"After drinking my local tea, you won’t be able to walk in a straight line.” That’s how I was introduced to this tea. It was a generous, proud young friend that set the challenge. By “local”, she meant Guizhou. I was surprised; Guizhou is not known as a tea place. The province is infinitely more famous for its hard liquor, tobacco and coal. On paper, it sounds like a dirty, hard-living kind of place. But it also enjoys its share of beautiful scenic attractions and ethnic communities. The capital, Guiyang, has been...

This frisbee-full of dried packed leaves cost me ¥260 . Buying a whole cake of tea (茶饼) is a bigger commitment than some buyers are willing to make. But, in the case of some varieties of tea, it’s the form factor which makers and sellers prefer to work with.  I’ve owned cakes before, of course. But this one is different, because it’s our first white tea cake.  That makes a difference because it can be consumed guilt free, with no sense of wrecking destiny; unlike pu er, there is no pretense about...

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...

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...