Historically, these spaces have resembled populist bars.The modern iteration allows for a personal retreat in a city that lacks privacy – among strangers.
A private room within the branch of the Shanghai Silver Jubilee Mini Teahouse Chain, where visitors can enjoy loose leaf and powder tea and snacks in a casual setting.Credit…Josh Robenstone
Women play cards, confront strategically, spotlessly.Smoke from cigarettes.We were in the Huangpu district of central Shanghai, a city of about 25 million people—but the six women were the only other customers I saw at Dehe Teahouse, Hanzo on the second floor of the gymnasium.
It’s October 2019, and more than two months before the world’s first reported case of the novel coronavirus.Public gathering places remained open and bustling; I was maskless in the subway, fighting alongside strangers.The teahouse, then, was a respite from the crowd: I entered through a stone gate guarded by grinning lions, then crossed a short bridge over dozing koi in a pond to a mausoleum-like sweeping floor above There are glossy black tiles and red lanterns dripping with fringe.My guide, Ashley Loh of UnTour Food Tours, had called ahead to make an appointment, and we took shelter along the perimeter, with curtains tied in a padded corner.Tea was ostensibly what we were here for, but after ordering, we sneaked away, past the ladies fanning their cards, to the buffet – hot pot plates filled with porridge, sweet corn soup, steamed taro and borscht The soup, based on the borscht brought to the city by Russian immigrants after the October Revolution of 1917.
A tall glass was placed in front of me, an aquarium inhabited by an anemone: a chrysanthemum poured from a height with the hot water, producing a resinous pale ale that smelled better than it The taste is stronger.It’s a lovely, and strangely unnecessary, almost accidental experience – a sudden respite from a city that persists; the search for an obvious hiding place in a country in conflict with the notion of personal privacy; contradictions of solitude, while being together with others, all of us dedicated to pursuing this fleeting moment.I thought I was here for tea at a tea house, but it turns out I was looking for something else entirely.I didn’t know yet that venues like this would shut down globally in a few months and my world would shrink to the borders of my own home.I still don’t know how much I’m going to miss this.
Tea is ancient and arguably vital to China’s self-concept.Fossils from Yunnan province in the country’s southwest demonstrate the existence of a possible direct ancestor of the tea tree 35 million years ago.Records of tea cultivation date back to the Western Zhou Dynasty, 11-8 centuries BC; remnants of tea were found from the tomb of an emperor who died in 141 BC; first mention of drinking tea in public appears in 7 AD to the Tang Dynasty in the tenth century, but teahouse culture was a relatively recent development, as historian Wang Di writes in Teahouses: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics.Chengdu, 1900-1950” (2008). It originated from academic tea parties and civilian street “tiger stoves”, which sold hot water for making tea at home, and then began to set up stools for customers to linger.
In the West, tea houses are often imagined as unpretentious oasis of tranquility and serenity, with stylized action ballet adding a mystique to tea making and drinking, encouraging inner and self-reflection.(This fantasy ignores the differences between China and Japan, as well as the differences between a Japanese tea room, a space specially designed according to the strict aesthetics of the tea ceremony, not so much a pastime as it is an art, and Tea houses are where geishas entertain their customers.) But in China, the rise of tea house culture—perhaps most fully embodied in the early 20th century in Chengdu, southwest Sichuan province—is driven by a desire for human connection of.The relative geographic isolation, fertile soil, mild climate, and extensive irrigation system of the Chengdu Plain meant that farmers did not have to congregate in villages; instead, they lived close to their fields in scattered, semi-isolated settlements , which calls for meeting places like teahouses as social and commercial hubs – corresponding to the Greek Agora, the Italian Square and the Arabian Souks.
For Chengdu people, teahouses are an essential part of daily life.In 1909, there were 454 teahouses in the city’s 516 streets.As they kill time, customers bring their pet birds and hang cages from the eaves.Earwashes walked up and down the table, waving semi-surgical tools.Mahjong tiles crackled; storytellers, sometimes vulgar, attracted hordes of rich and poor; ad hoc “tea house politicians” even shouted “Don’t discuss state affairs” under a banner warning, shopkeepers Posting such remarks, fear the perpetually vigilant authorities.In short, these spaces are hardly meditative, rare spaces.“From sunrise to sunset, every teahouse was packed,” Wang quoted editor and educator Shu Xincheng in Chengdu in the 1920s.”There is often no place to sit.”
As a space that connects the public and the private, the teahouse allows strangers to engage and exchange ideas in a relatively free manner – a radical move in a society that enshrines the family as the main social unit and where multiple generations share a home experience.In this freedom, teahouses have blood ties to coffeehouses in 17th and 18th century Europe, which the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas credits for breaking the rules previously held by the church. Some “explain the monopoly”, thus helping to give birth to the Enlightenment and the state.
China may never identify with the ‘state-society duality’ seen in the West, as historian Huang Zhongzheng writes in ‘China’s ‘Public Domain’/'Civil Society’?’ (1993).But historian Qin Shao believes that early teahouses, as microcosms of cities and villages, still had subversive power.After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, a rising, Western-leaning cultural elite saw teahouses as a dangerous breeding ground for diehards of the primitive past and “moral corruption and social chaos,” Shao wrote in a 1998 essay— — partly because teahouses tacitly allow gambling, prostitution and “singing obscene songs,” but also because leisure itself is suddenly seen as a threat to productivity, defying modernity and the new formal structure of the workday.Wang quoted a slogan from the early 20th century: “Don’t go into a teahouse, don’t watch local dramas; just farm the fields and grow rice.”
As state power consolidated under Communist Party leader Mao Zedong, public life was not only curtailed, but co-opted through mass rallies and omnipresent propaganda.During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, many teahouses closed when a word overheard might be condemned.It wasn’t until the post-Mao era that began in the late 1970s that the tradition was revived as the government loosened its grip on the private sector and turned to the ideal of a “socialist market economy” advanced by then-leader Deng Xiaoping.As living standards improved, so did nostalgia—once considered dangerous and aimed at destroying old customs, cultures, habits, and ideas by Mao’s shabby movement—as part of a reaffirmation of cultural identity amid China’s economic upheaval. a way.Anthropologist Zhang Jinghong wrote in Pu-erh Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Fashion (2014), the rapid transformation into a global power.Drinking tea at home and in public has almost become a nationalistic act, an affirmation of being Chinese.
In Shanghai — China’s most technologically advanced megacity — before the pandemic, Dehe felt repressed, a far cry from its raucous Chengdu predecessors.There are busier parts of town, perhaps most importantly the tourist-besieged Huxinting Teahouse, a gorgeous pavilion towering over Lotus Lake.But among the city’s thousands of teahouses, a new vanguard proposes a shift from populist engagement to concealment and refinement, whether in settings furnished with antique furniture, such as Dehe, or consciously avant-garde The aesthetic style, such as Tingtai Teahouse, in the M50 art district of Putuo’s once industrial area, its layers of private rooms are housed in elevated stainless steel boxes.In some places, tea tasters prepare high-priced varieties of Icelandic Pu’er, Tieguanyin Oolong, and Dianhong (a black tea from southwestern China’s Yunnan province) at the table.Reservations are often required and time limits are imposed so that customers do not linger too long.It’s an escape, but not from time.
In a 1980 study on the use of public squares in New York City, “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,” American journalist and urban planner William H. White observed that while people “say to stay away from it all,” evidence suggests that they actually Attracted to busy places: “It seems that it is the other people that attract people the most.” However, in other teahouses I visited with Loh (and later with food writer Crystall Mo), the encounters between strangers were preserved at a minimum.Men in suits, waving briefcases, disappeared into discreet, closed rooms.There is an aura of exclusivity, like being in a private club; at one point, a branch of the Silver Creek Small Chain on Yuqing Road in the former French Concession, there are no markings from the outside, just a row of chubby, expressionless monk dolls. on the wall.On entering, Loh pressed the head of the second doll on the right, and when the door opened, we climbed the steps, past the billowing mist.In the garden, tables are enclosed in glass cylinders surrounded by water, accessible only by stepping stones.
Coffee shops are now their competitors—including the 30,000-square-foot Starbucks Reserve Roastery storefront in Shanghai’s Jing’an district, which opened in 2017—and teahouses have had to adapt.Some use their interiors to appeal to the younger generation; others use tea as a focal point, formal ceremonies requiring skilled practitioners, or as a luxury item with prices rising to several thousand yuan per pot, equivalent to hundreds of dollars Dollar.These modern iterations don’t quite fit the classic model of what Shaw describes as “one of the most affordable public social spaces,” and it’s hard for outsiders to say how much of the freewheeling old teahouse spirit they’ve retained, where “ordinary people” can gossip and express Opinion, “Unleashing Destructive Emotions to Respond to Social Change” without fear of consequences or government intervention.Instead, they seem to harbor a different kind of nostalgia, imagining a time when the world was less demanding or more easily shut out.Perhaps the commitment is not engagement, but the opposite: retreat.
Today, Twitter and Facebook are arguably giant virtual teahouses, at least for those who have unfettered access to them.However, both are blocked by the Great Firewall inside China, and their closest social media platform Weibo and messaging app WeChat are closely monitored by the state.Nonetheless, information is still available to those seeking it.During my brief time in Shanghai, some locals told me about the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests that began earlier that year (described by mainland state media as the work of some thugs enslaved by foreign agents), and how Uighurs The plight of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking and predominantly Muslim minority in western China, of more than a million incarcerated in re-education camps the government claims is necessary to combat Islamic extremism.We speak freely in public and no one seems to be listening.But then again, who am I?Just a tourist, an inconsequential person, passing by.
Two years on, China has largely defeated Covid-19 (from a Delta variant in late July to fading by the end of August) through strict mask rules and elaborate surveillance technology, while in the West individual freedom is often valued over collective responsibility , keep fighting.If anything, the Chinese government is even stronger than before, and the country’s economy is in overdrive and could overtake the United States within a decade, according to the London Centre for Economics and Business Research.In this case, the idea of liberation that no one is listening takes on a darker tone: Is it because it doesn’t matter what people say?Because nothing will change?
The cutest teahouse I visited in Shanghai was not a real teahouse at all.Located in the former French Concession, this address is on the street side, directions are only available upon booking.Although Loh had been there before, she couldn’t find it at first; we went through one door, then another, and ended up in a room in a private residence.This is Wanling Tea House, where Cai Wanling, a tea master from Anxi city in southeastern Fujian province (the region is famous for oolong tea), presided over what became known as the Chinese Tea Ceremony.
With its delicate tools and elaborate gestures, the Chinese tea ceremony, tea ceremony, is often regarded as an ancient ritual, but as historian Lawrence Zhang has written, it is more recent, with local origins. The Kung Fu tea custom, until the late 1970s, was largely unknown in China outside of Chaozhou in southeastern China.Although Chinese tea drinking has a long tradition of academic appreciation, it is not codified, and Zhang believes that the original incarnation of Kung Fu tea has nothing to do with a specific philosophical meaning.It came later, partly inspired by the Japanese tea ceremony, a less strict version of the Japanese tea ceremony centered on whole-leaf steamed tea rather than powdered and whisked tea.
When Cai started, the question of whether the tea art was old or new became irrelevant.What she did was to pay close attention, narrowing my vision to these few objects lined up on the table: the gaiwan gaiwan, the lid symbolizing heaven, the saucer representing the earth, and the body being the tea set negotiated between them; the “cup of justice”, the cup of justice , placed at a 45-degree angle to the gaiwan, into which the tea is poured, then each guest’s cup, so all will receive – as a fair act – the same tea strength; a folded small Towel, dab spill.
She knows the harvest date of each of her teas.Here, oolong tea on October 4, 2019; there, white tea on March 29, 2016.She sat up straight as a ballerina.Before making the tea, she put the tea leaves in a gaiwan, covered the lid and shook it gently, then gently lifted the lid and inhaled the aroma.Each component – the gaiwan, the Gongdao cup, the wooden cup fired in a 400-year-old kiln – is heated with a drop of hot water and poured into a side bowl.When serving more than one type of tea, she prefers a ceramic teapot because the material doesn’t affect the taste, and only boils the water once or twice “to keep the water alive,” she says.
Each tea has a specific brew time, accurate to the second, but she has no reference clock.While the tea was brewed, I sat with her in silence.Such is the miracle: remembering how to tell time simply by being there, holding the seconds in your body, every second steady and unusually heavy.We do not escape time, but somehow master it.She had more to tell me – how delicate the first infusion was, the second more intense; how the tea cooled faster in a clay cup; how she liked to drink black oolong tea on a rainy day – I leaned over and listened , lost in the outside world for a while.
Post time: Jan-17-2022
