All the Tea in China

I had been misled my entire life by all the Chinese restaurants I have ever dined at in America. Chinese tea does not have to be dark and bitter. Actually there isn't one tea that can be called Chinese Tea. Every province it seems has a special tea. To walk into a Chinese tea shop to buy tea, is like walking into a clothing store to find a pair of pants. You have to try them on to see which one fits.

In Kunming we were lured into a tea shop after dinner by the rows of glass jars filled with colors and shapes. A man sat at a small wooden table near the front, brewing and pouring his potions. He lifted the lid of a jar and brought it to my nose. Oh, it was fragrant and sweet. "Let's try this one," I said. Each type of tea was divided into different jars according to its quality.

The ceremony of trying tea is an experience I would recommend to anyone. You sit on tiny stools in front of a small wooden table (made from the base of a tree) and the tea salesman offers the samples to you in tiny porcelain cups that he lifts first with tongs and then rinsed with boiling water (to remove the taste of the last tea). The table has a small drain in it and water and excess tea is just dumped right on the wood.

Some teas he rinsed first, some he strained into a small tea pot, some he swirled and soaked in a special tea cup. "Oh, this one is good," I said and gave him the universal thumbs up.

We decided on three teas to buy. One came in the shape of tiny little rice bowls (when soaked it expands) and had a slight ricey flavor to it. The salesman weighed and measured our selections and put them into special tea containers. I looked up a phrase in my phrase book and held it out to him. "Thank you, I had a good time." Then I looked up another phrase. (We had been sampling teas for over an hour.) "Is there a toilet near by?" The salesman laughed and showed us two row of brown tea-stained teeth. He pointed down the street. We thanked him. He bowed. We left and he went back to mixing tea leaves into tiny pottery tea pots.