Hong Kong is a great place to start an exploration of tea and there is no better place to start than at the Peninsula Hotel. I wish I had started there, but I didn’t. I started at one of the oldest Dim Sum restaurants in Kowloon (the mainland side of Hong Kong harbor). I had woken up at an ungodly hour and looked online for somewhere that served good Dim Sum quite early in the morning, which is how I found the Open Rice restaurant, on the third floor of a rather dingy looking building in a part of town that does not see many tourists. I was rather pleased with myself for being the only westerner there that morning. From the curious but welcoming looks I got from the old men reading their morning newspapers as they ate, I suspect not many non-locals show up there at all. The food was OK, but the tea., the tea…oh my god, the tea…sorry just kidding; the tea was nothing special either. I had basically wandered into the Hong Kong equivalent of a local coffee shop in New York. Despite the word coffee in the name, I would never recommend one of those for a great cup of Columbian. For a taste of New York, yes, but for coffee, never. Or, to draw an analogy with wine, it was as though I had gone to a corner café in Paris expecting the house wine to blow me away. Silly me. But I had had a thoroughly authentic experience and set off to find something better to drink.

Afternoon tea at the Peninsula is about the most shamelessly touristy thing one can do in Hong Kong but I would recommend it to anyone who visits. Anywhere else, it would seem like a kitschy theme-park recreation of the good/bad old days of the British Empire, except that the Peninsula is the genuine article and preserves its traditions without pretensions. One may suppress a giggle as the salon orchestra plays I wanna hold your hand, the theme from The Godfather and a Strauss waltz one after the other, but they play them well and it’s all part of the experience.  By the way, don’t call it ‘high tea’. Despite the classier sounding name, the ‘high’ in high tea refers to the height of the table, and it was the lower orders of society who took their tea at the dining table rather than at a low coffee table.

If you simply order tea in a joint like the Peninsula, they will ask you whether you want English or Chinese tea. This is a question I’ve now been asked many times on this trip. The main difference is that if you order English tea, you will be offered a choice of black tea (generally from India) with milk, lemon and sugar on the side. If you order Chinese tea, you will have a choice of black or oolong (rarely green) tea.  It will be Chinese; of course, and there will be no lemon or milk served with it. In addition, the English tea will probably be brewed stronger and the cup may be larger. So here’s another reason why the tea we Americans usually drink is so unsatisfying.  We’re not clear about how we want to drink it or why we want it that way. The English, traditionally, wanted a strong, hearty brew and tended to steep their tea until it became quite tannic and rather bitter.  They then cut its bitterness with lemon or masked it with milk. A small amount of cold milk in the bottom of the cup also protected delicate faience porcelain (the kind used in Europe before the technique of making harder “China” porcelain was imported from the East) from breaking when the hot liquid was poured in.

The Chinese, on the other hand, prize aroma and delicacy. They don’t steep the tea as long as the English do, so it is not as tannic and they prefer to drink several small cups to a single large one. And the reason why “English” tea is generally from India is an interesting historical digression. The first tea imported into England in the mid-seventeenth century was from China and, as we all know, it caught on in a very big way. Soon the demand for tea (as well as for silk, “China” porcelain and a many other goods) had created a huge trade deficit. The Chinese were not interested in anything Europe could offer. They would accept payment in silver and nothing else. So the English planted their own tea estates in the mountains of northern India where they had complete control over the tea trade. Until that time, although tea had been known in India for centuries, it was regarded as a medicinal plant and it was not widely cultivated. But eventually Indian tea, especially from the best properties in Darjeeling, came to rival the best China had to offer. Unfortunately, the trade deficit for other goods continued until the English discovered that there was a Chinese market for another crop that grew in India: Opium. And when the Chinese authorities cracked down on the drug trade, in the 1840s, the English sent gunboats up the Pearl River in what is now known as the first Opium War. And lest you think I’ve gotten completely off track, one result of that war was that the English took possession of Hong Kong for the next hundred and fifty-some years, which is why the Peninsula Hotel is there in the first place, offering two different styles of tea.

Being in Hong Kong, and on my way to China, I opted for Chinese tea. Then, fortified with cucumber sandwiches (what else?), I headed off to Fook Ming Tong, a well regarded tea emporium and spent about an hour tasting with the saleswoman, named Miss Tam, who brewed tiny cups of some of their best tea for me. Using a small bowl with a cover rather than a teapot, she first poured hot but not quite boiling water over the leaves and discarded it immediately. This was to rinse off any tea dust that might make the tea bitter. (Remember that tea dust is what gets put into teabags.) Then she steeped the first cup for about a minute, covering the cup briefly with a lid and then offering me the underside of lid, the where the steam had condensed, to sniff the aromas. The ritual was not unlike sniffing wine for aromas before tasting it.  The tea was then offered tiny tasting cups that held no more than an ounce and a half. Miss Tam brewed several batches from the same leaves to show how the flavors and aromas developed each time. Having been told that the way to brew tea is “one teaspoon of leaves per person plus one for the pot and steep for five minutes” this was very different for me. Ms. Tam used more tea than that. She explained that if you want strong flavor without the bitterness, you should use more tea but not extend the steeping time.  I had also been told that one could not re-use tealeaves. That might be true of English tea Ms. Tam said, (adding, a little dismissively that she really didn’t know because she rarely drank it), but with Chinese tea, it was traditional to re-brew the leaves until the tea became too weak or too bitter.  She added that the first cup is almost never as good as the second or third.

Ms. Tam also told me quite a bit a about how tea is grown and harvested. The tea season lasts from spring to fall. The harvest starts with the first “flush” or appearance of fresh new leaves, and subsequent flushes are harvested every ten days or so.  The first flush is often prized for its delicacy, but later flushes may be more robust. As the season nears its end, the quality diminishes and the last flushes are used for only for bulk production and (ugh!) teabags. Most commercial tea is a blend of harvests and estates. However, the finest teas are not only from a single estate, but often of a single flush and even, in some rare cases, from a single, highly prized tree. So here was another similarity with wine, where the best examples are from single properties and single vineyards although I have never heard of wine from a single vine.

By the way, I have not had a glass of wine since I got here. It’s not that it isn’t available, it’s that I just don’t feel like drinking it with the food I’m eating. The acidity of wine just doesn’t appeal to me with the oil and spice of Cantonese cuisine. Tea and beer seem a better match, for the most part.

In addition to selling tea, Fook Ming Tong also sells accessories, including Yi Xing teapots. These unglazed ceramic pots (made from a special clay only found in the northern Chinese town of Yi Xing) are said to absorb the flavor of the tea to the point where, after several years of use, one can make tea just by adding water to the pot. One pot in particular caught my eye. It was covered with Chinese writing, which I was told was a poem about tea. I asked for a translation and was told that each column of script told of a different person’s approach to tea, starting with the emperor and ending with a small child. The third stanza reads, “When the layman speaks about tea, he has no idea what he is talking about”.  If the shoe fits…I bought the pot.

From Hong Kong, my trip continues to Beijing and the to Hangzhou, where I will be able to visit a tea plantation. More from there.

Read more about Ross’s take on tea here