Harbin Tea House

As part of the Critical Language Scholarship, each student receives 1400 RMB (~$200) to spend over the course of 8 "social activity outings." Once a week, we do something expensive with our teacher, teaching assistant and classmates. Today, we ate at a relatively fancy restaurant, then met up with another class at a tea garden. I'll explain huo guo in a later post for the uninitiated.

People in Northeast China don't drink as much tea as elsewhere in China. But nevertheless, we enjoyed several hours sampling two very expensive teas in a two-level building where they had, refreshingly, made the effort to give some atmosphere of antiquity and tradition.

Our teachers ordered the tea, probably according to price, for Uncle Sam was footing the bill, and we have a quota to burn through with only five short weeks left. A waitress returned with the leaves and presented a short introduction to serving tea. I didn't understand most of it, because she spoke very quickly in Chinese. But basically, she rinsed everything thoroughly with boiling water, added the leaves, rinsed the leaves with boiling water, refilled the pot, then poured each person a small smelling cup (wen xiang bei) of tea. She then inverted this small cup over top of another tiny bowl, as if performing a physics demonstration of suction. After each of us received a mini-bowl with inverted smelling cup, we lifted up the smelling cups and smelled them.

Tasting tea, it seems to me, is much like tasting wine. To the uninitiated, it's completely unknown territory - that is, if there is even some objective territory out there. Nevertheless, we smelled it. Our first tea was Oolong (乌龙 wūlóng) from Fujian and it tasted very similar to green tea. We raised the micro-bowls one time each to chang, hui, and ping.

Each of the Chinese in our group, including the waitress, had a different opinion about the differences between Green, Oolong, Red, and Black Teas. Trying to get firm answers on this question was kind of like asking a group of Americans: "What constitutional amendments make up the bill of rights?" Everyone knew it was their patriotic duty to have an answer, but ultimately, an answer wasn't forthcoming. In the end, I think Oolong is basically the same type of tea leaf as the others, just harvested at a different time and dried differently. Green tea leaves are the first harvest, followed by Oolong, then the Red tea leaves (which is the more heavily caffeinated kind that we drink mostly in the West). If you know anything about tea, please share any insights by commenting to this post.

Our bill for ten people came out to 1,000 RMB, a rather high figure when one considers that my dinner last night was 10 RMB and my breakfast was 3 RMB. But our leaves are waiting for us in a special case at the tea garden, so that we can return within a period of time and reuse them for a small fee.