This day, 16 May, in 1997, Standard & Poor’s, the American financial credit rating company, announced that it would raise its China’s credit rating of bond issuers...
Tea is supposed to be zero calories. So what is this shiny slick on the surface of yesterday’s drink?
It’s like the blue-brown façades of blocks in China’s fourth tier. It’s like a rolled scarab carapace. It’s like the squeezed temple of a liquid crystal.
Shake it and the metallic tectons quite collapse, broad shards collecting into one bronze rim-stain. Perhaps this is why we are frequently warned not to drink tea that’s been left overnight.
Well, if there is a swollen cigarette-butt floating on top, let me concur; that cup may...
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...
In a previous entry for Strainer, we explored the use of green tea as an additive in various processed goods; from skin creams to air fresheners to slimming pills to ice cream.
We explored how seldom it is the flavour of the green tea that qualifies it as capable of “adding value”, which, by the way, usually means added shareholder wealth, not added customer pleasure.
We explored how green tea carries connotations of “healthfulness” to most people in most countries, as well as ambitious health claims for anyone who cares to...
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...
