This day, 31 March, 1989, the Chinese Navy’s first Type 679 ocean-going training ship “Zheng He” with global navigation capabilities set sail from Qingdao for a visit...
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...
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...
They call it “herbal medicine”. And in this house, this week, it’s everywhere.
I call it “horrible medicine”. But I actually quite like it.
It smells of fragrant-soil and it tastes like fragrant-soil-with-brown-sugar.
Apparently, it has an English name; Isatis Tinctoria. But, like the names for all those things popular only in China, that’s not really an English name.
The brew hasn’t caught on elsewhere; what Americans call root-beer is a completely different thing. But here it’s enormous. As I write, your local pharmacy is selling fast out.
There’s no scientific evidence that...
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...
