About a bottle of tea that is not really my cup of tea

For Chinese people, tea is not just another drink. For centuries, it has been identified as one of the seven daily necessities — the others being fuel, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar. In fact, the word "tea" appeared in ancient Chinese poems as often as wine, if not more often.

I have been drinking tea for as long as I can remember. I picked up how to make tea just by observing how my parents and grandparents did it: put a few grams of tea leaves into a teapot, pour boiling water, cover the pot for a few minutes with a lid and the steaming golden-colored drink is ready. Yes, making tea is that simple, or so I believed.

I used to think every other Chinese person prepared tea the same way until I attended a complicated tea ceremony organized by people in South China, saw some foreigners use tea bags, or add milk and sugar to the tea.

It came as a big shock to me when, during a visit to Japan, my hosts treated me to a cup of tea that had glittering gold leaf floating on the surface; they told me it was good for health. To avoid hurting their feelings, I closed my eyes and bravely gulped the whole cup at one go — in the process swallowing gold, which, I had been taught in China, could be fatal.

By the time I realized that tea could be sweet, cold, with milk or in different ways, a tea revolution had taken place in China. Different kinds of tea — green tea, black tea, jasmine tea, Oolong, Longjing, and Pu'er tea — were being prepared, bottled, and sold in the market.

If that wasn't enough, soon a variety of fruit, vegetable and herb teas joined the list. I once asked Baidu's artificial intelligence to list the number of tea-related drinks available in the market but failed to get a clear answer. It won't be wrong to say there might be hundreds of them.

Most modern-day buyers of bottled tea belong to the younger generation, people who were born "with a soda drink in hand". Now that more and more people have realized the harm these drinks cause, many young people are jumping ship and moving to drinks that are tea-based.

During my working years, the first thing many people did on reaching the office was to make a cup of tea. For people of my generation, a new day began only after they had the first sip of hot tea.

Nowadays, however, tastes have changed. Few people have that habit. They mostly come to the office carrying a bottle of iced tea or a steaming cup of coffee. I sometimes wonder if they know how to make tea — even in the simplest way.

As a dedicated tea drinker, I insist that the best tea involves professionally processed plain green tea leaves and the best way to enjoy it is to have it while it is still a little hot. Since a young age, I have been made to believe that tea left overnight is bad for health and should be thrown away. So, what about bottled tea? Presumably, it stays fresh for months thanks to vacuum packaging and the presence of preservatives. Despite all the talk of those added chemicals being safe, I have my doubts.

In recent years, whenever I had no choice, I tried bottled tea. I have had a few. It was tasty, indeed, but the flavor of milk, fruits, herbs and other ingredients is so overpowering that it drowns out the aroma of tea. I can only sympathize with the young people who call this drink tea.

I may dislike bottled tea, but I am not at all against it. The fact that hundreds of factories are manufacturing thousands of bottled tea brands shows that they have a huge market in China.

I hope that the ongoing tough competition in the sector will force enterprises to invest more in improving quality. I hope one day they will come up with bottles full of a drink that is tea both in name and aroma.

The author is former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily.

kangbing@chinadaily.com.cn