Tea Shopping in Xi'an, Tea Shopping in Chengdu (so far)
So...a little message from the beyond. I know that marshaln has been giving you guys our updates from Beijing, but I thought I'd let you know how my tea adventures have been going since then. Before I get into where I went in Xi'an and Chengdu, some observations:
1) Knowledge about pu'er here varies incredibly from store to store, from city to city. Even in stores that sell only pu'er, secure knowledge is rare. Perhaps because:
2) Pu'er is very much a fad in different cities; every tea store on the street has at least five cakes if not more, but few brew it well and fewer have much to say about it, even when adjusted for language barrier. I hear conflicting statements all the time, but have experienced many different styles of brewing. In Xi'an, for example, the vendors assured me that pu'er should be brewed in a big pot (220ml+), and they used fewer leaves. As far as contradictory evidence is concerned, I've heard this factory is good and that factory is bad, and then go to a different store and hear the reverse. I've also heard that more silver tips makes better tea for aging and vice versa. It's possible that the vendors believe what they're saying, and it's also possible they'll say anything to sell to a gullible foreigner. I don't make up my mind about this; it'd only be guesswork. I try to keep an open mind.
3) As far as teaware goes, it's incredibly difficult to find really nice gaiwans. Your standard variety are everywhere and very cheap, but finding nicer porcelain (gaiwan or otherwise) seems really tough, though decent yixing seems not too hard to find. Nice tea seas are everywhere, though.
Anyway, on to the meat of the post. Warning: it's a long one.
Xi'an
In Xi'an, I stayed at a hostel near the Drum Tower, which is now the entryway for the touristy side of the Muslim quarter. When wandering around, I entered a teashop and saw a "Lao Banzhang" cake that looked passable, and asked to taste it. The girl helping me refused my request, saying that it would mean breaking the cake (most stores have taster cakes, of course). I told her that I wouldn't buy any tea without tasting it first, and she said, "Whatever! Whatever!" and wouldn't look me in the eye as she wrapped the tea back up. Appalled, I told her I wasn't an idiot who would buy tea without tasting it first, and left.
In the next store I found a decent tea. It's a "1997" (probably 2000-2002) zhongcha bing, pictured below. It's browner than the fluorescent lights made it appear in the photo. I had to bargain hard to get it to 270, as I mentioned before, and I don't think it's worth even that considering its anonymity: the neifei is blank except for the zhongcha sign. Also, the Mengku stuff marshaln and I had tastes better and cost less.
After posting here and getting a quick response from marshaln about where to go for the more wholesale style district in Xi'an, I ventured to Chunming and Jinkang Roads near the Chawu market and found the mini-Maliandao in Xi'an.
The vendors here told me that pu'er has been a fad in Xi'an for only the past two years or so. I thought this might explain why stores don't have anything older than 2004 or so. Although their older stocks could just have been bought up. I don't know. First I walked around the stores, of which there are about 50-60, to get my bearings. Then I returned to where I started and entered a Changtai store.
All the tea here looked older than it really was (echos of hou de's 2004 Changtai I tasted with phyll_sheng), but without the Yiwu factor marshaln and I talked about in Beijing. Perhaps this has something to do with their method of processing? Anyway, I pointed to their most expensive shelf cake, 300 kuai, and asked to taste it. The cake had big, big leaves on the face and slightly smaller leaves throughout. But the tea the shopkeeper brewed obviously was some other tea, as the leaves were too small. What I tasted was dry and unremarkable, and when I picked up the sample he brewed and compared it to the tea I requested, the vendor assured me they were the same tea, but when I gave him an I'm-not-that-stupid look, he pointed to another tea that was cheaper. Feeling that this would only continue to be an experience with a vendor who underestimated me at best and was cheating me at worst, I decided to leave.
At the Mengku Rongshi store I tasted their "best" 2006 tea, a 500g cake they asked 168 kuai for. It has a big green leaf at the top. I also tasted a 400g cake from 2005 (I think) that they asked 90 kuai for. When I started bargaining for the former, which was actually alright if I got it for under 80, the store manager wouldn't budge below 150. WhenI told him I paid less for their 2002 brown label tea in Maliandao, he just looked away and ignored me when other customers arrived. I sat up and left.
Long Chang Tea Factory, a factory I hadn't heard of before, had a store next door, so I entered out of curiosity. It proved to be an educational experience. I tasted three teas: a 2005 Nannuo, a 2006 "Yiwu" tuo, and a "1997"/"10 year" "Yiwu" cake. [On a side note, those of you who've read my post about Maliandao in March of this year recall the Feng Qing store woman who wanted 600 kuai for a 650g "wild tree" bing...this store sold the same cake for 180 starting price. Cunt!] The 2005 Nannuo tasted and drank surprisingly good considering its vintage, similar to the Banzhang cake marshaln and I tried in Maliandao, but not quite as good. The 2006 tuo tasted just like Yunnan green tea! Quite obviously, this tuo was a waste of leaves, but the effects of higher temperature processing had never been so obvious to my tongue before. Indeed, this was green tea. I should mention that I didn't show interest in the tuo or ask to taste it; the vendor pushed it hard and brewed it even after I said I wanted only bingcha. His friends drank it with nods of approval and strokes of their neck ("gan" "huigan"), but the tea fascinated me merely for its lack of any pu'er taste whatsoever. Maybe he chose it because it's easy to drink? Either he knows nothing about pu'er to praise this so highly, or (more likely?) he tried to lead me astray by pushing a product with a higher profit margin? I don't know.
At this point, I asked if he had anything older, hoping to try some 2000~2003 teas. He brought out a brownish-green bing and broke a piece off to taste. At the wash, he showed me "how much darker" the liquor of this cake was compared to the Nannuo, and I nodded. It was dark orange-pink, like a 5 year tea or so. After the second infusion, he asked me to guess its age. The tea tasted 5 year old pu mixed with stale green tea, so I told him 5 years. He looked at me with indignity and said "10 years" and "1997" and "Yiwu". In disbelief, I asked where it was aged. "Kunming?" I suggested, as this tea would have been aged very dry to taste and look this way after 10 years. He replied saying they aged it in Xi'an. This meant nothing to me, of course, not knowing the climate, and he continued to say that this particular cake was in such high demand with his customers from Hubei province that his store bought it back from their Xi'an customers in the city. He previously said that Long Chang tea factory had not only a reputation that equalled Chang Tai but also had 100 years of history. A few considerations flew through my mind:
1) The cake didn't taste 10 years old.
2) The cake and its liquor didn't look 10 years old.
3) The store had no other cakes older than 2005 for all its 100 years of history, not even behind glass.
4) The vendor really believed his words about the cake from what I could tell.
Meaning:
1) He lied about its age, or
2) The cake is half green tea (bad kill-green) and didn't age well because of it, or
3) He doesn't know much about aged pu'er or pu'er in general, or
4) All of the above or any in combination.
This combined with the green tea tuo really threw my opinion about the 2005 Nannuo into doubt, but I had one more cup of it and held my opinion. It didn't taste like green tea; it tasted like pu'er. Really, though, my opinion didn't matter: he wanted 300 kuai for it (and 1400 for the "1997 Yiwu"! WTH!), so I walked.
At the CNNP "China Tea Corp." store a few doors down I had better luck. Right away I had a tea that I liked, a 2006 red/purple bud cake that was convincingly wild looking and tasting, or very well faked: I don't know. After so much tasting one realizes how little one really has except ambivalence! The cake tasted a little thin, but worth owning just one, and I bought one for a hard sell of 80 kuai. The vendor claims I'm the first to get just one piece at 80 kuai, his "tong price", but who knows if that's lip service. I also tried the store owner's own production, a one-leaf-one-bud cake with an orange, sweet, dry, Assam white tea flavor.
In the rest of the stores I saw little of interest other than this year's higher-end Haiwan stuff, which carried sticker prices too high to bother tasting. More stores than I expected in Xi'an, even more in the Chawu market, and at least half specializing in pu'er made for not a bad find. A million thanks to marshaln!
One thing that I really like about the purple bud cake is that drinking water some 3-4 hours later and after eating a meal, I still taste it at the back of my mouth and down my throat.
Chengdu
Chengdu is full of teahouses that serve mediocre tea to the clientele, who are more interested in their game of Chinese chess, mahjong, or cards than what's in their gaiwan. But for 3-10 kuai for the teas, what more can they offer? The atmosphere at these places is sublimely relaxed; many also offer shoulder and foot massages. Chengdu and its inhabitants are known for their laid back culture, and the teahouse serves as the focus of this relaxation.
There are corner tea shops everywhere in addition to the ubiquitous uncountable teahouses. On any non-department-store block, one can find at least one of each. Around my hostel, we have 11 teahouses on our one block. I went into several of the tea stores within walking distance today, and I found that vendors in Chengdu highly regard Xiaguan factory. Nearly every store sells at least 4-5 different cakes from Xiaguan; there's almost no other tuo to be found. Anyway, this made for slim pickings, although cakes from the factory I tasted pictured below were available at three or four other stores.
I only tasted at one store, where the girl serving me tea spoke decent English. She believed that silver tips made for good aging and better tea, and tried to have me believe that a year was significant enough for drastic changes in aging. I think she was trying to justify the price of their Cha Yuan Factory 2005 Wuliangshan Old Tree cake, which was 120 kuai more expensive than their best 2006 cake. But, again, I don't know.
Above: Cha Yuan Factory 2005 Wuliangshan Old Tree leaf sample
Below: Cha Yuan Factory 2006 Silver Tip leaf sample
The real difference in these cakes, of course, was the leaf, as visible above (dry) and below (brewed). The silver tip cake has mostly broken chopped small buds with a handful of medium-sized leaves. It tasted dry and like white tea; very tasty to drink now but not much for aging unless you believe the vendor. The Wuliangshan was more refined, but thin and a bit bland as most 2005 teas have a tendency to taste, at least with me thus far. If I could have got the Wuliangshan for 60-70, I would have bought one, but at sticker price of 300 I couldn't begin to bargain it down to what I feel is its worth. So I left without anything but happy to have drunk pu'er.
Above: Wuliangshan brewed leaves
Below: Silver Tip brewed leaves
From here I went to a restaurant and ate really heavy spicy rabbit hotpot and drank peanut juice to help calm the fire. The Sichuanese food isn't that spicy so far, but it has a different numbing spiciness to it. Tingling numbness from the Sichuan peppercorn makes the food unique and involves not just the taste of the tongue but its other nerves as well, which is cool. It still cleared my sinuses, but it wasn't the eye-watering makes-me-cry spiciness that I like so much in Indian and Thai food back home.
Anyway, that's all. Thanks if you read it all. If you came just for the pictures, wipe off your keyboard and go back to your business, tea pervert.
1) Knowledge about pu'er here varies incredibly from store to store, from city to city. Even in stores that sell only pu'er, secure knowledge is rare. Perhaps because:
2) Pu'er is very much a fad in different cities; every tea store on the street has at least five cakes if not more, but few brew it well and fewer have much to say about it, even when adjusted for language barrier. I hear conflicting statements all the time, but have experienced many different styles of brewing. In Xi'an, for example, the vendors assured me that pu'er should be brewed in a big pot (220ml+), and they used fewer leaves. As far as contradictory evidence is concerned, I've heard this factory is good and that factory is bad, and then go to a different store and hear the reverse. I've also heard that more silver tips makes better tea for aging and vice versa. It's possible that the vendors believe what they're saying, and it's also possible they'll say anything to sell to a gullible foreigner. I don't make up my mind about this; it'd only be guesswork. I try to keep an open mind.
3) As far as teaware goes, it's incredibly difficult to find really nice gaiwans. Your standard variety are everywhere and very cheap, but finding nicer porcelain (gaiwan or otherwise) seems really tough, though decent yixing seems not too hard to find. Nice tea seas are everywhere, though.
Anyway, on to the meat of the post. Warning: it's a long one.
Xi'an
In Xi'an, I stayed at a hostel near the Drum Tower, which is now the entryway for the touristy side of the Muslim quarter. When wandering around, I entered a teashop and saw a "Lao Banzhang" cake that looked passable, and asked to taste it. The girl helping me refused my request, saying that it would mean breaking the cake (most stores have taster cakes, of course). I told her that I wouldn't buy any tea without tasting it first, and she said, "Whatever! Whatever!" and wouldn't look me in the eye as she wrapped the tea back up. Appalled, I told her I wasn't an idiot who would buy tea without tasting it first, and left.
In the next store I found a decent tea. It's a "1997" (probably 2000-2002) zhongcha bing, pictured below. It's browner than the fluorescent lights made it appear in the photo. I had to bargain hard to get it to 270, as I mentioned before, and I don't think it's worth even that considering its anonymity: the neifei is blank except for the zhongcha sign. Also, the Mengku stuff marshaln and I had tastes better and cost less.
After posting here and getting a quick response from marshaln about where to go for the more wholesale style district in Xi'an, I ventured to Chunming and Jinkang Roads near the Chawu market and found the mini-Maliandao in Xi'an.
The vendors here told me that pu'er has been a fad in Xi'an for only the past two years or so. I thought this might explain why stores don't have anything older than 2004 or so. Although their older stocks could just have been bought up. I don't know. First I walked around the stores, of which there are about 50-60, to get my bearings. Then I returned to where I started and entered a Changtai store.
All the tea here looked older than it really was (echos of hou de's 2004 Changtai I tasted with phyll_sheng), but without the Yiwu factor marshaln and I talked about in Beijing. Perhaps this has something to do with their method of processing? Anyway, I pointed to their most expensive shelf cake, 300 kuai, and asked to taste it. The cake had big, big leaves on the face and slightly smaller leaves throughout. But the tea the shopkeeper brewed obviously was some other tea, as the leaves were too small. What I tasted was dry and unremarkable, and when I picked up the sample he brewed and compared it to the tea I requested, the vendor assured me they were the same tea, but when I gave him an I'm-not-that-stupid look, he pointed to another tea that was cheaper. Feeling that this would only continue to be an experience with a vendor who underestimated me at best and was cheating me at worst, I decided to leave.
At the Mengku Rongshi store I tasted their "best" 2006 tea, a 500g cake they asked 168 kuai for. It has a big green leaf at the top. I also tasted a 400g cake from 2005 (I think) that they asked 90 kuai for. When I started bargaining for the former, which was actually alright if I got it for under 80, the store manager wouldn't budge below 150. WhenI told him I paid less for their 2002 brown label tea in Maliandao, he just looked away and ignored me when other customers arrived. I sat up and left.
Long Chang Tea Factory, a factory I hadn't heard of before, had a store next door, so I entered out of curiosity. It proved to be an educational experience. I tasted three teas: a 2005 Nannuo, a 2006 "Yiwu" tuo, and a "1997"/"10 year" "Yiwu" cake. [On a side note, those of you who've read my post about Maliandao in March of this year recall the Feng Qing store woman who wanted 600 kuai for a 650g "wild tree" bing...this store sold the same cake for 180 starting price. Cunt!] The 2005 Nannuo tasted and drank surprisingly good considering its vintage, similar to the Banzhang cake marshaln and I tried in Maliandao, but not quite as good. The 2006 tuo tasted just like Yunnan green tea! Quite obviously, this tuo was a waste of leaves, but the effects of higher temperature processing had never been so obvious to my tongue before. Indeed, this was green tea. I should mention that I didn't show interest in the tuo or ask to taste it; the vendor pushed it hard and brewed it even after I said I wanted only bingcha. His friends drank it with nods of approval and strokes of their neck ("gan" "huigan"), but the tea fascinated me merely for its lack of any pu'er taste whatsoever. Maybe he chose it because it's easy to drink? Either he knows nothing about pu'er to praise this so highly, or (more likely?) he tried to lead me astray by pushing a product with a higher profit margin? I don't know.
At this point, I asked if he had anything older, hoping to try some 2000~2003 teas. He brought out a brownish-green bing and broke a piece off to taste. At the wash, he showed me "how much darker" the liquor of this cake was compared to the Nannuo, and I nodded. It was dark orange-pink, like a 5 year tea or so. After the second infusion, he asked me to guess its age. The tea tasted 5 year old pu mixed with stale green tea, so I told him 5 years. He looked at me with indignity and said "10 years" and "1997" and "Yiwu". In disbelief, I asked where it was aged. "Kunming?" I suggested, as this tea would have been aged very dry to taste and look this way after 10 years. He replied saying they aged it in Xi'an. This meant nothing to me, of course, not knowing the climate, and he continued to say that this particular cake was in such high demand with his customers from Hubei province that his store bought it back from their Xi'an customers in the city. He previously said that Long Chang tea factory had not only a reputation that equalled Chang Tai but also had 100 years of history. A few considerations flew through my mind:
1) The cake didn't taste 10 years old.
2) The cake and its liquor didn't look 10 years old.
3) The store had no other cakes older than 2005 for all its 100 years of history, not even behind glass.
4) The vendor really believed his words about the cake from what I could tell.
Meaning:
1) He lied about its age, or
2) The cake is half green tea (bad kill-green) and didn't age well because of it, or
3) He doesn't know much about aged pu'er or pu'er in general, or
4) All of the above or any in combination.
This combined with the green tea tuo really threw my opinion about the 2005 Nannuo into doubt, but I had one more cup of it and held my opinion. It didn't taste like green tea; it tasted like pu'er. Really, though, my opinion didn't matter: he wanted 300 kuai for it (and 1400 for the "1997 Yiwu"! WTH!), so I walked.
At the CNNP "China Tea Corp." store a few doors down I had better luck. Right away I had a tea that I liked, a 2006 red/purple bud cake that was convincingly wild looking and tasting, or very well faked: I don't know. After so much tasting one realizes how little one really has except ambivalence! The cake tasted a little thin, but worth owning just one, and I bought one for a hard sell of 80 kuai. The vendor claims I'm the first to get just one piece at 80 kuai, his "tong price", but who knows if that's lip service. I also tried the store owner's own production, a one-leaf-one-bud cake with an orange, sweet, dry, Assam white tea flavor.
In the rest of the stores I saw little of interest other than this year's higher-end Haiwan stuff, which carried sticker prices too high to bother tasting. More stores than I expected in Xi'an, even more in the Chawu market, and at least half specializing in pu'er made for not a bad find. A million thanks to marshaln!
One thing that I really like about the purple bud cake is that drinking water some 3-4 hours later and after eating a meal, I still taste it at the back of my mouth and down my throat.
Chengdu
Chengdu is full of teahouses that serve mediocre tea to the clientele, who are more interested in their game of Chinese chess, mahjong, or cards than what's in their gaiwan. But for 3-10 kuai for the teas, what more can they offer? The atmosphere at these places is sublimely relaxed; many also offer shoulder and foot massages. Chengdu and its inhabitants are known for their laid back culture, and the teahouse serves as the focus of this relaxation.
There are corner tea shops everywhere in addition to the ubiquitous uncountable teahouses. On any non-department-store block, one can find at least one of each. Around my hostel, we have 11 teahouses on our one block. I went into several of the tea stores within walking distance today, and I found that vendors in Chengdu highly regard Xiaguan factory. Nearly every store sells at least 4-5 different cakes from Xiaguan; there's almost no other tuo to be found. Anyway, this made for slim pickings, although cakes from the factory I tasted pictured below were available at three or four other stores.
I only tasted at one store, where the girl serving me tea spoke decent English. She believed that silver tips made for good aging and better tea, and tried to have me believe that a year was significant enough for drastic changes in aging. I think she was trying to justify the price of their Cha Yuan Factory 2005 Wuliangshan Old Tree cake, which was 120 kuai more expensive than their best 2006 cake. But, again, I don't know.
Above: Cha Yuan Factory 2005 Wuliangshan Old Tree leaf sample
Below: Cha Yuan Factory 2006 Silver Tip leaf sample
The real difference in these cakes, of course, was the leaf, as visible above (dry) and below (brewed). The silver tip cake has mostly broken chopped small buds with a handful of medium-sized leaves. It tasted dry and like white tea; very tasty to drink now but not much for aging unless you believe the vendor. The Wuliangshan was more refined, but thin and a bit bland as most 2005 teas have a tendency to taste, at least with me thus far. If I could have got the Wuliangshan for 60-70, I would have bought one, but at sticker price of 300 I couldn't begin to bargain it down to what I feel is its worth. So I left without anything but happy to have drunk pu'er.
Above: Wuliangshan brewed leaves
Below: Silver Tip brewed leaves
From here I went to a restaurant and ate really heavy spicy rabbit hotpot and drank peanut juice to help calm the fire. The Sichuanese food isn't that spicy so far, but it has a different numbing spiciness to it. Tingling numbness from the Sichuan peppercorn makes the food unique and involves not just the taste of the tongue but its other nerves as well, which is cool. It still cleared my sinuses, but it wasn't the eye-watering makes-me-cry spiciness that I like so much in Indian and Thai food back home.
Anyway, that's all. Thanks if you read it all. If you came just for the pictures, wipe off your keyboard and go back to your business, tea pervert.