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Our visit to Beijing's big southside tea market, Maliandao tea city, unexpectedly starts off with a quiz.
"OK," says Phoebe Han, our guide for the day. "You all know tea is identified by color. How many colors of tea are there?"
There are about 10 people in our group - all expats, though two are Chinese-Canadian. Some of us suspect it's a trick question, but we're a small group - there's nowhere to hide.
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Staff members at a Maliandao store pack the just-arrived Xihu Longjing tea into small bags. CFP |
We pool our ideas, and Han agrees with our consensus: Five.
"And what are they?"
"Green," we say. "Red. Black. White. Um ... yellow?"
Han looks up from the delicate cups she's rinsing with hot water and shakes her head.
Yellow is right, but she's not giving us both red and black. "They are the same tea," she says, grinning. The one we left out is blue - a new idea for most of us.
That wasn't the only surprise.
Our tour of the sprawling tea market will include stops at four shops, each color-coded so we'll sample a different kind of tea at each. Halfway through, we'll have lunch at a Fujian restaurant nearby.
We start with green tea, tasting a premium variety from Anhui province that Han explains is stir-fried after harvesting to dry it and bring out its flavors.
Some of us are startled to learn that green teas have more caffeine than any others. It's the freshest, she explains, and it's not aged or fermented. While those processes can make the tea leaves darker and their taste "stronger", she adds, it dissipates the amount of caffeine.
"That's why most of your Chinese friends probably drink green tea first thing in the morning - and never late in the day," Han says. "If you drink green tea in the evening, you are going to be up all night."
By the time we finish at our second tea vendor, where we sip our third and fourth pots of tea, we suspect we could be up for the next two nights. Han introduces us to two white teas - one with a grand aura of mushrooms and the other with a nose like fresh grass - and we all get up with a bit of a buzz. The aftertaste in my mouth is almost metallic.
"That's why we take our lunch break in the middle," says Han, who runs these tours every other Sunday through The Hutong, an education center with lots of programs that introduce foreigners living in Beijing to different aspects of Chinese culture.
"We used to visit all four tea shops before we ate," she tells us as we dig into a platter of saucy barbecued eggplant. "But some people were almost too dizzy to walk to the restaurant after drinking so much tea. So now we break things up a little."
A grateful murmur ripples around the table.
"So much tea is a little overwhelming," says a German woman in our group who has been in China for just three months. "If we had to do more before lunch, I think the tastes would all run together in my mind and I wouldn't remember one from another."
All true teas are harvested from the same plant, the camellia. The variety comes from the climates and soils in which each is grown. We learn about first-pick teas, how green tea is "fired", how the biggest tea trees look like denizens of an old-growth forest, and the health benefits that can come with the fermentation and aging of teas like pu'er from Yunnan province.
Most of the shops in the market, Han says, are run by the families who grow the tea in different provinces around China. It's a bit like being in an outlet mall for tea, though most stall owners now also sell other types of tea besides their own, hoping to get more sales from each person who comes in.
That's one reason our group is happy to be on a guided tour in English. Only about half of us speak or read Chinese, so wandering through on our own would result in a grab-bag of browsing. Most shop owners speak no English, and since most offer more than one tea type it's hard to learn much if you can't ask questions.
Besides Han's expertise and running commentary, we enjoy buying the teas we like best at a near-wholesale price - even though we are usually buying 50 to 200 grams at a time.
After lunch we move on to oolong (blue) and black teas. As we sip these more robust teas, Han explains how the leaves are rolled and cut, how the British impacted the world tea market, and how flavors such as Earl Grey are produced.
On our final stop, we explore some floral teas, like jasmine, and the paraphernalia used in preparing and serving tea. This section of the "tea mall" has dealers with ceramic tea services, storage jars and canisters, and "tea pets", the clay figurines of the Buddha or animals that are ceremonially doused with the first wash of tea until they are stained with rich color and age.
At the end of a pleasant afternoon, we march back to the subway and head home, clutching our purchases and feeling a little smarter about our morning beverages.
Of course, we haven't learned everything there is to know about tea. But we won't lose as much sleep over it. And we know where to learn more.
