I doubt the universe of Chinese tea manufacturers, sellers, and enthusiasts will be swayed by this blog post.  Tea drinkers will continue to grapple with unaccented, non-standardized romanizations for the foreseeable future.  So the alternative–as preface to learning the entire Chinese language, of course–is to build a vocabulary of tea-related words.  These can serve as possible points-of-entry into pinyin whose meaning is impenetrable.

Take “dian hong.”  To reiterate, this phrase does not convey enough meaning to be reliably interpreted by a Chinese speaker.  (Does it mean “flood of electricity”? “Cushion horseplay”?)  The savvy tea-drinker knows that 红, or hóng, means “red,” so we could be talking about an oxidized tea.  (What Westerners call “black tea,” Chinese call “red tea.”  What Chinese call “black tea” puts Western “black tea” to shame.)

That leaves us with “dian,” which brings me to the point of this post.  In this case it’s 滇, or diān, which is a literary name for Yunnan province.  It comes from the Dian Kingdom, which occupied what is now northern Yunnan from the 5th to the 2nd centuries BCE.  I thought there was a list of these evocative nicknames for Chinese provinces–which are sometimes used in tea names–at the excellent blog Cha Dao.  But the post, about high-quality black tea, was much less complete in its treatment of these province names than I remembered.  So I am forced to create my own table below.  (As a starting point, I found “The Chinese Reader’s Manual: A Handbook of Biographical, Historical, Mythological, and General Literary Reference,” by William Frederick Mayers, 1874.  Musty goodness!) You can see that many of the alternate names are simple abbreviations, but a good number refer to peoples and kingdoms that occupied the same area long ago.  Perhaps later I will add some of these encapsulated histories.  I decided it would be easier to include all of China’s provinces, provincial-level municipalities, and special regions rather than selecting only those that are relevant for tea purposes.  But if you see “Ji” on a packet of tea, and you assume it is from chilly Jilin, I will not be responsible.

Of course, for those of you with the internet at your fingertips, the best way to decipher a pinyin tea phrase is consulting the redoubtable Babelcarp.org.  But that would be too easy.

from "Art of Tea" magazine

The Philadelphia Tea Institute has been making a systematic study of The Art of Tea magazine series.  The Art of Tea is the English version of 普洱壺藝, an irregularly-published periodical (an occasional?) on Chinese tea culture.  This English version is marketed to non-Chinese-speaking Asian countries (e.g., Singapore, Malaysia, and Korea) for whom English is a common second language, but thankfully it’s available stateside from Tearoma.  This post, my attempt at a recipe in The Art of Tea #1, will be the first in a series of comments on our studies.

Green Tea Bean-Paste Cakes, from Art of Tea #1, with my footnotes

(I’ve inserted approximate American volumes, but you might as well weigh most of these ingredients.)

Ingredients:

600 grams  (5 cups) glutinous rice flour
150 grams (1 1/4 cup) any non-glutinous flour
(the non-glutinous flour is a transparent powder for baking, found in Cantonese supermarkets) ¹
150 grams (2/3 cup) white sugar
150 grams (5.3 oz, or 10 1/2 tbsp) butter ²
600 grams red bean paste ³
450 grams any green tea brew ⁴

Directions:

1. Make dough using glutinous rice flour, white sugar, cooked non-glutinous flour, ⁵ butter and the green tea.
2. Knead the dough into a loaf shape ⁶ and place the bean paste in the middle.
3. Sprinkle some flour over the loaf. ⁷
4. Fry the loaf in oil until it is golden-brown. ⁸
5. Cut it into pieces and serve with any nice green tea. ⁹

Footnotes:

¹ These glutinous and unspecified rice flours were pretty common in my area, and did the trick. Wheat is the only flour that has actual gluten in it, so “glutinous rice flour” is just sticky by analogy.

² I used unsalted.

³ This is azuki beans and sugar. It’d be 21.2 oz, but an 18 oz can works fine.  Make sure you get the paste, and not the chunkles.

⁴ That’s 2 1/4 cups of liquid.  I used 5 grams of Zhu Ye Qing (Bamboo Tips) in my first batch but couldn’t taste it.  I couldn’t taste 13 grams in the second batch either.  I don’t know if it’d make more sense to put lots more tea in, or to brew something with a more obtrusive flavor.  Might as well skip the tea entirely, and drink it instead.

⁵ Wait, it’s suddenly “cooked non-glutinous flour” now?  Apparently, this IS a different product, which I discovered too late.

⁶ Not being used to metric measurements, I almost overran my mixing bowl.  And listen, junior: there’s no way all that dough is supposed to make “a loaf.”  Does the dainty treat above look anything like these monstrosities?

1 batch of dough, 2 azuki-stuffed pizzas

 

⁷ I skipped the flour-sprinkling on my first batch, and it came out better.  The dough’s not very moist, so the flour jumps ship immediately and burns in the oil, producing a dark color and a smoky flavor.

Cuter, but dirtier. About a half-batch worth.

⁸ I’m told peanut oil is the one to use here.

⁹ And lots of paper towels.

Indoctrinating the young

People definitely left with solid tea fundamentals, and having tasted four great teas. I think I had a good mix of PowerPoint slides, tea tasting, lecturing, and “concrete manipulatives”–tea and utensils for people to examine up close.  I also did well pacing all of these; I never found myself talking to fill time while water boiled, for example.  And yet I felt like I didn’t see the sparkle of excitement in anyone’s eye…I don’t know if I could have done anything differently, or if Chinese Tea Culture is simply too remote for most people.

CTC has certainly been hard enough for me to acquire.  I was chagrined when somebody remarked that I wasn’t explaining all the steps of gongfu in enough detail, but I was hard put to justify the gaps in my knowledge that I’ve had to fill in myself.  I’ve gotten my information from books, magazines, the internet, and transmitted through a succession of practitioners.  All of these methods seem to lack varying degrees of fidelity.  When something is missing, or doesn’t make sense, I’m forced to invent a solution.  I find myself more sympathetic to those ancient book copyists, making those interpolations in fragmentary manuscripts which now seem ridiculous.

The primary point I tried to convey in my presentation was the vast diversity that composes China.  There isn’t one Chinese Language, and there isn’t one Chinese Tea Culture.  I have Philadelphia Chinese Tea Culture.  It hardly sounds prestigious, but it’s still a valid response to a particular set of circumstances.  I just wish there were more practitioners.

“In the time of Buddha, a man was walking deep in the mountains in search of a place where he could discipline himself to understand his spirit.  While searching he chanced to meet one of Buddha’s disciples.  ”Sir, from where do you come?” he asked.  ”The disciple answered directly, “I’ve come from my place of practice.”  Thinking that this man knew of the very place for which he had been searching, he asked the disciple, “Sir, I am looking for that same place.  Please take me there.”  The disciple answered, “The place of practice lies in the pure and honest spirit where there is no false vanity.”  Startled, the man saw that a place of practice and discipline is not only seen with the eyes.  The place of practice is the spirit.

*  *  *

In one Tea teacher’s house hangs a scroll that says: The Place of Self-Humiliation.  When you enter the Way of Tea, no matter how you think you may disgrace yourself, it will not be taken as disgrace or shame.  Make mistakes, be rebuked, stand corrected, and learn.  Rikyu wrote a poem with a similar meaning as a guide for the student of Tea:

Fight your shame.
Throw out your pride and learn all you can from others.
This is the basis of a successful life.

*  *  *

The student of Tea once on the path must put away his doubts about himself and ignore the slighting remarks of others. He must give the greatest attention to his study and practice.  Tea, like cleaning, is not a skill to memorize but one that is acquired slowly by the body and the spirit.”

*  *  *

I found these lessons about humility indispensable.  All too often I have let self-consciousness, inferiority, and vanity keep me from trying new things and practicing what I enjoy.  For instance, I got a Mandarin Chinese audio study course, but I was usually too embarrassed to use it, even when home alone!  Inspired by this book, I began practicing my Mandarin course on the subway.  I hope you will find Hounsai’s little book as useful as I have.

For external use only

How do you keep from burning yourself as you begin practicing gongfu tea?  Good gear helps, like a thin porcelain gaiwan with a sizable rim, but direct contact with hot water and steam is unavoidable.  I imagine most tea masters would say, “Make more tea.”

A majority of guitar players would give you the same “suck it up, baby” attitude, but there are still enough on the internet who offer helpful tips for toughening your fingers.

The outermost layer of your skin is comprised of dead cells.  Apparently, pressure or friction stress signals your skin to accelerate the growth process.  (Similarly, in a sunburn or a tea burn, red skin signals blood rushing to the affected area to repair the damage.)  The layer of dead skin then accumulates faster than it can be sloughed off, which forms a protective callus.  If there’s too much friction, a blister forms, and the skin separates.  So you want to find the sweet spot of skin trauma, that artificially boosts production, but doesn’t result in damage.  Of course there’s a product you can buy for this.  But to look at it, it seems like you could rub your fingers on ANYTHING and get a good result.  After reading this article, I cut a pocket-sized swatch of sandpaper and rubbed my fingertips on it gently in my spare moments.  At the end of the day, my fingers felt disturbingly dusty, and I’m worried that it removed more skin than it fostered.  Maybe I can find something else around the house that would work.

I also wondered about topical solutions or creams that might toughen skin.  The above article mentions soaking your fingers in rubbing alcohol.  I’ve seen some articles say that the drying action adds to the dead skin layer, while moisture can cause your calluses to separate.  Most other solutions I looked at work by creating a protective layer on top of your skin.  I couldn’t find any indication that they otherwise facilitated callus production, say, after the solution washed off into your tea.

All this assumes that a callus caused by friction is going to protect your fingers from damage and discomfort caused by burns.  Most information about burns is focused on treatment and “prevention.”  I want a way to embrace burns, not avoid them!  If menial prep cooks have an online forum where they swap tips on systematic burn desensitization, I haven’t found it.

9th century Fiestaware

Dr. Victor Mair is a linguist.  What can a linguist offer to further the study of tea?

In 1998, his book, “The True History of Tea,” co-written with Erling Hoh, was a month from completion when he learned of a shipwreck being excavated in the Java Sea.  What’s known as the “Belitung wreck,” named for the nearby Indonesian island, turned out to be the most important archaeological discovery in southeast Asia: a ninth-century Arab trading vessel loaded with Chinese export porcelain.  And one of these bowls bore this inscription: 荼盞子.

“Tea-bowl (thingy).”  It was the capstone of his research.

Dr. Mair recounted how the conservative, exacting editors at his publishing house wanted to cut his linguistic research from the book.  He refused to yield, but it was still relegated as an appendix, tiny type in double columns.  Publishers are right to be mercenary these days, but this made it easy for the tea world to overlook Mair’s groundbreaking contribution to the scholarship.

Let’s start with the third character on the bowl, 子, “zi.”  By itself, it means “son.”  But when used as a suffix in this fashion, it emphasizes that the word is a noun.  This is a vernacular usage, and it wasn’t classically seen in written Chinese.  The effect is that this object is a concrete one, here in messy reality. And this effect was deliberately employed by Zen Buddhist masters to remind their disciples that the way “does not require seeking for things outside of the here and now.”  Mair tells a story in which tea drinking was not a widespread Chinese practice from 2737 B.C. onward, but rather, in hand with Zen Buddhism, suddenly became popular in the 9th century.

The first character, 荼, “tu,” is not the one used today to signify tea. That’s 茶, “cha.”  (Since the characters are difficult to distinguish at this resolution, I’ll proceed to refer to the pinyin transliterations.)  ”Tu” referred to any of several bitter vegetables.  Seeing “tu” in pre-Tang dynasty texts, scholars have wondered which of these usages referred specifically to tea, and thus how early tea was drunk in China.  The Belitung bowls seem to have been made in 826 A.D., but about a half-century earlier, Lu Yu referred to “cha” in his “Tea Classic” codifying the tea cult.  Mair posits, buried in Appendix C, that it may well have been Lu Yu himself who first differentiated tea from the bitter vegetables linguistically, as a “rebranding campaign.” In any case, Lu Yu was an early adopter.

Appendix C’s subtitle is “A Genealogy of Words for Tea.”  Mair describes how all of the worldly names for tea derive from the three avenues by which each culture may have obtained their tea from the Chinese.  The southeastern coastal province of Fujian gave their word “te” to tea that shipped overseas via English or Dutch traders.  ”Cha” was used by Mandarin or Cantonese speakers who shipped tea overland, say to Tibet or Thailand, or overseas via Portuguese traders.  The neatest trick though, is that the usage of “chai,” which seems like a random corruption of “cha,” is confined to central Eurasia, coinciding with the 13th-century Mongol empire.  The Mongols used Persian as their lingua franca, which gives “byforms ending in -i” to words otherwise ending in long a’s.

But the biggest bombshell of all is that Mair traces “tu,” “cha,” and a third Chinese tea word, “ming,” back beyond Chinese to the Mon-Khmer language group of southeast Asia.  ”Tu” and “cha” come from the Mon-Khmer “la,” for “leaf/tea,” while “ming” indicates a borrowing of Mon-Khmer words like “meng” or “miiem” that indicate a tea product that may be locally grown, specially fermented, and/or have ritual significance.  The final conclusion: while China turned tea into a commercial enterprise, it was not Sinitic peoples who first cultivated it.

The Philadelphia Tea Institute has been studying “The True History of Tea” as a book club, and Dr. Mair was gracious enough to join us for Q&A at The Random Tea Room last night.  As much as I want to gush and brag about it here, I concluded the most valuable use of this post would be to highlight the essential contribution of Dr. Mair’s book, which was otherwise hidden under a bushel.  (I’m glad I forced our book club participants to read the appendices!) Readers looking for a thorough review of the book should visit the venerable Cha Dao site, and note that crucial wisdom is also contained in the comments.

Victor Mair, in "tea lecture uniform"

But I will mention a few highlights from Dr. Mair’s talk.  He said he initially wanted to write about India’s history with tea: he first became enamored of chai while serving in the Peace Corps in Tibet.  (At this point, Dr. Mair put on his “tea lecture uniform,” his gray-blue Nehru jacket.)  To his chagrin, he realized that the history only went back as far as the British capitalists who urged it upon India.  There is no ancient Sanskrit word for tea.  ”And I know Sanskrit!” he moaned.  I was glad to hear this anecdote, but sorry our club-member Nachiket could not be in attendance; Nachiket had spent the five weeks complaining that Mair was giving his native India short shrift.

Dr. Mair told us how he received a scathing letter from Brother Anthony of Taizé, who thought Korea received even more negligent treatment in the book.  In his defense, Dr. Mair had consulted with with several Korean historians, who all told him that tea was “not important” to their country’s history.  Given the tea world’s recent surge of interest in Korean tea, perhaps the Korean tea industry needs to do more to raise its profile at home?

People have wondered why “The True History of Tea’s” first chapter is devoted to plant beverages other than tea proper.  Dr. Mair confirmed that he was building a case for tea’s exceptionality.  Specifically, he said there is a book waiting to be written about tea’s epidemiological effects: it was boiling water and drinking tea, he asserts, that allowed people to live in cities.

Dr. Mair told us about the scholarly controversy surrounding the Smithsonian’s planned exhibition of the Belitung shipwreck next spring.  We hope to organize a visit, and we also hope discussions involving the Bowers and Penn Museums regarding an American tea exhibition come to fruition!  Many thanks are due Dr. Victor Mair for taking the time to chat with us local tea enthusiasts in the midst of his many undertakings.

You want milk and sugar?!

In case you hadn’t heard, I’ve been promoted from “Tea Monkey” to “Manager” at the Random Tea Room. We’re a single-barista shop, so this involves more operational rather than supervisory responsibilities. As you can see, I’m currently implementing our “Friendly Faces” customer service initiative.

It’s hardly an atlas, but Adagio and Jason Walker already have “tea maps.”  And it’s only 1/18th complete: the vast mass of facts in this book is what compels the creation of aids to cognition.

I welcome comments if you have corrections, but please keep in mind that places you don’t see on the map may be added later, or else aren’t mentioned in “The True History of Tea.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out how I’m going to serve Hunan Baishaxi tonight in Tibetan fashion, without any yak butter.

Read about tea farming, dress the part.

Simply put, this is the best overview for the beginning tea student, and there’s enough here to interest the expert tea student as well.  The appeal of this book is its crisp, factual approach.  There’s a wealth of material, with great information about cultivation science and the development of manufacturing processes.  There are compelling maps highlighting tea-growing regions.  There are sections that clearly demonstrate gongfu and kyusu technique.  (This is the rare book that “gets” gongfu tea and also gives Western tea credit.)  It’s also instructive to mention the things this book lacks: there is none of the Anglocentric history that clutters most tea books.  There are few mythological anecdotes and origin stories.  And there are no rhapsodics about tea’s metaphysical or spiritual functions.  You will not read about clipper ships or Bodhidharma’s eyelids.

Accordingly, the book is strikingly well-organized.  It flows smoothly from cultivation, to manufacture, to preparation, to the drinking experience.  This is followed by detail pages on the “50 greatest teas,” grouped by country.  I had little trouble dividing the book into sections for our reading group, and going back to locate some piece of information is quick and easy.

So the “encyclopedic” approach is a great asset, but it makes the occasional inaccuracy  more glaring.  Delmas repeats the fallacy that different tastes are mapped to different areas of the tongue. (In fact, the entire section on “The Physiology of Taste” is best skipped altogether.  Instead, I recommend Rachel Herz’s “The Scent of Desire,” supplemented with wikipedia articles.)  Another troubling section on “Brewing Time” talks about “decaffeinating” your tea by discarding an initial 30 second infusion.  Refuting this old chestnut would take more space than I have here, but suffice it to say the information Delmas gives on this topic doesn’t even agree with itself.  It may be significant that these sections are both accompanied by diagrams that are more misleading than the accompanying text.

More outside references would have greatly improved things.  There are no footnotes, virtually no sources cited, and the scant bibliography that does exist, which is subtitled “selected further reading,” is populated by travelogues, philosophy, and more general surveys.  There are a lot of scientific claims here, new and exciting information, that I would love to embrace.  Instead, I’m cautioned by the assertions I know to be false, and Delmas misses the opportunity to assuage my doubts with corroborating sources.

Another manner of offense is ambiguous language.  Sometimes I got the feeling that Delmas knew he didn’t have a complete account of some phenomenon, and used inexactitude to cover all possible explanations.    One of our members was particularly offended that Delmas seemed to equate Tang dynasty cake tea with the Pu’er bings we see today.  I’m even more troubled that the section seems to equate the Tang dynasty cake tea with Song dynasty powdered tea, but the only thing one can ascertain from the passage is that “preparing tea has not always been a simple matter of infusing a pinch of leaves.”  Again, watching Delmas’s language become smeary is especially deflating because it is so often clear and informative.

There are a few minor wrinkles due to translation from the French.  I was intrigued to find that there are “glucides” in tea, until I realized that they are only “carbohydrates” en Français. All measurements are presented simultaneously in metric and US systems, which is admirably universalist but becomes tedious and arbitrary.  For example, did you know “mid-grown” refers to Ceylon tea grown between 1,969 and 3,937 feet (600 m to 1,200 m) in altitude?

I’ve spent four paragraphs criticizing this book’s shortcomings, so let me repeat: this is a good book.  It’s still the best tea book out there for beginners.  And while the more advanced student will find problems, these will open more avenues of inquiry.  Just by attempting a tea book that so embraces scientific empiricism and eschews mystique, Le Palais des Thés have performed a great service, and I applaud them in executing it as well as they have.