I'm in China. It's not what you want, but here's something about tea that I sent to friends in Canada a while back:
Sean says you would like some tea. OK, but there are questions. One is what type of tea. Apart from jasmine tea, chrysanthemum tea, and what the Chinese call hong cha (red tea) which is what India grows & the West mostly drinks, and about dozen others that I do not know much about, there are three main kinds. Green tea is unfermented. Most famous is Dragon Well tea from Hangzhou, one province North of me. There are several dozen, maybe several hundred, other variants. Pu er cha, named after a town in Yunnan, is heavily fermented, and packed into hard cakes. Originally, packed for transport by horse caravan into Tibet & Burma. The cakes are embossed with designs and quite pretty; people I know have them hung as wall decorations. Oolong is an intermediate type, fermented a bit for flavour but not really heavily. The province I'm in, Fujian, grows China's two most famous oolong teas. It was the biggest exporter back in the clipper ship era, may still be for all I know. Wu Yi Mountain, a major tourist/scenic area, has da hong bao (big red robe). Anxi, right in my area, has Tei Guan Yin. The other quite famous oolong is Tung Ting from Taiwan. Taiwanese are mostly descended from Fujian immigrants. Likely you can buy that cheaper than I could. Another question is who is paying for it? I can afford to buy you some decent tea & send it but if you want the really good stuff, it is expensive and I'm on a Chinese salary. If it is you, how much are you willing to spend? XE.com gives 100 rmb = $18.3007 Canadian today. Tea here is normally sold by the jing, almost exactly half a kilo. Prices start around 40/jing and go to the moon. Tea here is priced like wine in the West; something that is both good & rare can fetch incredible prices. The record for a bottle of port is >$20,000. The record for tea is >$1000 a gram! That was for Da Hong Bao, but not the ordinary stuff; off three little bushes halfway up a cliff, once reserved for the emperor. Chinese seem to think that if it is hard to get, it must be good. You need rock-climbing equipment to harvest those bushes. Tei Guan Yin is a very fine oolong grown in Anxi, quite near me. Major export item. It was the tea thrown overboard at the Boston Tea Party. I wandered into my local branch of Ten Fu today, a China-wide chain with a good reputation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Ren_Tea http://www.tenrenstea.com/tenfu/ Their best tei guan yin was 600 rmb. Add 100 or so for shipping and my cost is near $140. Is topnotch tea worth that to you? They had other teas that were cheaper and a few that were quite a bit more, like a Dragon Well green tea for 1200. They also sell tea over the web. Things they offer for $35/40 US on the web are 100-150 rmb here, so cheaper. But add 100 or so for shipping and it may not be worth it. Suggest you try a decent oolong, preferably Tei Guan Yin since that is easiest for me to get, then if you like it, consider the expensive one. Their web site: http://www.tenrenstea.com/WMCshop.cgi?action=dbview&id=4AT320&list=category Or tell me & I'll send, or just look in Toronto Chinatown or Asian mall near you. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
