Back to Basics

To build a family, as a Chinese saying goes, one needs seven items: wood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea. These are the basic daily necessities to the agricultural-based Chinese – wood to set the fire, rice to fill the hunger, oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar to enrich the flavours of simple food, and tea, more than just a thirst quencher, is also a preventive medicine for the common folks who could not afford the doctors.

In the course of cultural development, tea, which is the last on the list, rose to become a preferred taste of the aristocrats; scholars gushed over it, with odes and eulogies; emperors demanded ridiculous annual tributes of tea, turning fodder crop cultivating lands into tea gardens; prices rose, and tea was beyond the reach of the common people. Several hundred years later, history repeated itself: people would pay exorbitant prices for a fresh young Dragonwell, pay out wads of bills for an Wuyi Da Hong Pao, pawn jewellery for an aged Puer.

Some call it Green Gold. We have forgotten that it is a drink. A simple and uncomplicated, un-stylized, cup of beverage.