Feng Huang Dan Cong, or Phoenix Tea, is one of the rarest China teas. Just a handful of farmers, including the Huang family, seen here, whom I was delighted to photograph, process these large leaves whose lingering bouquet evokes flowers, fruits, wood and spices by turn. If you love fine teas you should taste this at least once in your life.
A while ago, in Tunxi in China, I was eating my evening meal in a tea house. Outside it was raining. I used a slow shutter speed to photograph the movement of passers-by, and the reflections of the city on the wet pavements. The window reflected the interior of the establishment. Feeling mischievous, I took a photo of the teapot on the neighbouring table, walking over the silhouettes of people outside.
Tea follows us. It accompanies us. Sometimes we don’t see it but it is near and does us good.
I wish you a very Happy New Year for 2014. I hope you enjoy discovering new flavours. I hope that every day you find a moment of harmony. I invite you to share these moments of happiness with your loved ones. Vivre le thé.
2007 saw the start of a spectacular craze for pu er in China. In the space of a few weeks, this previously barely-known tea became the subject of frenzied speculation, and it took two or three years before prices came down again. Now it seems this same phenomenon is about to be repeated. Once again, the Chinese are queuing up to buy cakes of this tea, which is said to improve with age. As before, the cause is speculation. At the Canton Tea Fair, which has just taken place, we saw pu er cakes selling for over €1,000 each.
To appreciate a tea as fine as the Taiwanese “Black Pearl” I recently selected, there are two options: either use your usual teapot, or prepare it according to the Gong Fu Cha method. This involves placing the tea in a very small teapot and steeping the same leaves several times in succession. It is a different way of discovering the rich aromas of this fine tea, whose fairly sweet notes make it perfect for the season.
It is difficult to imagine the amount of work that goes into making the tea we drink. To produce one kilo of a top quality jasmine tea, for example, it takes 2.5 kilos of jasmine flowers, no less. With 100 flowers, you can make just 25 grams. So no fewer than 10,000 flowers, individually picked by hand, are needed to scent a kilo of tea. And the plucking of flowers in the time-honoured tradition, which I witnessed last week in southern China, sometimes takes place in scorching temperatures.
Instinctively, this photo makes me happy, because in Asia I discovered the pleasure of drinking tea in the evening, or even at night. In some western countries many people are reluctant to drink tea after 5 o’clock, but in China people enjoy it at any time, even late at night.
Sometimes, your cup is bathed in the warm reflections of the neon lights.
When I visit a monastery in Asia I always think of the important role the monks played in the spread of tea. Because tea has the ability to keep the mind alert, because it helps us learn, and assimilate knowledge, its use spread from monastery to monastery, from China to Korea, then from China to Japan.
What the monks tell us by carrying tea beyond borders in this way is that tea awakens us to life. It is good for our body, and good for our soul.
