be a tea connoisseur

I went yesterday to the Canton Fair – think count fair times 1.3 billion. A bunch of tea exporters had set up stands to hawk their products to the foreign businessmen coming through, so I told everone I was starting a chain of tea houses in the US and got packets and packets of material describing in excruciating detail all of the teas that the sold – both in English and Chinese.

I haven’t been able to find a book to guide me through all the different types of tea here, but this is a start.

In the states I knew a lot about tea. I was a master of herbal teas, of mate, of fruit teas, of white tea, of black tea, of teas of all colors in between. So when I headed to a tea shop here in China I thought it would be an easy task to pick out a tea I liked and bring it home – and I was dead wrong. There were hundreds of jars of looseleaf tea staring me down, and I could just imagine them shaking their crystalline heads at my feeble attempts to read the characters marking their insides. 熏衣草? 甘草? 茉莉花?

So I’ve decided to become a real conossieur of tea, the Chinese way. I’m trying to find some sort of guide for all the teas that they have here with English along with the Chinese characters, as well as trying to learn proper tea etiquette. I’m going to dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s.