A taste that grows on you

A taste that grows on you - sip by sip

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-11 10:35

Serving Pu'er tea is a delicate art.

I'm no tea connoisseur. I love to sip tea when I'm in a mood to relax, but I didn't know how to savor the subtle flavors of different teas.

Until I arrived in Pu'er.

Pu'er is a special kind of tea grown in southern Yunnan. The tea is so well-known that the local authorities decided, a few years ago, to change the name of their hometown from Simao to Pu'er. Actually, it is more complicated than that. A smaller town used to be called Pu'er, and the name was taken over by Simao, the city with wider jurisdiction including that town.

Anyway, I was sitting inside a teahouse in a tea garden. Not just any tea garden. The biggest of its kind in the whole world - 20 hectares of mountain slopes of tea plantations, at 1,700 m above sea level.

I had four kinds of tea in front of me, prepared by a young lady dressed in an ethnic costume. One was green tea, the kind I grew up with - I'm from Hangzhou, the place of the Dragon-Well (Longjing) green tea, one was black tea, or if you use the literal translation from Chinese, red tea, and there were two kinds of Pu'er, one with hot water and one with cold water.

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