How wonderfully relaxing Sundays can be!  It’s the one day of the week when there’s time to chat and enjoy bowls or cups of tea with special friends!  This Sunday I was treated to Chinese-style ‘afternoon tea’ by Bin Shao, my Chinese friend who sells the fabulous Mao Jian tea that I wrote about last time.  He took me to Royal China on London’s Queensway and, as well as trying another of his very special early spring teas, I also had the chance to ask him more about the teas and where they’re produced.   Here’s Bin with a bowl of his tea (see below).

While ordering our pot of Taiwanese oolong tea, Bin asked the waitress to also take some of his Pre-Qing Ming Mao Jian and brew that as well.  This tea was harvested even earlier this spring than the two samples he had given me last time we met.  Picked in the village of Yu Wun in Guizhou province around the 23^rd March this year and made using only the tiniest buds, this is even finer and sweeter in character than the teas I tasted last time.  Each pale green-silver dried bud measures between 3mm (0.2 of an inch) and 6-7 mm (0.4 of an inch) – they really are tiny (see below) and the women who harvest them must have infinite patience and a real dedication to filling their baskets with the very best of the early crop. 

Only 20 kilos or so of this ‘first flush’ tea are made each year and sell for very high prices – about £300 per kilo (the later Gu Yu spring tea costs about £50 per kilo).  It takes 500g of the little fresh green buds to makes 120-130 grams of Mao Jian so the pluckers hunt among the bushes for some 80 kilos of new buds.   Regular customers from outside the area who love the tea contact Bin’s father, Pei Feng Shao, at the start of the season to find out when the new tea will be ready and then they come specially to the tea farm to buy what they want for their own consumption.  Many of these people have told Pei Feng Shao that they prefer his teas to Long Jing – probably China’s most prized green tea. 

With the cool weather and the slow growth of the bushes in the late March and early April, these spring  teas are of course the best.  When the weather gets warmer and wetter, the tea makers manufacture what they call their ‘summer tea’ which is not good enough to sell outside the village and costs only £20 per kilo.  Whereas the spring flush gives a beautiful amber green liquor, the summer teas yield a deeper, red-amber colour and don’t have the subtle, gentle sweetness of the earlier teas.

I asked Bin why the high quality spring teas from Ghuizhou rarely find their way onto the world market and he explained that the province is a very remote and undeveloped area – hard to reach, very mountainous and with poor systems of communication.  So, we’re really lucky that Bin and his father have brought some of the teas to the west and that they have given me the opportunity of introducing them to some of London’s avid tea drinkers.

As we sipped and talked about the tea, Bin ordered a very generous selection of Chinese treats to try.  A much more savoury meal than British afternoon tea with all its scones, jams, pastries, etc, this traditional Chinese ‘brunch-tea’ is more nutritional and definitely less fattening!  In Guizhou province, it is not such a popular or traditional Sunday event, but further south in Guangdong and Hong Kong, families often go out together to enjoy an appetizing spread of bite-size sweet and savoury dim sum.  We carefully manipulated our chopsticks around squid cakes, chicken claws, prawn and chive dumplings and pork and beef changfeng (in the picture below) wrapped in soft, creamy rice-flour pasta. 

Bin decided we really should try some of the sweet dishes as well, so we ordered some Nai Huang Bao – sweet egg yolk buns that are pure white steamed sponge on the outside and rich yellow sweetened egg custard in the middle – one bite into a soft, delicious, warm bun and it looks just like a boiled egg! (see the photo below).  I loved them! 

Then - another treat!  Bin said it was time for a proper dessert and, after much deliberation of the menu (which included sesame seed jelly, chilled mango pudding and sweet lotus paste buns), we chose a bowl of ’sago milk with yam’ which turned out to be a deliciously sweet coconut milk with pieces of yam and small balls of tapioca floating in it.  It was light, satisfying and a little like drinking bubble tea from a spoon (see below). 

This slow, relaxed meal was a real feast - and so different from English Sunday tea!    To add to the pleasure, we had our teapot of Bin’s tea filled up 5 or 6 times and the flavour was still excellent – no bitterness, no harshness, just a gentle, smooth, subtle and sweet high quality green tea flavour that went so well with my Sunday dim sum!

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