This day, 5 October, in 1961, China and Nepal signed a boundary treaty in Beijing, which came immediately into effect. Based on the China-Nepal Boundary Agreement of...
Of course it’s not reasonable to expect commemoration or contemplation.
The “Great War” was concluded more than a century ago. How can I expect “the eleventh day of the eleventh month” to resonate somewhere so far away from where the Armistice was signed?
Yes, China was the non-European nation which committed most men to that war, with real casualties and real costs. It’s a story that needs telling, one which may one day receive more airing. But those events are too far away to claim such as exclusive calendar slot in...
Now the baking days are behind us, we can say it’s been another hot summer, with one tiny difference;
Things have heated up in the cold tea sector.
For a long time, there was only Suntory (三得利) with its iconic pair of Oolong SKUs: WITH-sugar (red characters) and WITHOUT (blue). These black/brown bottles have a following (of fans and imitators) to rival Laoganma (老干召) sauce.
Traditionally, the remainder of the “tea” bottles on the c-store shelf were of the lemon-tea or the milk-tea type, all stashed with sugar, of course.
Actually, those teas...
There are things I might perhaps do differently if I were starting the Strainer column for the first time in 2021.
I’m not saying I would be right to do them differently; I’m not saying the results would be better. But let’s scratch that counter-factual itch anyway.
For one, I might be tempted to use the “Tea Opinion Leader” moniker. The whole KOL thing hadn’t kicked off in 2016. If starting this gig afresh, the pun might just be irresistible.
Another asset I might feature prominently would be the image of Chinese-tea-in-a-wine-glass.
I’ve...
We can never borrow each other’s mouths. I will never know what it means to taste the way you do, nor you me.
Then again, perhaps if we could try that, we would no longer be the sufficiently the same people we originally were to make the new observation meaningful...
Anyway, that imperfect empathy is part of the tragedy of writing and reading about food and drink. I also often wonder if my speculations on taste may be even less meaningful to someone who has a Y chromosome.
In Classical legend, there...
