You are reading this in English. I can therefore assume that, unless you have some aversion to carbs, you have found your solution to the problem of bread.Personally, I have a bread maker from Midea which cost less than ￥400 and makes bread as well as, say, a Panasonic or a Russel Hobbs. I also make a pick-up whenever passing a good baker or even an Aldi. I often scoff the whole stick to claim its full freshness. Unless this is your first year here, your solution to bread is probably...

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...

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...

I’ve used this column in the past to vent my criticism of the tea sold in China’s supermarkets. Today’s Strainer marks no retreat. There are usually two locations for tea in the supermarket. There’s the loose tea; often located next to the pickles, stored in a similar way. Those glass jars, containing leaves of indeterminate age, are not the fitting place for happy tea; light is every bit as ravaging for green tea as heat or oxygen. And those unimaginative selections of tea, usually Long Jing , invariably smell as...