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...
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...
This frisbee-full of dried packed leaves cost me ¥260 .
Buying a whole cake of tea (茶饼) is a bigger commitment than some buyers are willing to make. But, in the case of some varieties of tea, it’s the form factor which makers and sellers prefer to work with.
I’ve owned cakes before, of course. But this one is different, because it’s our first white tea cake.
That makes a difference because it can be consumed guilt free, with no sense of wrecking destiny; unlike pu er, there is no pretense about...
Chinese food was the ultimate treat for me. You may sneer at those British-Cantonese restaurant dishes which so excited me: spare ribs, crispy noodles, crispy beef with carrots, etc. I am unrepentant. In our family, we each ordered one dish. Mine was always Lemon Chicken. Sure, the take-away version usually comes in a gloopy sauce with the same lemon-ness as “lemon-fresh” bathroom cleaner. But fresh lemon (word order is important here) is always used in the best restaurants. And, thanks to BritishChinese food evangelist Ken Hom, it’s a dish...
