Dragon Well Tea

Tea Bushes

There's an old idiom about "all the tea in China".  I'd always heard it, but never understood until coming here.  All the tea in China would be a LOT of tea.  This is a country of 1.3 billion people and virtually all of them drink tea all day long.  Every bus driver and taxi driver will have a thermos of tea wedged under the seat.  Migrant workers go to work carrying their tool kits in one hand and their tea containers in the other.   The demand for tea is huge. 

One of the most famous, if not the most famous, teas in China comes Hangzhou.....from the hills surrounding the West Lake.  LongJingCha, it is called. It is a green tea.  Translated, it is known as Dragon Well tea to English speakers.  In the old days, the best of this tea was reserved for the emperors.  Today, much of the high quality stuff is still reserved for government use.  Good quality LongJing tea can be expensive. The highest quality can be obscenely expensive.  For that reason, Dragon Well Tea is also one of the most counterfeited items in the country.

Gathering Tea Leaves

Our EAS tour group made a stop at one of Hangzhou's tea plantations.  It seemed a bit of a tourist trap.  At the foot of the hills there was space for bus parking.  Our tour group trekked to  the top of the hill, where there was a cluster of buildings.  There we were given some baskets and assigned a guide to take us out into the bushes to pick tea. 

More gathering of tea leaves

Now, a tea bush may have a lot of leaves on it, but very few of them are suitable for picking.  Only the smallest, newest leaves emerging from the tip of branch are suitable.  Our guide taught us how to recognize these. We were then challenged to pick enough tea to cover the bottom of a basket.  Not to fill the basket... just to cover the bottom. It took our group about a half hour of cooperative picking to accomplish.  I think we could have picked all day and not filled a basket.
The secret of good green tea, we learned, is in the roasting of the leaves.   The roasting of the leaves assures quick drying, but more importantly it denatures the natural enzymes in the leaves.  If you just pick the leaves and allow them to dry in the air, then the colors will darken and the flavor will become less flowery and more earthy.  This is how the dark teas (like the stuff in the tea bag) are made.  If you roast the fresh picked leaves quickly and carefully, then it stops the oxidation processes dead in their tracks.  The leaves dry, but they retain their green color and their herb-like scents.

Pan roasting the leaves - the essential step

They call it pan roasting, but it more like a saute.  First a large steel pan is oiled and then heated over an open flame.  Once the temperature is just right, then the tea leaves are added.  They must be kept moving, constantly, so as not to burn them.  In the old days, it was all done by hand.  These days, there is more automation and mass production creeping into the process.  But the good teas are still hand roasted in a process controlled feel and smell.  It takes a skilled worker to bring out the highest quality product.  The photo above shows our guide in the process or roasting the leaves which we picked.

So, at first this whole tea plantation thing seemed a bit touristy and hokey.  In time, though, it was explained that this really WAS a working tea plantation, and not some Disneyland stagecraft.  The guides and the pan roasters really WERE tea growers and not people play acting the role.  The land, like all the land in China, is owned by the government.  The government grants the use of the land to the farmer.  It's like sharecropping.  Sharecropping has never been a particularly lucrative occupation.  

This particular farm family makes most of their income by producing tea.  The whole tourist thing is just a way to bring in a little cash on the side.  It also gives them a chance to sell their product directly to the consumer.  What farmer wouldn't want to cut out the middlemen?  And what Chinese consumer wouldn't want to avoid counterfeiters by buying direct from the farm?  They sold three grades of tea.  The best grade went for about $50 per 100 grams, if I remember correctly.  By that math, the ten pound sack pictured below is worth a fair bit of money.

Finished product.

Since Suzhou and Hangzhou are rivals in most everything, it's appropriate that Suzhou also has a famous green tea that rivals the Dragon Well Tea of Hangzhou.  Suzhou's tea is called BiLuoChunCha.  In English, it is known as Green Snail Spring Tea.  BiLuoChun is grown in the hills of DongShan, on the eastern shores of Lake Tai.  The "snail" in the name is because the tea leaves become corkscrew shaped as they dry...like shell of a snail or a nautilus.  (Dragon Well tea leaves remain flat.) 

The local people are passionate about their tea.  As passionate as the French are about their wines.  Some of my colleagues swear that Hangzhou's LongJing tea is the best.  Others swear by Suzhou's BiLuoChun.  It's like Bordeaux or Burgundy.  Democrat or Republican.  White Sox or Cubs.  You develop an allegiance for one or the other and that allegiance lasts for your entire life. 

上有天堂， 下有苏杭

One of many bridges at West Lake (XiHu)

 Ok... it is a bit pretentious to go with an all-Chinese-character title for this post.  I don't speak the local language, and much less understand the complex characters used for writing.  This couplet, though, is famous here in China.  (Or at least it's purported by the local tourism bureaus to be famous.)  It's a bit of poetry.  Here's how you say it:

shàng yǒu tiān táng
xià yǒu sū háng

Like all Chinese poetry, there are multiple ways to interpret.  Here is one:

There is Heaven above. 
There are Suzhou and Hangzhou below.

Right now, we live in Suzhou.  In October, Theresa and I took a trip to Hangzhou with the EAS group.  (EAS is the Expats Association of Suzhou.  We've taken trips with them before, and they are always excellent.)   About 30-plus-or-minus folks went on this two day trip to see the other side of paradise.

A lotus pond on West Lake

To understand the Chinese fascination with Suzhou and Hangzhou, you first have to understand the love the Chinese have for their classical gardens.  The classical Chinese garden is an orchestrated balance of water and plants and stones and structures....too perfect for nature but painstakingly built to look perfectly natural.  The Chinese classical garden is Feng Shui and poetry and painting and Confucian philosophy mixed all together into one intoxicating experience.   The Chinese classical garden is also the embodiment of opulence; a pleasure that could only be afforded by the most filthy of the filthy rich.  The classical Chinese garden is both divine and carnal.  It's hidden spaces encourage both meditation and seduction.  It appeals to the Saturday night sinner and the Sunday morning saint.

A view from the lake on a stormy day

 Suzhou is well-known and much respected by the Chinese tourists for the many classical gardens within the city.  There are a couple of dozen, if not more.  You normally find a garden behind the walls of an old, family estate.  These gardens were originally private....intended for the enjoyment of a wealthy family and the guests invited to come into their compound.  Now the gardens are open to all who are willing to pay the admission fee.

Suzhou is respected by the Chinese.  Hangzhou is beloved.

Hangzhou is beloved because the entire city is as one, big, classical Chinese garden. XiHu, or the West Lake, is the water element of the garden.  Surrounding XiHu are the knobby mountains of ZheJiang province. They serve as the stone.  The remaining classical elements - the plants and structures - abound on the shores of XiHu.  You can walk for miles along the shores of XiHu and enjoy the site of pagodas and trees reflecting in the waters. In Hangzhou, nothing is hidden behind walls.   In Hangzhou, everyplace is within the garden.

Wind surfers in foreground.  Leifeng Pagoda in background.

 The city of Hangzhou is only about a two hour drive, by car or bus, from Suzhou.  I'd been there once before on business.  Theresa had never been.  So this was a first chance for both of us to see the city as tourists.

Hangzhou is also only about two hours away from Shanghai.  This is both a boon and a curse.  For the people of Shanghai, it is a boon to have a nearby place where they can escape the crowded, concrete sterility of their all-too-modern city.  For Hangzhou, though, it is a curse to have living nearby 20 million people who, on any given week-end, might all decide to drop in for a quick dose of "back-to-nature".  The week-end that we visited, the traffic around XiHu was horrific.

The North-East shore.  No Trees or hills.  Mostly apartments to house the six million residents.

 Suzhou and Hangzhou are approximately the same size.  Both have a population of around 6 to 7 million.  (add in a few million more migrant workers).  In Hangzhou, most of the citizens are concentrated in urban areas on Eastern shores of West Lake and they spill out behind that further East and North.  The North, West, and South shores of the lake are mostly green spaces.  These are criss-crossed with paths that lead to countless scenic spots .  Countless.  Places such as "melting snow at broken bridge" and "three pools mirroring the moon".  You could spend days exploring the paths and shores around the lake.

Hangzhou is good Fengshui

The scenic views of Hangzhou are not just recently famous.  They have been famous for hundreds of years.  So much so that the emperors in Beijing spent large sums to replicate the views of XiHu within the grounds of their summer palace.

Scenes through a circular window

 There is more to Hangzhou than just the West Lake.  The hills to the west of the lake are famous for the green tea that is grown there. (More on that later.)  To the North is the XiXi Wetlands park, where our EAS trip spent a good deal of time.  The wetlands area is a lot like the bayous of Louisiana.  It marshy and criss-crossed by a tangle of small streams.  In the old days, the folks there fished and farmed and mainly kept to themselves.  During the difficult years of the 1950s and 1960s, the area became a natural spot for a re-education camps....a place to send the political dissenters from large cities like Shanghai and Beijing.  A city-slicker trying to run-away from camp would be just as likely to drown in the marshes as escape.  (Ironic, that this supposed place of "heaven on earth" should serve as a swampland-prison.)

Bridges and Lilly Pads

That was thirty years ago.  The XiXi wetlands are now a place for tourists to take boat trips and to see the persimmon trees and the water-birds and the reconstructed farm houses.  The iron hand of central-control has given way to the soft hand of market-capitalism.  Re-education has become recreation.  I wonder how many former prisoners come to visit and relive the good-old-days in the camps.  Not many, I guess.

Ok, can't think of a good ending.  That's partly because we have a few more stories to tell.  Watch for a couple of more postings related to our Hangzhou trip. 

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.  It's not much of a holiday here in China.  Many of the local folks are aware of this American tradition.  Gan En Jie, they call it.  If you plug the Chinese characters into a translation website, these characters 感恩节 translate roughly into "sense of kindness holiday".  I think that is nice.

For our Thanksgiving dinner, we went to Zapata's, where they put out a spread that would bring a tear to any American's eye.  Turkey (both roasted and smoked), potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, brussel sprouts, and salad.  Follow that with dessert of pumpkin and/or pecan pie.  Not as good as grandma's, but a darned fine substitute if you're 8000 miles away from home.

By the way, from my unscientific sampling I would have to conclude that very few Chinese people have ever eaten turkey.  And those that have eaten, for the most part, don't like it.  "Like eating cardboard" is how one person described it.  So it goes.  The sociologists call this "cultural distance".  We have our turkey.  They have their duck.

"Huo Ji" is what they call the turkey here.  Literally translated, this means "fire chicken".  Lord only knows where this comes from. 

Still though, it is amazing that almost all the Chinese I know are aware of our holiday of Thanksgiving and our tradition of eating turkey.  In the reverse, I would guess that far fewer Americans are aware of the mid-autumn festival and fewer still aware of the tradition of eating moon cakes.  For that matter, at lunch today a colleague explained to me the traditions of the Spring Festival.  (Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, has a lot in common with our Thanksgiving in that it is a time for family get-togethers and huge meals. No football on TV here, though.)  Anyway, the tradition in the hometown of my colleague is to cook a large fish - head and tail still attached - for the family dinner on New Year's Eve.  But no one is allowed to eat the fish.  It has to stay on the table untouched.  (If you sneak a bite, then it is bad luck for the family for the whole year.).  The fish cannot be eaten until the new year comes.  So it is carefully set aside and then served again for consumption the next day.  It seems strange to me, but I guess it is no stranger than fighting over a turkey's wishbone.

Though not Thanksgiving, today here is a bit of an auspicious day.  In the Shanghai Daily it tells us that:

Today is xiaoxue, or light snow, on the Chinese lunar calendar. That marks the time when many traditional families in China start to make preserved ham and pork sausage as the weather should be cold and dry.

Pig or turkey notwithstanding, it is the time of year to celebrate the bounty of the harvest and to fill one's belly in preparation for the hard days of the coming winter.  Happy Thanksgiving to all.  Happy XiaoXueJie as well.  Count your blessings, and know that we certainly count you amongst ours.

Lost in Translation IV

 These are some pictures remaining from my summer trip.  I've been looking for an excuse to slip them in to a story....but that excuse never came.  

At top is a statue that can be found in the small town of DongYang.  DongYang is the home of HengDian Studios and is also known as "Chinawood"....because of all the films shot there.  This statue is located in a bus stop area just outside the studio gates.  On the day that we visited, we saw no horses or buffalo.  The danger of stampede was very low.

 These last two photos were taken in the small village near the beach at XiaPu.  Walking through the streets of this village made me feel like a complete foreigner....like I was a million miles away from my home.   Then I saw this guy delivering Budweiser , and all was right with the universe again.

Fashion

 Here are a couple of observations about local fashion.  The first point is about glasses.  The second is about T-shirts.

If you look in the photo below, you see a good looking young man wearing glasses.  He looks reasonably intelligent.....until you get close enough to see his glasses have no lenses.  He is wearing empty frames.  Huge, empty frames.

Why is he wearing frames with no lenses?

Now, this is not a rare thing to see in China.  You see it quite a bit in Japan, too.  It's a trend for young people to wear glasses with no lenses.  By young, I mean people that appear to be between 12 and 32 years old.  (It's not just the school kids.)  Most often, you will see this on the ladies.  But now and then you will find a fashionable fellow like the one in the photo above.

Helen Reddy claimed "I Am Woman".  This lady claims "I Am A$*H*L*"

 Now, on to the t-shirts.  Here in China, it seems to be very fashionable to wear a shirt with something readable on it.  That something readable might be a brand name (Abercrombie and Fitch) or a school insignia (Harvard) or some kind of message (I Climbed the Great Wall).  Very rarely do you see Chinese people wearing clothing emblazoned with Chinese writing.  Most of the times, the words are English. French words are popular also.  In some cases, it is hard to figure out whether any real words are involved at all.  Grammar is often warped and misspellings are frequent.  Sometimes things are so mangled as to be unintelligible.  It seems that any arrangement of our alphabet will do.

Here is what I think is going on.  Some people buy legitimate brands like Nike and Lacoste in the malls.  Others are buying knock-offs, and the knock-off artists are not very good with their spelling.  Then, on top of it all, I think that much of the American novelty t-shirt market is supplied by factories in China.  And I suspect that many of these factories end up with a lot of "factory seconds" which can not be exported - either because of production overruns or because they've screwed up the graphics so badly that the customer would not accept the goods. All of these factory seconds probably end up getting sold in China.

 I've got to believe that the vast majority of Chinese people have little understanding of what their t-shirts are trying to say.  Even if they are able to read English very well,  the nuances of t-shirt humor and gutter language probably go right over their heads.   One day I saw one of the elderly landscaping ladies, a woman who looked to be in her 70's, wearing a t-shirt that prominently featured the "F" bomb.

Where do these shirts come from?



Gourmet Birthday

 It so happens that a colleague of mine, named Lin Jian, and I share the same birthday.  He is about 14 years younger than I, so the birth years don't match.  He is a Tiger,  according to the Chinese Zodiac.  By the lunar calendar, the twelve months beginning 23 January 1974 were the year of the Tiger.  I, being born in August of 1960, am a Rat. 

I could not imagine a less auspicious animal than a rat.  The Chinese, though, assure me that rats have many redeeming and endearing qualities.  Of course, the Chinese are extremely courteous... to the point of telling white lies to maintain your self-esteem.  For example, any attempt by a Westerner to speak Chinese, no matter how badly mangled, will ALWAYS produce a compliment.  "You speak Chinese very well !", they will say.  They are lying.  They are taught from an early age that, sometimes in life, courtesy is more important than veracity.  I suspect that, in their hearts, they pity the poor bozos who are born in the year of the Rat.

Snake with Chili Peppers

 Our Chinese co-workers were kind enough to take us out for a birthday celebration.  Lin Jian likes spicy food, as I do.  So a restaurant was chosen that specialized in the cuisines of Hunan and Sichuan provinces.  Lin Jian also has a predilection for some of the more exotic cuts of meat, as I do.  For that reason, Theresa decided not to go along to the restaurant.  She prefers the more traditional cuts of the pig and the cow and the chicken.  Those were not on the menu for our birthday feast.  (She arranged another party later on at Zapatas for the less adventurous.)

For appetizers we had some cold items - some marinated lotus root and chicken feet.  The star of the show was the cold, thin-sliced donkey meat.  There was also a pretty good mix of sliced, marinated cow stomach, cow tongue, and duck gizzards.  (Though the animals are different, the chewy textures of these organs complement each other.) Then we moved on to the hot dishes.  (The photos show some of them.)

 

Sichuan Spicy Bullfrog

The snake with chili peppers had a very nice flavor and spiciness.  The snake skin was left on the meat, which produced a very nice chewiness.  The only downside was the bones, which were many and tiny - like the small bones in a small fish.  This restaurant used a small snake for this dish.  You might find street food made from larger snakes, which afford a boneless filet to be cooked on a skewer.  But you will not find a more tasty snake-based dish.

Spicy bull frog is always a winner in my book.  The frogs are skinned and gutted and the meaty parts are cleaver-chopped into bite-size chunks and then fried with onions, garlic, and peppers.  As with the snake, one has to deal with the little-bitty frog bones.  Luckily, Chinese table etiquette allows you to spit these out onto your plate.  The spitting of bones offends no one.

Fish Heads with Red Pepper

 Fish heads don't have a lot of meat on them, but what little there is is considered by the Chinese to be the best.  I'm starting to understand why.  Firstly, the head has more bones and connective tissue, which produces a richer and more gelatinous quality in the meat.  Secondly, muscles in the head are smaller, more delicate, and more globular and fixed to large facial bones.  When cooked, these muscles become tender, boneless chunks of meat that can easily be pulled away with chop sticks.  We had a wonderful dish of fishheads cooked with red peppers.

Pork Belly in Garlic Barbecue

Then, there was the pork belly.  Pig meat is the most popular in China.  And if you want to impress a guest, then at least one dish with pork-belly is de rigueur.  This is, essentially, a big slab of bacon which has not been cured nor smoked nor sliced thin.  Instead, the pork belly - with skin - is chopped into cubes and slow cooked with a dump-truck-load of garlic in a barbecue-like sauce  Each cube (about one inch on each side) consists of a layer of chewy skin followed by alternating strata of meat and fat.  Each cube probably has a calorie content bigger than a Big Mac and more cholesterol than a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.   Each cube is a cardiac surgeon's nightmare.  But it tastes.....oh-so-good.

This was my birthday dinner.  Though it probably took 5 years away from my life expectancy, I would not trade it for all the world.

No Escape

There are some advantages to being 7000 miles away from home, especially in an election year.  There are no political advertisements on the television.  For the most part, there is not much coverage of the U.S. elections in the news.   Sure, from time-to-time you will catch a story on BBC World News.  But it comes in small doses and is tolerable.  CNN Asia has been making a lot of noise about the elections lately; Obnoxious segments with people yelling at each other. (Just like at home.)  A quick zap from the remote control is all that is needed to restore peace and harmony.  You can surf right past CNN to the apolitical tranquility of Dog Whisperer re-runs on one of the Filipino channels.

 Theresa and I were in Beijing last week - the last week before the Tuesday elections.  Our hotel had the full set of CCTV channels.

Side Note:  We don't have CCTV at our apartment.  We have satellite TV coming out of the Philippines. Strictly speaking, external programming is not supposed to be available in China....or at least not available to the general populace.  For foreigners it is tolerated, though.  Satellite TV keeps the expats happy and, since we're already corrupted, it can't corrupt us any further.  The only downside is that the CCTV programming is often better than that on the satellite.  The Chinese soap operas and kung fu movies are much better than the Filipino programming, which is mainly two-year-old re-runs of B-grade American cable TV shows.  (Dog Whisperer, Hillbilly Hand Fishing, Pawn Stars....)

 Anyway, in our Beijing hotel we had the full menu of CCTV to select from.  While surfing for a good kung fu movie, we stumbled across some local programming on the U.S. elections.  The photos here give you a feel for the show.  The format was a cross between a newscast, a debate, and an episode of American Idol.  The host of the show provided the news content - he explained the candidates and the key issues and the electoral climate.  He also posed questions to a panel of experts.  The experts would argue their points.  A couple of the experts were Chinese-speaking Americans, who seemed not-so-much to argue as to try to explain why things were not-so-simple as they appear on the surface. 

Every now and then the host would allow members of the audience to express their opinions or to ask questions of the experts.   After points were debated, he would ask the audience to vote as to which of the opposing positions they supported.  That's what they are doing in the photo immediately above....holding up little paddles to show their votes.

In case you are wondering, the Chinese name for Obama is 奥巴马.  The anglicized spelling is "Ào bā mǎ" and it is pronounced very similar to the actual English pronunciation.  Romney is not-so-easy a name for the local folks.  His Chinese name is 罗姆尼, anglicized as "Luō mǔ ní". The "R" is the killer.

The individual characters are for phonetic purposes and not really intended to have meaning.  However, if literally translated (according to Google translate) Obama's name might be something like a "mysterious Pakistani horse".  Romney would be something like a "fussy baby-sitting Buddhist nun".