Tea Adventures

Harvest Party part 1

May 11th is the current official date for the first Harvest Party of this spring, will be tasting countless new teas, including the Qing Ming pre-rain Dragonwell, which is like giving everyone a gold bullion each time we have a tasting. So we can only do it once. email us if you wish to attend, and for those who don’t live near our teashop for this special occasion, we will make some special considerations for you by taking photos of the tastings. info@teance.com The second half of the tea adventures this season will continue in the summer, so stay tuned!

Fast vs Slow

What’s fast in China: Courier services. Sometimes, one can send a small package to another city, say, Shenzhen to Guangzhou, and receive it on the same day.
What’s slow: Banking. They can never figure out the Central Government policy what to do when. For some time there is retaliation with the US currency, so the banks are not allowed to freely make currency conversions. For example, I wire some US dollars to my own account in China. I can not exchange it in to RMB online, I have to come into the branch, present my ID, and then convert. That means I have to fly to the China branch each time. Ridiculous. Or rather, ‘China Specialty’.

What else is slow in China: Banking. I go to a branch to convert some USD into RMB. Form after form, copy after copy of my passport, and extensive reading and keying in of information later, and rejecting most of my bills later, and filling out a foreigner’s foreign exchange form later, and manager’s approval later, and some other mysterious behind the scenes manuvering later, I was made to sign a few more forms, and got my currency exchanged. 45 minutes flat, if lucky, but who’s counting?

The same scenario in Hong Kong? 3 minutes at the most, and that includes me counting my money very slowly just so I don’t get whiplash from the speed of the exchange.

What more is slow in China: Long haul buses. To make some extra unethical bucks, bus drivers would sometimes stop in the middle of the highway, pick up a few more passengers without tickets, and pocket the money. A direct drive from station to station can involve a dozen or more inappropriate pick up stops.

What is fast in China: High speed trains from most major cities now. Impressive reduction of travel time for me to go from farm to farm. If only not a quarter of the other passengers either did not have tickets or pretended to have tickets or had tickets going elsewhere and end up arguing with the ticket attendants when they walk around to check, disturbing my naps.

China Specialty

One of us Cantonese dubbed all things inexplicable, ridiculous, and behaviours beyond belief to be called simply as ‘China Specialty’. After all, ladies all dressed up with spiky heels are still spitting at a train platform, offering cigarettes as a matter of conducting business is still the norm, and making dangerously fake food (fake eggs! fake cooking oil!) are in the everyday life of the Chinese. Pretty much, nothing is off limits.

That’s why we have to do so much leg work, to get to know the places and  the people who make our tea, to know whether they are good hearted, ethical people with pride in their skill and heritage, or merely tea farmers in cohorts with unethical merchants. We do not buy low elevation tea, nor from places we can count on for being polluted. Many of the wealthier, subsidized farms are welcoming the EU inspectors to get their EU standardized certificates; some local governments even pay for the organic certifications. USDA certified is still far below par, as the U.S. market is minimal compared to even say, the Ukraine, or Russia, or any little Eastern European country where they take tea drinking much more seriously. 

I introduced the concept of ‘Chinglish’ to my Cantonese relatives to supplement the term ‘China Specialty’ in the lexicon to more fully describe the many absurd  faces of China lurching forward at warp speed and fearing not too  many consequences.

A Gentlewoman Farmer

A distantly related relative decided that she will do her part and change the food scene in China by being a lone voice in growing clean,  organic food using the natural resources of a magical mountain she found in the Yao Indigenous Self Governing Region. Being a city person originally, idealistic, and cynical regarding the rampant fake food all over China, she was ecstatic when she found this pristine, completely natural, very remote mountain  with no roads. 

We were trekking around, helping her find the wild tea that needs to be harvested, in thick undergroves, covered by ferns and lots of other medicinal herbs. Apparently, this mountain is full of beautiful chrysanthemum wild and rampant, as well as mulberry,woodears and countless, nameless herbs. The occasional wild boar also surfaces to eat the excellent yams that grow everywhere.

We will be harvesting the wild chrysanthemum with her in the fall, and introducing the delicious mulberry leaves as an alternative herbal. Thirst crunching and lemony, these leaves are quite a bit more interesting than your standard chamomile or mint herbal tea. Plus, one imagines helping the local Yao people survive and maintain their tradition, and not become Han-ized. Han refers to  the main tribe, the standard issue Chinese one is used to. The larger tribe always forces assimilation. Here I stand up for the Yao people.  They speak Cantonese!