I have been blogging about my recent month-long journey to Hangzhou, Huangshan and Anhui province in eastern China. My main objective on this trip was to obtain the demanding Tea Artisan and Tea Assessor qualifications of China’s Labour Ministry. After years of private study and research, the thought of taking public examinations felt exposing and daunting, but I am glad I went through with it, because I can now proudly call myself an officially certified Tea Artisan and Tea Assessor.
My cosy little classroom at the 公刘子 Gongliuzi Tea Institute in Hangzhou was furnished with antique desks, a blackboard with coloured chalk, and, naturally, lashings of tea. My teachers were a fine, inspiring group of aficionados and experts:
Professor Zhou Wentang 周文棠, Miss Hu Xuli 胡旭丽, Miss Zhang Xiaolei 张晓蕾, Miss Cheng Xiaohong 程小红 and guest lecturers Professor Yu Fulian 虞富莲 (Tea Research Faculty of the China Agriculture Institute) and Professor Tang Yi 汤一 (Zhejiang University – Tea Faculty).
Subjects covered included the history of tea, the literature and poetry of tea, the art of tea performance and the identification and grading of tea varieties. We were given ancient tea texts to read in the classical Chinese, but also, excitingly for me, we read selected passages from the the world’s first tea book, 茶经 Chajing or the ‘Tea Classic’ written in AD 785 by Lu Yu (733-804).
Lu Yu writes extensively about the cultivation, harvesting, processing, storage, brewing and drinking of tea as well as the history of tea culture. The Chajing is regarded as an extremely important historical text not just on tea but on ancient Chinese culture generally.
With just four Chinese characters “广陵老姥”, Lu Yu writes that during the reign of Emperor Yuan (AD 276-323) of the Jin dynasty (AD 265-420), there was an elderly woman who would carry a huge pot of 雨花 Yuhua green tea to sell along the street market. Her business was brisk and she donated all her proceeds to the poor. Over time, her customers noticed that her pot was never empty, even though she sold tea the whole day. The real reason was that she kept adding hot water all day, as it is perfectly possible to re-brew good quality teas several times over; but the townspeople thought that she must be practising witchcraft so they locked her and her pot up in a prison cell.
By nightfall, she is said to have flown out through the tiny prison window, taking her pot with her. The story is probably true up until the bit where she flew away! Interestingly, it conveys the impression that brewing and then selling tea as a drink was highly unusual at this time; I could very well imagine that the story is a semi-mythical version of the actual origination of the traditional Chinese tea house, which I think is a fascinating concept.
A major section of my Tea Artisan training concerned the physical processes of making and presenting tea: constant going over and over the correct implements and the right ritual movements and postures appropriate for each tea type; when and how to bow, which hands and fingers to organize into what precise gestures, and so on. This is all prescribed for the sake both of smooth efficiency and to be a visual delight, all part of the tea drinker’s experience.
By the end, I had progressed to a point where I can use my body quite gracefully and with calmness and a sense of flow – but this was definitely the toughest part of the course. The girls had it even worse – they have a whole different set of movements and gestures of their own, involving physically demanding curtseying, flowing and gesturing. We all experienced plenty of aches and pains, in the name of the art of tea (‘Cha Tao’)!
The Tea Assessor course, by contrast, focused on understanding the commercial grading of tea and on the complex chemical reactions that occur when tea is brewed. I had to learn to memorize long lists of tastes and colours associated with particular types of tea, an odd mixture of the subjective and the objective. For example, such and such tea might be expected to have the aroma of freshly steamed, tender sweetcorn with a glutinous texture, while another tea might be reminiscent of fried Chinese chestnuts. I have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of Chinese foods but some of these comparisons were hard to take on board, and as for the Chinese descriptions of colours, these can be very difficult to differentiate from one another.
The Tea Assessor exam came in two parts. In the practical section, I was asked to evaluate and rank three grades of Dragon Well within 20 minutes, using the standard tea assessing equipment. This year, the untimely rain at Qing Ming (the Clear Bright Festival or Tomb Sweeping Day around April 5) seriously affected the Dragon Well harvest, making it particularly difficult to tell the grades apart – very unlucky for me, though I did managed to rank the tea correctly!
Every day of this tea journey was filled with new knowledge, heartwarming stories and continued reminder that the study of tea is indeed a life long process. I met many tea friends and was touched by the unspoken code of friendliness, sincerity and generosity amongst tea artisans. And I’ve brought back home to the UK so many tea books I can’t wait to read them all and share more discoveries with you in my future blogs!
Warmly,
Pei pei@teanamu.com ~~ sip a good brew, steal a slice of tranquility, glimpse a lingering fragrance, gladden the heart and refresh the mind ~~
Dragon Well Green Tea Shrimps are one of Hangzhou’s most famous specialities, so it’s amazing how hard it is to track the dish down when you’re actually in Hangzhou. However, we did find it eventually at Lou Wai Lou (‘Pavilion Beyond Pavilion’), a 150 year old restaurant on the shores of the beautiful, scenic West Lake.
This dish is a good example of using tea as an ingredient to add subtlety to a dish in a light, refreshing, clear sauce.
There are many colourful stories about the origins of Dragon Well Green Tea Shrimps. Here is one.
The Qing emperor Qianlong (1711-99) liked to travel around his country disguised as a wealthy merchant. One spring day, near Hangzhou’s West Lake, he sought shelter from the rain in the humble little home of a tea farmer. The farmer graciously offered his guest a cup of tea made from the fresh green tea leaves that he had just harvested and pan-fried.
The emperor was delighted by the colour, aroma and taste of the tea. He was desperate to take some of the leaves back to the palace so, being loth to disclose who he really was, he surreptitiously took a handful and stashed them in his sleeve.
The emperor, still in disguise, dined that evening with his entourage at a West Lake hostelry. He wanted to taste again the tea brewed from the farmer’s tea leaves and so he reached into his sleeve for the tea leaves. As he did so, he accidentally revealed to the waiter his golden yellow, imperial garments. These were very distinctive, and no-one could mistake them.
The waiter went into the kitchen and told the chef the merchant’s true identity, handing him the tea leaves for him to brew. Now it happened that one of the dishes ordered for the emperor’s table was a simple stir fry with shrimps freshly caught from the lake. In his anxiety and haste to keep his illustrious customer perfectly happy, the chef carelessly mistook the tea leaves for spring onions, chopped them up and added them to the stir fry.
The dish is said to have looked very appetising to the emperor, with the shrimps glistening like little jewels among the tender green tea leaves, with their delicate fragrance reminiscent of steamed, young sweetcorn. The emperor enjoyed the dish immensely and conferred on the tea a royal status signified by the use of the word ‘dragon’, and thus Dragon Well green tea and the dish Dragon Well Green Tea Shrimps were born.
I was slightly disappointed with the Dragon Well Green Tea Shrimps at Lou Wai Lou, and I wonder if the restaurant may not be a little overrated. While the shrimps were indeed glistening and extremely sweet, there was not much fragrance in the dish, certainly not the definitive, steamed, tender sweetcorn-like aroma that I was looking for. Above all, the chef had used poorer quality tea than I had been led to expect.
The menu promised the dish would use only the precious ‘mingqian’ Dragon Well green tea. The term ‘mingqian’ refers to tea harvested pre-Qingming. Qingming is the Clear Bright Festival or Tomb Sweeping Day around April 5th, or 104 days after the winter solstice. Mingqian Dragon Well is generally considered the sweetest, tenderest and most fragrant variety, so of course it was rather a blow when I realized that the chef had used a later picking.
Despite this minor letdown, there were other interesting dishes on the menu too, in addition to the shrimps. In fact, we ordered all the famous local Hangzhou specialities: 东坡肉 Dongpo Pork (a soy braised pork dish – attributed to the poet and local hero Su Dongpo), 宋嫂鱼羹 Songsau Yugen (Auntie Song’s fish stew which is packed full of umami and tender pieces of fish, seafood and flakes of poached eggs) and, last but not least, 富贵鸡 Prosperity Chicken.
Prosperity Chicken is whole chicken stuffed with minced beef, mushrooms and chestnuts, then wrapped with lotus leaves and covered in mud before baking. Traditionally it’s baked at high temperature in an underground pit.
History relates that a certain beggar stole a chicken and then had nowhere to cook it, so he dug a hole in the ground, burned some branches in it, wrapped the chicken in mud and buried it in the hole. Emperor Qianlong was touring Hangzhou, incognito as usual, and stumbled upon the beggar. The beggar saw this tired and hungry man and kindly shared the cooked chicken with him, little guessing that this was the emperor he was feeding. The grateful emperor really liked the dish and asked the beggar for its name. The beggar was embarrassed and quickly said ‘Beggar’s Chicken’, but the emperor conferred on the dish the grander title of ‘Prosperity Chicken’.
Although it was approaching the end of the Dragon Well green tea season, well past Qingming, when I was in Hangzhou, I was fortunate enough to secure a small quantity of the latest ‘mingqian’ Dragon Well green tea. It is extremely fresh, and when I have used it to demonstrate the umami quality of tea in my ‘cooking with tea’ workshop, the participants have been really impressed by it.
I use minqian Dragon Well tea when I make the recipe below but, given the difficulty of getting this top quality tea in the UK, you can substitute it with any decent green tea, such as Japanese sencha or better still gyokuro. The other important thing to note is the use of raw shrimps which, if you’re lucky, you can get from your local fishmonger. Or you may well find them, flash frozen, in Asian supermarkets.
So, here is my own attempt at recreating Dragon Well Green Tea Shrimps:
Main Ingredients:
Marinade:
Seasonings:
I’m just back from a tea study tour of eastern China, where I had the privilege of visiting all sorts of tea farms and speaking to ‘tea heroes’ about their lovely teas and, along the way, I got to enjoy unforgettable sights, smells and tastes. I also got a chance to live as a Chinese person does, experiencing a simpler, more fulfilling lifestyle … washed down with gallons of fresh green tea!
I met so many wonderful, friendly ‘tea people’ during my month in China I cannot write about all of them, but in the next few blogs I shall share as many pictures, videos, experiences and thoughts or ideas about tea as I can.
Starting off in the incredibly scenic city of Hangzhou, we drove southwest into Anhui province, through fairytale hills full of plum, peach and guava orchards, tea bushes, and sandalwood and mulberry trees for feeding silkworms.
This legendary region is famous for producing traders and adventurers over many centuries. Its landscape inspired numerous artists and also the myths of the Water Margin. I couldn’t help but think of the 108 heroes and rebels, like WuSong who saved a whole village and killed a man-eating tiger even though he was drunk. This beautiful area, with its bamboo-forested mountains, its green valleys and spectacular lakes and cliffs, has been the setting for many classic films like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
You can find about thirty varieties of tea plant in Anhui, each subtly different from the next. Often, the higher a tea bush is up the hillside, the older the bush will be, benefiting from purer air and water and a more subtle light, producing the most nutritious tea leaves with particular high levels of amino acids. It is these amino acids that gives the premium green teas what the Chinese and Japanese call “sweetness”, better called “umami” which really is the fifth taste after sweet, sour, bitter and salty.
We chose to do this tea study tour in April/May to coincide with the spring harvesting season. Spring harvested tea is considered the best by all accounts because the first flush of tea leaves are the most nutritious since the tea bushes have had an entire winter to rest. Also, as the weather is still slightly cold, there is little need for tea farmers to use any pesticides since the worms and bugs are still hibernating.
Anhui is scattered with beautifully preserved, still inhabited, ancient villages. In one of these, I discovered what appears to be the ancestral home village of my mother’s family. This was a Huizhou village called Tangmo (唐模) which at its peak was given the honoured status of ‘model village’ by one of the Tang emperors. My mother has the surname Xu 许 and everyone in Tangmo bore this surname too, and their descendants then spread out over the world, in my mother’s case as far away as Singapore. The ancestral hall looks rather like a Roman villa, and it would (but for the devastation of the Cultural Revolution) contain the entire history and records of the Xu ‘tribe’. It was very moving for me to see the ruins of the compound and to imagine my ancestors being on the same spot paying homage to their ancestors.
At the entrance to the village stands a 1,400 year old ‘living fossil’ gingko tree or ‘maidenhair’. Gingko and cedar are both known for their ability to repel mosquitoes, and they were often used as building materials all over China. In the centre of Tangmo is a sandalwood tree, so ancient that it is believed to bring good health to those who are sick. Villagers had tied many silk strips to its branches, displaying the names of their sick and aged relations. A visiting film director once saw this tree’s resemblance to a mouth, so made a movie about a silk weaving fairy in which the tree comes alive and plays the role of a matchmaker.
I then was shown a miniaturised version of Hangzhou’s famous West Lake, dug by a Tangmo farmer so that his mother could step out of her house and enjoy some of the beauty of the actual lake which she was too infirm to ever travel to. Though much smaller than the original, it’s still pretty huge. It took him three years!
Walking through the ancient streets of Tangmo I passed a shop emitting a strong, sweet aroma of soya beans and I just had to enter to have a look. I bought some lovely, fresh home-made soya milk made there in the shop. And there were some intriguing and ingenious tools there too which were clearly for making tofu, although it was too late in the day for me to see them in action.
After Tangmo I visited the ancient walled city of She Xian, whose long shopping street has been a hub of commerce for two millennia. I then journeyed further south, to have encounters with 猴魁 Houkui (Monkey Pick) green tea in the area known as Houkeng (猴坑 Monkey Pit), 祁红 Qihong (Keemun) black tea in Qimen (祁门) county, 松萝 Songluo green tea in Huangshan (黄山) City and 毛峰 Maofeng green tea Xi (歙) county. At the end I returned to Hangzhou to sit my exams to become an accredited tea artisan and tea assessor. More about these tea adventures soon!
