This day, 7 May, in 1861, Indian polymath and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Rabindranath Tagore was born. A fierce critic of Britain’s opium dumping on China...
I wrote last month about glossy teas; teas with a polished appearance, mostly from Japan. I also mentioned a pea-green variety from Sichuan’s Emei mountain range called Bamboo Leaf Tea .
Now, let’s be honest. Sichuan is less famous for growing tea than it is for pandas, bamboo and spicy snacks. Were Sichuan and tea are ever connected in people’s minds, it is the tea houses and the tea-drinking culture that stand out rather than native varieties of leaf.
Possibly that is just how Sichuan people like it. Local tea...
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...
Chinese food was the ultimate treat for me. You may sneer at those British-Cantonese restaurant dishes which so excited me: spare ribs, crispy noodles, crispy beef with carrots, etc. I am unrepentant. In our family, we each ordered one dish. Mine was always Lemon Chicken. Sure, the take-away version usually comes in a gloopy sauce with the same lemon-ness as “lemon-fresh” bathroom cleaner. But fresh lemon (word order is important here) is always used in the best restaurants. And, thanks to BritishChinese food evangelist Ken Hom, it’s a dish...
The tea was oolong, with just a hint of Formosa-perfume-tanginess. Or was it a hint of detergent? Anyway, this was a nice restaurant, too nice for pouring spilt water onto the floor.
This was a rare lunch with my teenage daughter, waiting for dumplings to arrive, cheekily spying on her friends’ QQ Music playlists.
To her cup I poured expertly. Now, trying to fill mine, arms slightly retracted, I… over-tilted… liquid seeping from the teapot’s lid. It wasn’t a big puddle, so I swept it off the table edge, hoping to...
