This day, 9 October, in 1980, Deng Xiaoping met with a delegation from Panasonic, in order to introduce China’s policies for developing economic cooperation with countries around...
“Thank you for your tea.”
“I just tried it.”
“It has a very good taste and smell.”
As a proper tea nut, this is the kind of WeChat message I’m used to sending and receiving.
But this was odd. I hadn’t given any tea to my colleague’s girlfriend. So her message made no sense.
Then I remembered. Yes, I had given them some curry leaves earlier in the week.
With the huge minimum order of curry leaves purchasable on Taobao, I had given half to the only other person I know nearby who loves Indian...
I need to cut back. We’ve overspent this month.
When I look back, I don’t know whether it’s the newly-printed poster board on my wall which I’ll point to as “peak-splurge”.
Maybe it will be the sailing sun-hat from the French sports shop in Shanghai. The family have teased me about the price tag on that one. I bought the poster despite the teasing. Profligacy.
Maybe it will be the tea I’m drinking these days; comfortably the most expensive I’ve bought with real money in ages. It was ¥170 for a bag,...
By coincidence, I was recently drinking Yunnan Green tea anyway.
My favourite market-stall had been selling some. Yeah, it was cheap. And, despite the unpromising smell and ashen grey appearance, I was curious.
I had not bought any of this stuff while in Yunnan itself. I remember seeing it piled high in the market there, dusty, no effort towards preservation. “That’s not the way to treat green tea”, I thought. Moreover, the Yunnan sellers themselves told us not to buy it! Buy the pu er, they said; this can only by...
Let’s say that it halves with each cycle. Each consecutive steeping produces half the flavour of the last. With each pouring, the drink more closely resembles water. Eventually, water is all that this drink will have become. The exponential decay curve. Pretty normal.
In fact, this is rather a pessimistic outlook for green tea. There’s drop off, but each infusion surely matches more than 70 percent of the previous infusion. And the observation of today’s Strainer is that, although the taste profile of each infusion worsens as well as the...
