Well, I just don’t think it happened like that. It relies on too many coincidences. It can’t be the true origin of tea-drinking, surely. For the emperor, Shen Nong (神農), to have received a stray, falling leaf of camellia sinensis in his cup of boiling water relies on that tea plant being very tall, or the weather very windy. It’s the height thing. And why do these apocryphal breakthroughs always happen to bigwigs like emperors, not to ordinary folk and earnest experimenters? Doesn’t wash with me. But if the Emperor’s cup was the...

I love games consoles. I own more than I care to admit. But (Marie Kondo, since you’re asking) every one of them sparks joy. The console is a well-named invention, providing solace that sometimes even tea can’t provide. I’m not the only one; retro gaming is as much of a draw for my generation as steam trains for my father’s. An industry surrounds console nostalgia, with restorations, re-releases, emulation and excavation. But in focusing so much on the games console, the home experience of games, the nostalgia is neglecting another great...

Des Esseintes is a man with sick fancies. He is the dissipated aristocrat at the centre of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel, “À Rebours” . He is the collector of house plants which somehow look fake but aren’t. He owns a tortoise shell encrusted with gem stones. He didn’t want the tortoise to die from contamination. But so be it. Together with figures like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, he represents the Fin-de-Siecle End-of-19th-Century spirit of jaded pleasure seeking.  Something of this appealed to me as a young man confronting a new century of...

Let me state that The Nanjinger has not paid for me to be here. Nanjing is far too far away and the expenses for such a glamorous patch could easily spiral beyond control. I write from Juan Les Pines on the French Riviera. You can almost skip a stone to Cannes in the west and Monaco to the East. Every town along here has significance to the grand tour, the lost generation or the jet set, but also to a contented local populace. This is still more French than...