Tea for Two

Posting this entry gives away some of the secretive process of buying souvenirs for some of my readers, but I think it’s just too good not to post. Last Sunday Xueqin and I went on our shopping excursion and ended up at a tea seller I’d heard was a good place for tea purchases. Hangzhou, is a city historically known for its silk, its tea, and according to my Lonely Planet guide, its wooden fans and scissors. The brand of tea associated with the area is Xihu Longjing, or West Lake Dragon Well tea, a type of green tea with a very clear flavor and slightly bitter taste. I plan to buy some Longjing to take home, as it’s very region-specific and practically synonymous with Hangzhou, and good to drink.

We entered the shop, which was filled with large glass jars of loose tea leaves. I am somewhat inexperienced at judging and evaluating teas, so I was needless to say at a bit of a loss, and explained to a helpful salesperson that I was looking for a good but not top quality Longjing to buy some gifts. His English, at least in terms of selling tea, was about on a par with our Chinese, so we had an interesting mix of languages flowing around as he pulled out a jar marked “68 yuan” (about 10 dollars), and explained that this was from the spring harvest and would soon be sold out, then brought us to a table with a small tea set and proceeded to serve us several rounds of tea.

First, he poured hot (but not too hot) water into a glass with the tea, then immediately strained the water, poured it into four small tea cups, and then dumped everything out, in order to wash the tea leaves and cups. He then repeated the process, allowing the leaves to brew only slightly longer, and presenting us with the tea to drink and comment on. I’m no expert, but it was good tea, and the bitterness was much more subtle than that of the teas I’d had before, which had steeped for long periods of time. He explained that the third or fourth cup usually has the best flavor, and that you don’t want to steep the leaves more than about five times. We smiled and nodded and pretended that this was the sort of thing that we knew about, and I asked about how the tea was sold.

Tea is measured by the jin, which I thought was a kilogram but in fact is 500g. I determined that it was possible to buy a half a jin, and asked for two half-jin boxes (no, not the frilly gift boxes set into the lined larger box, just the tea, thanks). I was already a bit bewildered by the measurements, which were not only metric but also Chinese, and which I’d never studied, so I kept asking about how much tea there was altogether, in each box, etc. I was convinced I’d accidentally ordered a very large amount of tea, but they reassured me that each box had 250g, and as I saw, each was about the size of a liter nalgene. Mistake there was, however, as I handed the cashier 100 yuan and received a blank stare. No, no, it’s 680 yuan. Excuse me? I looked again at the jar with the loose leaves. There, in very large print, the number 68 yuan. Beside it, in smaller print, was written “/50g”. I stopped dead, looked at Xueqin, and we both said something along the lines of “holy shit”. I mean I know good tea is expensive, but it never occurred to me that a mid-range tea at this place (the lowest price I saw was 20, and many were up to 180 and above) would cost 200 dollars per kilogram! Especially since I know a friend bought a half jin somewhere else for 30 yuan.

I offered some flustered apologies and explained that there was no way I could afford to spend 100 dollars on tea. The salesman, eager to be helpful, asked if I had a Visa card. I explained again that I was very sorry (the Chinese phrase is actually “I am embarrassed that I have made a mistake” and though it is used for any situation from stepping on someone’s foot to being late to meet someone, it was particularly fitting here) and the two of us left, still floored by the nonchalant way with which this very friendly guy about our age figured we could just drop that much money on tea. So sorry guys, no one is getting 50 dollars worth of tea, you’ll have to settle for either one cup’s worth of the good stuff or something slightly lower grade.