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Gongfu tea untouched by time
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Lin Min
DEFYING threats from modern culture, gongfu tea, an old tradition of preparing and serving tea with small tea sets and special skills, still flourishes in its homeland in the Chaozhou area of eastern Guangdong Province, and southern Fujian Province.
People like to compare tea in China to coffee in western countries. But few people would notice that tea serves different purposes in different regions and on different occasions. Before people began to drink tea in the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD24), when the earliest known tea drinking literature was written, tea leaves had been on the dinner table as a vegetable for more than 2,000 years. Even today the people of the Jinuo ethnic group in Yunnan Province, believed to be the birthplace of tea, still eat tea leaves.
People in different regions in the country have their own way of preparing tea. Even in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), Lu Yu, the author of the Tea Book, recorded 28 varieties of tea-making utensils and placed them in eight categories. But the delicate process of preparing tea has made gongfu tea a unique custom in China.
Even nowadays, tea serves different functions. Most people drinking green tea or red tea would simply treat it as a drink. But around Chaozhou, it has loftier purposes.
Gongfu tea, which was first sipped back in the Song Dynasty (440-479AD), remains an important part of social etiquette in Chaozhou. If you visit a family, you can be sure of at least one round of gongfu tea. If no tea is offered to you, something must have gone wrong.
Preparing and drinking gongfu tea, which can facilitate a lengthy, meandering discussion, has proved to be a perfect topic of conversation among friends and relatives. Wherever people get together, gongfu tea is there. But it also has its modern detractors: in offices gongfu tea may not be welcome because critics say it has turned workers, even white-collars, into gossipmongers and blame the time-consuming process of preparing the beverage for reducing productivity.
Gongfu tea, to which manual skill, high quality tea leaves and water as well as appropriate temperature control are critical, brings out the best that tea, especially the fermented Wulong tea, can offer. Though it tastes bitter when it first reaches your mouth, it is the lingering aftertaste that makes gongfu tea probably the most charming tea culture in China. Drinking gongfu tea is in fact a process of aesthetics rather than a solution to thirst.
Veteran tea fans are said to be able to detect the charm and spirit of the mountain where the specific tea leaves were grown: this, indeed, brings the utmost pleasure in drinking gongfu tea. Tea leaves from different mountains may offer different fragrance and taste, even though they are exactly of the same variety.
For ordinary people, after a long day of hard work, a round of gongfu tea offers refreshment and physical relief. This is one of the important reasons why the tradition lives on. Some even use gongfu tea to stimulate their minds and seek inspiration, a much healthier method than relying on caffeine or cigarettes.
Gongfu tea is not immune from modern trends. A few years ago, almost everyone drank expensive Fenghuang single-grove tea, a variety of Shuixian, but now they have shifted to Tieguanyin, which comes from Anxi, Fujian. People talking about tea often sound like they are discussing fashion.
Chaozhou families spend much more on tea than ordinary people. And so the tradition lives on and prospers.
Making basic gongfu:
●Clean the teapot with boiling water to make better tea with a warm teapot.
●Fill in the teapot with a big handful of tea leaves, making sure the leaves, after being soaked with hot water, will stick out the mouth of the teapot.
●Pour boiling water into teapot. The water should overflow so as to get rid of impure materials and foam, and to make mellow tea. A few seconds later, the tea should be poured into cups, which are usually arranged in a circle.
●Pour tea with a few rounds of circular motions into each cup so as to make sure the tea in all the cups is the same in terms of colour and fragrance. To avoid creating foam, the teapot should be held close to the teacups.
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