it.

The everyday drinking happens literally everywhere. No matter where you go, you encounter tea in the city. When you sit down at a restaurant, unless it’s a place that specialized in some sort of non-Chinese food, you are generally served a cup of tea. That can be a cup of tea brewed in a pot, as in dim sum places, or it can be a cup of tea that’s really super-diluted cooked pu that’s nothing more than slightly flavoured water. The quality of these teas, generally speaking, are quite low. At dim sum places, for example, it is a good rule to not order puerh, as they are generally cooked and nasty, with lurid stories of rats running over teacakes told by scaremongers. I usually opt for shuixian, which, these days, can be anything really from a tieguanyin (more likely benshan) to a Wuyi shuixian, and with roasting that is anything from nuclear green to dark brown. Although older, wiser tea friends tell me to go for shoumei, as it’s usually the safest choice, I just can’t stand that stuff.

PhotobucketTypical scene after a meal, this one in Cambridge MA

In addition to the everyday tea that automatically gets served to you, there are teas out there that you order, but which you encounter effortlessly and which are served to you more or less automatically. For example, if you visit a fast food restaurant specializing in local fare, your dish is almost inevitably accompanied by a drink. The options, usually, are: lemon tea, lemon water, milk tea, or coffee. I often opt for milk tea, for lack of a real choice, and in a strange local custom, cold drinks always cost more than hot ones (ostensibly for the ice) so by going with milk tea over, say, iced lemon tea, you’re saving a few bucks as well. What you get, of course, is your standard fare Hong Kong milk tea, made super strong and then added with a generous dose of evaporated milk. You can’t get that anywhere else. There are also things like bubble teas, but those have really faded from the scene in recent years, and are far less common than they used to be.

One issue with this type of tea drinking is that it is everywhere, and that you are almost stuck with it. I don’t like it, actually, because it raises my caffeine intake for no good reason. I tend to view my caffeine intake daily as a set thing, and as I spend it on things like milk tea, I have less to spend on better teas that I prefer to drink. Alas, that’s part of the cost of living here.

The other kind of tea drinking that goes on here is of course the grandpa style drinking that happens everywhere. My colleagues at work, for example, drink loads everyday, mostly greens and sometimes including some mysterious looking things that are probably herbal teas of some sort. In fact, as anyone who’s ever traveled in China will tell you, most of the time, people who drink grandpa style are doing it to green tea, which of course flies in the face of whatever your tea vendor tells you about proper temperature at which to brew tea – when they first brew the green, it is almost always with boiling hot water violently knocking the leaves around as one pours from our office water boiler (yes, it’s an industrial looking thing you might imagine in a staff canteen rather than individualized kettles). The tea that comes out, if you know how to manage it, can be quite ok, or quite nasty, if your tea is bad, but this, I think, is tea drinking for the vast majority of people in Hong Kong.

Then there’s that small group of folks who are quite serious and sometimes obsessive about tea drinking. You can find those, at least for Hong Kong, at a relatively new tea forum that some established a little while ago. They hold frequent tea drinking sessions, although I haven’t really gone for reasons of work. Many of these individuals know far more and have tried far more aged puerh than any Western vendor ever has, or ever will. If you mention, say, the Snow Mark, they’ll tell you they’ve had dozens of different ones and some are better (and be able to tell you which ones) and some are worse, and right away, for example, when I brought them the Yuanyexiang that I’ve been storing for the past five years, they tell me there’s something different about it, because, quite possibly, it’s been stored overseas. In other words, they’re a living repository of tea knowledge, and for the most part, they’re consumers like you and me, not producers or retailers who have a vested interest in what they’re talking about. They congregate around shops of various types that will entertain them, but Hong Kong being what it is, oftentimes it has to be done in other venues, whether it be sympathetic restaurants or sometimes, when space permits, people’s homes.

So all this, in some ways, forms the rather complex tea drinking culture here. For a tea lover, I think it’s not a bad place to be. It’s close to Taiwan and the Mainland, and if you’re so inclined, even Japan or India is not too far away. I guess I should count myself lucky in that regard to be able to live here.

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Frenzied development

July 19, 2011 · 1 Comment

Pretty much every day now you can open the newspapers (or more likely, a news website) and some story about China’s economic development will pop up.  The rise of China as an economic power that people actually pay attention to is something quite remarkable, and every time I go back and visit I can see it on the ground.  Maliandao, which I discussed five years ago when I first got there and updated last year, is no longer the backwater shopping street it used to be.  Two new roads have opened onto Maliandao, and traffic is worse than ever.  There are many, many more buildings in the vicinity now.  If we go back to the updated map:

Now I can give you some pictures to match up with the colours.  This is the building in purple on top

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The one on the left anyway.  That was a pile of dirt, basically, when I was there in 06/07, and was just beginning to get some building going on.  Now it’s a full blown tea mall with an apartment building on top.  The building on the right in the picture is what used to be the Pu’er Chadu, which is now defunct.  This picture was taken from the vantage point of the big Maliandao Tea City mall

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Which is the same as always.  Don’t go if you’re a tourist — it has the worst prices.  Although, because a number of stores there are older, if you’re looking for Beijing stored tea, you might get lucky there.  Just don’t expect a good deal.

The big pink thing on the map on the right hand side is this:

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Another big apartment building with teashops underneath.  There are two levels of this, all open to the street, and some have nice teas.  I bought my big bag of white tea there.  Next to this building is another building that has always been at Maliandao, but only recently started selling tea:

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The building underneath the blue sign was, and still is, mostly a audiophile/camera mall, but the ground and second floor are now teashops.  Nothing too impressive there except a few things of interest, but that’s only after a quick walkaround.  Behind it is Tianfuyuan, the big brown box on the map on the right, and where Xiaomei’s shop is located.

Underneath all this ritzy development though is still the same old infrastructure that supplies the stores.  Witness, for example, this:

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Among all the new cars and shiny objects are still the labourers who work hard to make the place function — here are two cart drivers who are carrying empty (left) and full (right) jugs of water for the shops in the area.  Note how the carts have an electric motor. Many of the shopkeepers still live in, or above, the stores, and many of them are still earning a paltry sum, although a paltry sum now is closer to 1600 RMB a month, rather than the 600 RMB a month of four or five years ago.  In fact, my friend L has been trying to hire someone but has found no takers for 1500 RMB.

Construction is still continuing, with a new tea mall slated to open probably later this year, and targeted at a more upmarket crowd.  The place has nicer decor and looks to be quite posh.  I’m sure you can find high prices there, along with prettier sales girls and more comfortable surroundings.  On the other hand, I also heard that a subway line will open in the next few years that will take you to Maliandao, which will make life a lot easier.  Either way, it’s fascinating to see all the changes in the past few years — and it looks like it’s going to keep going.

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Random thoughts in Beijing

July 1, 2011 · 2 Comments

1) I find myself having difficulty brewing tea away from home these days to my satisfaction, mostly because my setup is very specific and quite different from what you find elsewhere.  I’m sure many of us have our quirks in our brewing setup, some more esoteric and specific than others, but generally speaking, the more you change the brewing settings, the harder it is to replicate good results.  When everything ranging from wares to water to the tea itself has changed, the likelihood of success is relatively low.  Note how in tea-brewing competitions, the competitors are often using their own teaware and I think often know what style of tea they’re brewing beforehand, so there’s really not a lot of variable they have to control for.

2) Partly because of the abovementioned difficulty, buying tea away from home is also a difficult thing.  First of all, you are tasting at someone else’s place, and you have no way of trying it out at home, because you’re away from it.  You can’t just take a sample, go home, and try it out.  What you get at the store is likely what you will have to deal with.  Also, you are limited by your luggage space.  I bought 500g of a white tea, and it’s enormous – the tea, because of the way it was processed, has very broad leaves and eat up tonnes of space.  Whereas 500g of compress pu is just one cake, 500g of this white tea is two large bags that fills up my entire backpack.  I wanted more of it, but simply cannot carry more.  I’m going to see if there’s a way for me to get the seller to ship it to me, but that’s a real pain even if I were in China.

3) The Beijing tea markets are getting bigger, and things are getting more expensive.  There have been a few tea malls that are now open that didn’t exist back in 2007, and another brand new one is under construction.  It looks posh, and I’m sure will be filled with finely decorated stores.  This is the other trend – things are getting more expensive here, and there’s no turning back as the country gets richer.  The average restaurant worker in Beijing is earning about 2-3x what they used to when I lived here, and my friend L was complaining to me how he couldn’t find someone willing to help out at his store with an offer of 1,500 RMB a month plus free living space.  Now it seems like the going rate is 1,800.  While that’s still pitifully low for Western standards, it speaks volumes about what people can afford and how much they’re willing to pay.  Prices I’ve heard quoted for old tree puerh raw materials are anywhere from 300-800 RMB/kg, depending on the area.   Prices for new tea, of course, are quite high.

4) One positive from the higher prices is that things are getting prettier, although of course, you have to pay for pretty.  A lot of stores look nicer now, are using nicer wares, and serve you tea in nicer cups.  Packaging for tea is getting better, and even the paper used to wrap puerh cakes are no longer of the toilet paper variety.  It does make for a slightly more pleasant shopping experience, and in the case of teaware, you can find some pretty decent looking wares out there for not a lot of money.  I’m quite tempted by a celadon fairness cup, but I might pass, just because I almost never use fairness cups in the first place.

5) Serious tea makers are getting better at it.  I remember visiting this shop in Maliandao that was run by two brothers in 06/07, and their teas, which they pressed themselves in Yunnan, were decent, but not great.  I went back there today, and the tea I tried were some of the best young puerh I’ve had in quite some time.  The ones who entered the game and stayed in the game are now a few years wiser, and some, like this brother pair, are getting quite good at it.  The tea is expensive, but I think well worth the money, so I shelled out for a few cakes.  I would’ve probably gotten more, if not for the abovementioned limitation of space.

6) Having said that, it’s still quite hard to find anything really decent unless you know already where to look.  Shopping in tea markets is not really for the casual traveler.  There’s a reason, for example, why few locals visit these places, never mind foreigners.  It’s hard looking for good tea when there are literally hundreds of shops all packed inside a two block radius, and it’s only getting harder with more and more tea malls being built.  Sometimes I find things because I get lucky, like this white tea, but sometimes you just have to know where to find it, like this brother shop.  You also need boatloads of time.  I was hoping to find some decent yancha today, but most of the shops I know from back when were either dead, or don’t look too promising.  There are no lack of yancha shops at all — I probably ran into a hundred in the past few days, but I didn’t enter a single one.  Sitting down and tasting tea takes a lot of time, not to mention having to endure all kinds of crap because they’re not to your liking for either price or taste purposes.  Finding good tea takes work.

7) It’s still buyer beware.  This applies to both the end consumer, like us, and also the producers.  Consumers need to be well informed – know what you’re tasting, be able to tell the difference, be able to make good judgment quickly based on one or at most two tastings, and know the prices of things out there.  Producers need to know what they’re doing, and not trust their sources too much.  I’ve heard and also seen enough in the past few days to know that the same stuff that used to happen in 06/07 still goes on today – people having their maocha swapped between purchase and pressing, people thinking they were buying tea from mountain X when it was really tea shipped in from mountain Y, people processing teas in woefully misinformed ways, etc.  Producers, if they’re not careful, can get just as easily screwed as the consumer, except they then pass the cost of the mistakes onto the consumer.  That’s why I generally don’t trust any producer who spends less than 3-4 months a year in Yunnan to be pressing cakes.  Without that kind of time and effort, and not to mention the necessary building of local connections that require constant maintenance, most vendors simply cannot get the tea they think they’re getting.

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Packing and shipping

June 13, 2011 · 9 Comments

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One of the most painful things about moving is packing up everything.  What you see here, alas, is only a fraction of what I have.  Teaware, as we all know, are fragile, breakable things.  Pots, cups, dishes, kettles, everything is breakable, and everything needs a lot of wrapping.  I find that a lot of it is really difficult to do right, and sometimes people who pack and then ship these things don’t do it properly, resulting in breakage.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to pack a teapot with the lid on the pot itself and just wrap the whole thing with bubble wrap.  That’s dangerous.  The lid, while it sits on the pot, can easily be rattled in shipment and comes loose or, worse, get damaged, as happened to one of my pots.  One of the pots I bought recently was shipped to me with only a little tape holding the lid onto the body.  Of course, when I opened the box, the lid was loose.  I was really lucky it wasn’t in pieces.

There’s also the issue of cushioning.  Ideally, you want space between all pieces of stuff — some sort of buffer in between each and every piece, so they never touch during shipment and will never come into contact with hard surface.  They also need to be cushioned against impacts along the walls of the box, so there needs to be space there too.  Boxes that are too small are disasters waiting to happen.

Shipping metal is no less difficult.  While tetsubins are pretty hardy and can take a lot of abuse, things like tin, pewter, copper, or silver are much more fragile and will dent or scratch easily.  With these, you have to be extra sure that the cushioning is enough to support all kinds of blows to the box — especially since some of these are heavy and if they are allowed to shift in the box, the momentum will create a greater force to dent what’s next to it.  I’d suggest shipping them singly, if possible, or if one must ship them together with something else, do so in a way that minimizes the chances of breakage with the way you place different items, etc.

Teas are easier to deal with, especially if they’re of the oolong variety and come in bags.  That’s almost a no brainer, so long as the box itself is relatively air tight and (hopefully) won’t be exposed to high temperature or sunlight.  Puerh cakes are a bit of a pain, but generally speaking when I ship these things I almost expect damage — it’s just part of the cost of shipping them.  Broken edges, roughed up wrappers, and missing teadust are par for the course.  If they’re not flooded I’m happy.

What’s really difficult is deciding to get rid of some pieces.  I have a lot of teaware that I think I should probably cull from my collection, either because I no longer use them at all, or in many cases, never really used them in the first place.  In this picture alone I see three pieces that I never use and I should probably get rid of, but I have a hard time bringing myself to do it.  On one level, I’m a hoarder at heart, so I want to hold onto them.  I also feel, somehow, that selling these things is not quite right.  I sometimes gift items away, but you can only gift so many things, and not a lot of people take tea related gifts, in any case.  Sometimes they’re also pieces that I don’t deem gift-worthy — if I’m not going to use it, why should I inflict it on someone else?  Then there are the tuition pieces.  At some point I’m going to take pictures of all of them and then show them here, so that others can learn from my tuition mistakes, but those pieces I’m sort of stuck with forever, and all I really need to the resolve to throw them in the trash.  All in all, the problem of too much teaware is really a dilemma that has no good resolution.

Categories: Misc
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Maliandao Geography – an update

September 10, 2010 · 7 Comments

A long time ago, I posted something about Maliandao Geography, mostly to help others going to Beijing to navigate themselves around the street where they sell all things tea.  After this recent trip, I noticed that the old map needs a little update.

So, what changed?

Well, first of all, the Beijing Pu’er Chadu (black on the old map) is no more.  It’s dead, gone, turned into something unrecognizable.  Those stores all left, I guess, to go somewhere else.

Instead, we have two shiny new tea malls that are now BEFORE the all important Carrefour (purple and orange).  Now, what I said about the Carrefour still stands — anything that shows up before the Carrefour is for tourist only, and the serious tea buyer should not bother with them, because they are more expensive and so you will probably not find your best prices there.  Keep walking.

There are also two newer (although not new — newer only relative to my last post) places that sell tea that are slightly more out of the way.  Brown is Tianfuyuan tea mall, which you can only get to if you walk through the Beijing Tea Corporation mall (or through a nondescript alley with shops).  That’s where Xiaomei, my friend, has her shop.  It’s now a little shabby, and honestly, I thought she should move, but then, she seems to be doing all right, so I’m sure there’s business there still.

The other place that is newer is the Beijing tea trading center, coloured pink here.  I walked by, walked around, and didn’t see much that I like.  However, I didn’t see much that I liked anywhere in Beijing this time, so that’s really not saying much.

I went on a rainy day, and it was not very crowded at all – in fact, it was positively dead.  At Chayuan, only about half the shops were actually open.  I was told that on sunny days business is much better, and that I went on a bad day.

So that’s that — an update to Maliandao.  Just remember — walk past the Carrefour.  It’ll pay off.

Categories: Information · Old Xanga posts
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