This day, 29 May, in 1997, China announced at the United Nations Headquarters in New York that it shall participate in the United Nations peacekeeping standby arrangement...
I am a contrarian.
All of this unpopular opining of mine may look like critical thinking, heroic truth-seeking.
But don’t be fooled; it’s just knee-jerk doggerel.
My world-view is permanently controlled by the assumption that “those millions of people talking around me can’t possibly be right”. My brain rails against whatever prevails.
Remember that, especially when you catch me writing about Chinese medicine.
Remember where I am writing from. Here or there. Remember whose those surrounding millions of voices are.
If I am in my native UK, stifled by familiarity, you will find me warmly...
Well, I just don’t think it happened like that.
It relies on too many coincidences. It can’t be the true origin of tea-drinking, surely.
For the emperor, Shen Nong (神農), to have received a stray, falling leaf of camellia sinensis in his cup of boiling water relies on that tea plant being very tall, or the weather very windy. It’s the height thing.
And why do these apocryphal breakthroughs always happen to bigwigs like emperors, not to ordinary folk and earnest experimenters? Doesn’t wash with me.
But if the Emperor’s cup was the...
The first thing that hits is how inefficient this whole game is. It isn’t quite May as we climb the mountain. Picking only began on 31st March. And already the season is over. Not a basket or wicker hat to be seen.
And it isn’t that these tea bushes have stopped producing; glossy, thick leaves are growing abundantly. If fact, what work we see is the two-man job of sawing off the top 40% or so of the bush along each terrace. Baseball bats are worn for the less-romantic (but...
"After drinking my local tea, you won’t be able to walk in a straight line.”
That’s how I was introduced to this tea. It was a generous, proud young friend that set the challenge.
By “local”, she meant Guizhou. I was surprised; Guizhou is not known as a tea place.
The province is infinitely more famous for its hard liquor, tobacco and coal. On paper, it sounds like a dirty, hard-living kind of place. But it also enjoys its share of beautiful scenic attractions and ethnic communities. The capital, Guiyang, has been...
