The English language wouldn’t be as careless as this. Sure, 汤 (tang) is “soup” but this character also gets used for fruit juices, as in 酸梅汤 (suan mei tang); sour plum juice.  There’s also 茶 (cha); tea, which means “processed-Camellia-Sinensis-leaves” and “drinks-infused-with-those-leaves”, right?  Well, not quite, because there are other roles for this character, too.  There are those Chinese drinks using the leaves (and flowers) of other plants. In Beijing’s impromptu Temple Fairs, I have drunk a 茶汤 (cha tang); tea soup, which is a glutinous, sugary, sesame-flavoured thing much better than it...

When I lived in Beijing, students hoping to study abroad would travel half a day to a certain shrine, praying to receive an “offer”. They were practicing hieroglossia. That’s because they deemed the shrine’s name; 卧佛寺 similar enough to the English word ”offer” to place their trust in, or hedge their bets on, this place for a few hours of their lives. I was intrigued that students treated it as more than just a joke, more than just an excuse for a jaunt. I was curious about this geomantic...

Among the anecdotal indicators of a country’s being developing or developed is the availability of drinkable tap water.  A developing nation which has laid down the world’s most extensive railway network can add safe water pipes to that in record time, and surely will. But, for now, it remains nominally one of those watershed development issues. I say, “nominally”, because I didn’t enjoy the tap water which I drank in France this summer. I actually suspect it. Even if it left the water plant uncorrupted, it may have passed through heavy...

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...