This day, 4 April, in 1985, Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom signed the Hong Kong Act 1985 to return the territory to Chinese sovereignty. The Act...
I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. There they both were. And it was my wife who’d put them there.
Strewth. It wasn’t even that one of these dishes was left-overs from the previous day; no, she had consciously cooked both of them, set them there for the family to actually eat.
Okay, it was a long time ago that she’d delivered the warning. Maybe she’s forgotten it by now. Or maybe I’m the one who misremembered. Anyway, here goes.
Fish is not to be paired with sweet potato. Harmless individually, these two...
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,...
"After drinking my local tea, you won’t be able to walk in a straight line.”
That’s how I was introduced to this tea. It was a generous, proud young friend that set the challenge.
By “local”, she meant Guizhou. I was surprised; Guizhou is not known as a tea place.
The province is infinitely more famous for its hard liquor, tobacco and coal. On paper, it sounds like a dirty, hard-living kind of place. But it also enjoys its share of beautiful scenic attractions and ethnic communities. The capital, Guiyang, has been...
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...
