Here is a picture of some tea. I decided to use this pot because it was my newest one. I decided to drink some 2005 Xiaguan 8653 because it was in a sample bag from a group buy and I figured it wasn’t going to age any more in the bag, so time to drink it up. It worked well with the pot, but that’s beside the point.

Did you know that Gongfucha, and/or chadao, and/or whatever this is called, is in some respects fairly new, and influenced by multiple cultures and dialogues between China, Japan and Taiwan? Famous tea blogger MarshalN wrote this, which is how I found that out: http://www.marshaln.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GFC1601_06_Zhang-3.pdf

I used to think there is “the chinese way” of making tea, and that it had been around for thousands of years. Now, things make a lot more sense. This way of making Chinese tea is not 100% Chinese and not that old, and that opens things up a bit so you can use whatever you want as an active participant in an ever-evolving global tea culture. We have in this picture a chinese teapot bought from a hong kong vendor, a chinese cup, a czech plate with japanese kohiki glaze style, a sake pitcher made by a ceramicist in brooklyn, and chabu (tea mat) from a French dude in Taiwan.

This isn’t anything particularly edgy, but it is worth noting that tea drinking is a global phenomenon and everyone does it in their own style. It’s pretty cool to have teaware from all over the world interacting together in one session.

Anyway, on this blog I’m going to try to explore the more abstract concepts in puerh and other teas because I’ve found it all to be very, very interesting.

Thanks for reading.

-Tea Secrets