Tea shops and scents, and why tea shops should stay.
Today when I met up with Huihui for the first time since local new year, of all the things for coffee (!), I realised how much I missed her sunny tea shop. The smell when walking in was intoxicating. She only sold Fuding white tea from a particular tea plantation. She closed it about six months ago… I felt like I lost a friend with the shop being gone.
And with that I realised, I must do more about these moments I am having with tea. The makeup of Xiamen is shifting before my feet; so many of my dear tea spots are just moving on so to say, never properly to be replaced by anything. Except perhaps by a Starbucks. The dazzling rate that that mermaid is guzzling up all the tea drinkers and pleasant locations is breathtaking. You can’t even spit without hitting one! (In my mind that’s way closer than throwing stones or swinging cats. Plus, my word can the locals hawk a loogie.) When we first arrived in Xiamen there was none, not even one Starbucks. Presumably in the pipeline, but none to be seen. And now… As I said, saliva and some force – bingo!
But the tea shops are different. Now don’t get me wrong – I too love the smell of freshly brewing coffee – but the scents that seduce you when entering a tea shop… Especially right after harvest time, when the fresh tea leaves – as they say – come down (茶下来了), descending from the mountains, and all the nans and aunties are picking through the tea, getting rid of the bits of stems and stuff, and everywhere there is the constant din of the packaging machines banging away, popping out 6g–8g little bundles of tea joy… those smells. They are subtler. However, it is like a whole meadow came to visit and its latest seasonal scent was left lingering everywhere, filling every nook and cranny. To the point one can’t help but want to drink the tea to match the scent that has already invaded you to the brim. For me at least, it starts with the smell. And I don’t just mean the smell of the tea – I mean the way the shop smells as well.
Admittedly the smell of the tea can be deceiving. How many a times I have had a cup of Tieguanyin presented to me, been completely blown away by its smell, only to find the taste isn’t even half of what the smell promised. But when that blessed day comes in a blue moon when the two align…. I love it. I wish I could bottle that moment.
Nonetheless, my local joint for Fuding white tea now gone, I realise it is not so much the tea I miss (that I still have access to) but more so the presence of it. I mean I have a buckload of it at home (handy having a shop owner close shop for that – oooh the discounts!) but my house doesn’t smell of white tea nor am I able to spend a morning drinking 3-5 different kinds of white tea, starting from the lighter and working my way to the stronger and more matured teacakes… I don’t exactly have it in those amounts to go around, nor would be able to work my way through so much tea so fast in these levels of humidity. If one cracks open a teacake it is a matter of drinking it within a relative space of time, finding a way to store the remainders properly, or inevitably losing some of the flavour and even perhaps some of the goods to just plain old mould.
So, tea shops are like the guardians of certain tea essences. Some shopkeepers get it, some don’t. Some are just eking out a living, and some seem to be more aware they are the gatekeepers to an ancient custom that is not just about quenching one’s thirst.
Someday I will hopefully have a chance to write something about the ones who get it. But today – today is reserved for the mourning of yet another tea haven lost.