This day, 12 October, in 2021, President Xi Jinping attended the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming via video...
I have speculated in this very column whether it is correlated with a liking for cats or dogs.
I have asked what Chinese teas/infusions I would recommend for a coffee lover to try; wheat tea (大麦茶) or burdock-root (牛蒡茶) tea. I have also asked aloud what makes me (and most other people) enjoy one so passionately more than the other.
Well, this month, we have (perhaps) learnt a bit more.
A study by Northwestern University, Illinois, USA, has identified specific DNA differences correlating with humans drinking coffee or tea.
Apocalypse Tea; Should I...
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...
Every tea region in China has seen good times and bad times. Lost decades are not unusual in this business. The tea fields of Xinyang City (信阳市) in Guangshan County (光山县), Henan, are no exception.
One dynasty was particularly unkind. Sadly for Xinyang, that dynasty was the Qing, the longest of them all, spanning 1644 to 1912. It’s not that the Qing Emperors didn’t drink tea; the Qian Long emperor specifically wrote about China’s “best” green teas. His omission of Xinyang tea was damning and lasting. Tea production flourished in...
I’ve used this column in the past to vent my criticism of the tea sold in China’s supermarkets. Today’s Strainer marks no retreat.
There are usually two locations for tea in the supermarket. There’s the loose tea; often located next to the pickles, stored in a similar way. Those glass jars, containing leaves of indeterminate age, are not the fitting place for happy tea; light is every bit as ravaging for green tea as heat or oxygen. And those unimaginative selections of tea, usually Long Jing , invariably smell as...
