This day, 3 April, in 1949, the First Congress of Chinese Women held in Beijing officially announced the establishment of the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation, with He...
Delicious, isn’t it? Remember the smell when you unpeeled your first credit card?
If you have bought electronics, you will know the excitement of transparent sleeves and instruction booklets. Let us also mention polyethylene.
If I write here about the smell of new bin liners, you will experience something quite specific in your “inner nose”. Polyethylene.
It is the softer plastics that seem more generous to give off their scent. PVC raincoats and toy umbrellas. We all know the aromatic explosion from a roll of bubble wrap. Tiny seams of injected modernity.
It...
The term, “flatscreen TV”, continues to be used in 2023. I sometimes wonder why. Seems to denote value, luxury, modernity. “Police seized 15 stolen flatscreen television sets”; “The room features a mini-bar and flatscreen TV”.
It’s actually been impossible to buy a new TV which isn’t flat for at least 15 years, making the “flatscreen” preface useless. Yet it persists.
There’s a name for this; “redundancy”.
Other examples include “each and every”, “balsa wood” or “cease and desist”.
Like bad handwriting, these are perpetrated more often by first language users, because they rely...
The bad news is that you’re possibly going to be confused at some point here. The good news is that, at the end of this Strainer, you’re going to know about a really cheap, great Chinese tea.
Ask anyone around here (in Jiangnan, I mean) about White Tea and they will talk about Anji Baicha . Fair enough. That’s a great one, a must for anyone slightly interested. And Anji’s claim to the “white” name is somewhat legitimate; the relative lack of chlorophyll in the leaves results in a...
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...
