This day, 3 June, in 1992, Premier Li Peng attended the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, also known as “Earth Summit”,...
There’s an English word that begins with “b”. It literally means “female dog”. Don’t pretend you don’t know it.
The word has retained its full force during the many years since I first learnt it, while other “b” words, such as “bloody”, have lost theirs.
Secularism and permissiveness have prevailed. But even as the old lexicon of oaths and obscenities fades into quaintness, there is actually a whole group of curses that retain the capacity to shock.
These are the terms that will lose a broadcaster his/her job; the terms that imply/constitute...
Let me tell you about this green tea I’m drinking. Laoshan tea (崂山茶), from Qingdao. It’s all a bit of a mystery. But, as these leaves unravel (slowly), I’m building up more of a picture.
Let’s be honest; Baidu is helping out as well.
This tea was a gift from a friend, who, like the tea, hails from Shandong,that peninsula jutting out from the east of China. It’s not North China. But Shandong is distinctly “northern” in tea terms; further north than Henan, home of the previous, most-northerly tea plantation mentioned...
Let’s say that it halves with each cycle. Each consecutive steeping produces half the flavour of the last. With each pouring, the drink more closely resembles water. Eventually, water is all that this drink will have become. The exponential decay curve. Pretty normal.
In fact, this is rather a pessimistic outlook for green tea. There’s drop off, but each infusion surely matches more than 70 percent of the previous infusion. And the observation of today’s Strainer is that, although the taste profile of each infusion worsens as well as the...
I take the glass out of the fridge and sip on the dark, ice-cold liquid.
The coldness is a comfort in this fast-tracked summer. And the flavour is transportational.
It takes me back to Japan and my first brush with Asia; a school exchange aged 18. Specifically, it takes me to those affordable restaurants where this drink is default.
At first, Japan’s ice cold oolong tea (乌龙茶) appealed to me only because it was wet and plentiful. The humid heat of Osaka was a shock to the system. Ice cold anything would...
