This day, 30 April, in 2010, President Hu Jintao announced the opening of the Shanghai World Expo. With 246 countries and international organisations participating, during the following...
You are reading this in English.
I can therefore assume that, unless you have some aversion to carbs, you have found your solution to the problem of bread.Personally, I have a bread maker from Midea which cost less than ￥400 and makes bread as well as, say, a Panasonic or a Russel Hobbs.
I also make a pick-up whenever passing a good baker or even an Aldi. I often scoff the whole stick to claim its full freshness.
Unless this is your first year here, your solution to bread is probably...
You’re familiar with the rule by now. Do not carry your own liquids allowed into the airport departure lounge.
… except that I was drinking an awesome green tea I’d brought with me from China. And no one was asking me to surrender my cup. How long, I wondered, could I keep this up?
Right up to the boarding gate, it turns out.
Actually, it’s quite the comfort to have tea, especially green, in one’s hand while being herded through an airport.
But why haven’t any of the other liquids in my...
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...
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...
