The tea was oolong, with just a hint of Formosa-perfume-tanginess. Or was it a hint of detergent? Anyway, this was a nice restaurant, too nice for pouring spilt water onto the floor.  This was a rare lunch with my teenage daughter, waiting for dumplings to arrive, cheekily spying on her friends’ QQ Music playlists. To her cup I poured expertly. Now, trying to fill mine, arms slightly retracted, I… over-tilted… liquid seeping from the teapot’s lid. It wasn’t a big puddle, so I swept it off the table edge, hoping to...

Does tea itself contribute stress?The answer here is: surely, yes.If so, then what’s the remedy?Why, clearly, it’s a cup of tea. Hard-liquor drinkers sometimes make that face; the one that isn’t just pleasure. Children must see this wincing face when watching, say, Westerns, and wonder why grown men would voluntarily drink something so painful-tasting, again and again.  Perhaps children intuit the social aspect of the deal; the difficult drink must be imbibed because the situation demands it.  Perhaps children recognise the celluloid sour mash as a necessary medicine. Children surely know the...

We had just 1 hour minutes to fill four baskets. Any less, we were told, and the local tea master would reject the batch as a waste of effort. So off we went to work on a hillside overlooking a road on the edge of Qiandaohu in neighbouring Zhejiang Province. With baskets attached to our bellies, our job was to pick those leaves from the bushes which were big enough to be called leaves but small enough to retain the desired pale green shade and moist texture. It didn’t take...

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...