This day, 25 July in 1996, Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen attended the First China-ASEAN Dialogue Meeting, during which China became a formal dialogue partner...
So I’m a red risk all of a sudden.
It’s a shock for someone who’s conjured only green codes from so many apps this past quarter-of-a-decade.
My red code will be a shock for some reading this, too.
Perhaps, blissfully green for as long as such colours existed, you just experienced a twinge in your buttocks, before remembering that, no, printed paper cannot transmit pathogens from some guy in Shanghai, and nor can an LCD screen.
Mindful of the two negative results after my near-exposure and before my colour-slander, it’s not concerning me...
Every tea region in China has seen good times and bad times. Lost decades are not unusual in this business. The tea fields of Xinyang City (信阳市) in Guangshan County (光山县), Henan, are no exception.
One dynasty was particularly unkind. Sadly for Xinyang, that dynasty was the Qing, the longest of them all, spanning 1644 to 1912. It’s not that the Qing Emperors didn’t drink tea; the Qian Long emperor specifically wrote about China’s “best” green teas. His omission of Xinyang tea was damning and lasting. Tea production flourished in...
I take the glass out of the fridge and sip on the dark, ice-cold liquid.
The coldness is a comfort in this fast-tracked summer. And the flavour is transportational.
It takes me back to Japan and my first brush with Asia; a school exchange aged 18. Specifically, it takes me to those affordable restaurants where this drink is default.
At first, Japan’s ice cold oolong tea (乌龙茶) appealed to me only because it was wet and plentiful. The humid heat of Osaka was a shock to the system. Ice cold anything would...
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...
