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#茶

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🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦
This is the original tea that made me a Chinese tea fanatic. In Canada I drank and appreciated tea, learning quite a bit about tea grades, and production from places like India or Sri Lanka. (This is just how I'm wired: I always have to learn more.) But there wasn't a lot of representation of Chinese tea culture in Canada at the time, and instead I fell into the circle of a coffee Lothario who taught me a whole bunch about coffee (to the point I only bought green and roasted at home).

Then I moved to China (Jiujiang, specifically). The coffee at the time was crap (and overpriced crap to boot), but the tea I had was magnificent. My "learn everything" instincts kicked in and I started haunting the streets and alleys of Jiujiang looking for tea shops, one of my "student minders" with me each time (because I needed translation and local knowledge). I quickly learned that the big and fancy shops sold only specific brands and knew nothing broadly, so I looked for the small shops, typically run by a single plantation as their in-city rep.

That's when I ran into Songbai Tea. The shop owner (who also operated a plantation) tolerated my questions, and paid careful attention to how I was tasting the tea, understanding that I actually had a palate for it, and that I could tell the difference between good tea and plain. We developed a pretty good friendship over time, bonding, basically, over today's tea: 庐山云雾茶 (Lúshān yúnwù chá or Lushan cloud and mist tea).

This tea is very famous inside China, being the trope namer, in effect, for the entire class of "cloud and mist" teas. It was an imperial tribute tea since the Song dynasty and is now a protected trademark. And it bears a special place in my heart as my introduction to the madness of Chinese tea, and is a "comfort tea" of sorts for me.

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@tea@a.gup.pe

#茶 #云雾茶 #中国名茶 #庐山云雾茶 #tea #CloudAndMistTea #ChineseTea #LushanCloudAndMistTea
The tea and the tools for the photo shoot laid out in preparation. A window sill is covered by a black tablecloth with sun shining from above. To the left is a glass double-walled cup with a tea leaf basket ready to do the brewing. To the right is a replica bamboo scroll with The Classic of Tea inscribed on it. Behind that, closer to the background, is the burgundy brocade bag that holds the scroll. In between the cup and the scroll is a rectangular piece of paper upon which the bag holding the tea is place. The paper has some seal stamps on it (which will be detailed in later alt text). The bag with the tea will too be explored in more detail in later alt text.
A closer-up view of the sealed bag holding the tea. It's a plain bag, not branded, that has some generic "this is tea"-style marking over which is slapped a vertical sticker reading "Lushan Cloud and Mist" (in Chinese, naturally) from top down in black, then across the bottom in small red type "Jiangxi Speciality Tea". The seal stamps are still a little blurry here so will be described later in a picture that has them in better focus.
The back of the bag has production information on it as is legally required of agricultural products in China. The key information is that it comes from Jiujiang, Jiangxi (thus confirming it is from Lushan, not neighbouring mountains), and has a "date" (a bit ambiguous here if this is the production date or the packing date; I'm leaning toward the latter based on what I know of tea production in Lushan) of 2025-02-08. As is increasingly common it provides instructions for how to brew the tea (which sounds crazy until you realize just how DIFFERENT and DIVERSE Chinese teas can be). In the case it says use 3-5g, add water between 85-95°C, and brew for 30 seconds. The 30-second brew is not a joke. This tea brews up quickly and if you brew the first round for 30 seconds (after the wash), you can get a good half-dozen cups from the leaves by increasing the brewing time a bit with each round.
Here a suitable amount of the tea is placed on the fold in the middle of the paper (I fold it so it's easier to put into the cup after I've taken the photo). This tea is a very dark green in the leaf (one of the ways you identify a cloud and mist tea) and the leaves are carefully rolled lengthwise into almost a little worm shape. Here the three seal stamps are more clearly visible. The two right-most ones are a dragon design and a phoenix design which I placed there because I like the emblems. The leftmost one is an illustration stamp featuring an old-time tea pot on an old-time stove with a couplet I can't decode at the top right (but it's about tea).
#lushancloudandmisttea
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