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...

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...

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,...

HRH E II R, Queen Elizabeth the Second. Her name has appeared in these pages twice before now.  And why would a Chinese tea column be concerned with the former monarch of the United Kingdom? Actually, Strainer first mentioned her as the name of a donkey ridden on a trip to Yunnan. .  And then there was the column about Chinese tea sellers seeking actively validation for their product through international celebrities. The story goes that Queen Elizabeth II, when introduced to a new variety of oolong tea from Taiwan, described it as...