Wenshan Baozhong, spring 2023

Baozhong mix of Jinxuan and Tsui Yu

Tea would be boring if we would always have the same, top quality tea. When you embark on an afternoon of tea brewing, it's nice to start with something humble, to get warmed up. If the first mountain you wish to climb is the mount Everest, you will most likely be overwhelmed by the experience and won't enjoy it a bit. With tea also, it's good to warm up, enjoy something cheap, fresh, natural like this spring 2023 Wenshan Baozhong made from Jinxuan and Tsui Yu leaves.

The key to appreciate the top quality of expensive teas is to appreciate how this quality evolves with price. And it also makes more sense to train your tea skills on cheaper leaves. A good tea is going to taste good even if you misbrew it! It takes more skill to get a lower quality tea right. You have to understand its limitations and brew 

A lot of people talk of a Cha Dao, a tea way. Well, I believe that a simple, loose leaf Baozhong is a great way to start your journey and your journée (day in French). While Baozhong dates back to the 1880s, this one is based on 2 cultivars created 100 years later! This reminds us that Baozhong isn't a particular cultivar, but foremost a process.

This process has evolved with customers' tastes. Nowadays, Baozhong is more lightly oxidized and barely roasted. It produces a brew that looks similar to high mountain Oolong, but the Wenshan area is below 1000 meters, even though the plantations are often on the slopes of the many hills between Taipei and Yilan. 

So, Wenshan Baozhong has done its part to stay relevant and liked by Oolong fans. This one in particular provides a simple place to start a tea tasting or an Oolong comparison. It sets the bar of what you should expect from other teas. 

Au bord de l'eau, dans la Pléiade

1970s sheng puerh

La lecture de ce pavé de la littérature chinoise a débuté. Cette semaine, notre groupe de lecture commence par le prologue et les 2 premiers chapitres. Vous êtes cordialement invités à vous joindre à nous. Nous avons vu dans Proust que le thé et la littérature sont deux attributs du prestige et du luxe qui vont très bien ensemble. Ces plaisirs fins qui demandent un petit effort, un petit investissement préalable, un peu d'éducation, de temps et de culture, vous le rendent au centuple!  

L'histoire de Au Bord de l'Eau est centrée autour de 108 brigands qui vivent dans des marérages (au bord de l'eau) ou dans des montagnes, afin d'échapper aux autorités. Ils vivent de rapines, mais cela ne les empêche pas de vvire selon un code de l'honneur, ce qui peut paraitre paradoxal pour des hors-la-loi. Certains apparaissent alors plus honnêtes que des citoyens normaux! Mais comme ces brigands n'ont pas de demeure fixe et sont rarement issus des classes supérieures de la société, la pratique du thé est assez limitée et il ne sera pas beaucoup question de notre boisson favorite dans ce livre. Mais il reste très intéressant pour comprendre l'une des dynasties où la Chine était à son apogée dans bien des domaines.

Ainsi, dans les deux premiers chapitres, il n'est question que deux fois du thé. La première fois (page 12), c'est pour dire que 'les moines hospitaliers servaient le thé' avant de servir un repas maigre (sans viande, car ils sont végétariens). Cette première mention du thé se passe donc dans un temple et non chez les brigands. Leurs festins sont plus arrosés de vin! Le thé, lui, permettait de rester éveillé durant la méditation et était donc un breuvage essentiel chez les moines. 

La seconde mention du thé est bien plus originale. Si on a vu dans Proust que 'thé' peut désigner la feuille de thé, l'infusion, la maison de thé et la réunion sociale, il a à la page 14 une signification différente, déjà rencontrée dans Le rêve du pavillon rouge', le temps qui passe: "Après le départ du tigre, il fallut bien le temps nécessaire pour boire un tasse de thé avant que le grand maréchal pût se remettre péniblement sur pied." 

A l'époque où se déroule l'action, il n'y avait pas encore de montre et au lieu d'utiliser une expression vague du genre 'après un instant' ou 'un peu plus tard', le thé permet de rendre plus réaliste et charnel le temps qui s'écoule. On le compte en temps qu'il faut pour boire une tasse de thé. Ce temps peut être assez long, car un thé a besoin de refroidir un peu avant qu'on puisse le boire et on ne le boit pas d'un trait, mais par petites gorgées pour mieux l'apprécier. D'ailleurs, je n'ai pas vu cette expression avec une coupe d'eau, mais toujours avec du thé, comme si la notion de thé impliquait un ralentissement et une prise de conscience du temps qui passe.  

Si le sujet du temps vous intéresse, j'en profite pour vous recommander la lecture de cet article récent d'Olivier F Delasalle: Temps existentiel et temps scientifique. Le temps d'un thé est lié à notre expérience existentielle, alors que résumer cela à 10 ou 15 minutes est le temps scientifique, objectif.

How tea helps us understand the 3 major themes of Proust's Search

Thank you for your interest for my video about Proust's In Search of Lost Time viewed from a tea angle. This view got more views and likes than my other tea classes. It took me a whole year to read the book and this class is the result of a lot of work (and a lot of pleasure!)

I prepared this class by reading all 91 quotes of 'tea' in Proust's work. Something struck me as I read these excerpts again: each mention of 'tea' had a deep meaning concerning the 3 main themes of the book:

1. The social world,

2. Love

3. The arts.

1. Tea is at the center of the social life of Proust, because a lot of the social gatherings he describes happen during afternoon teas. These tea parties in France's high society of aristocrats and rich merchants were strongly inspired by the British royal tea traditions. On two occasions, through Odette, a 'cocotte', Proust even uses the English word 'tea' instead of 'thé' to make this point crystal clear. So, in many instances, tea doesn't refer to the leaves or the beverage, but to the social gathering. It takes place in the afternoon, at 5 o'clock and lasts until the tea ware is gathered and taken away by the servants. 

People who try to have an influence on the social world have their own tea day, which means that their tea party takes place the same day of the week almost all year long (except for summer vacation or holidays). Your social prestige is measured by the teas you are able to get invited to, and the people you manage to attract to your own tea parties. Talking about the Ritz, Proust says that anyone who has money can go there, but only those who are invited get to attend the most prestigious teas. He describes this perfectly when he talks about Mme Verdurin's behavior. She sometimes attends boring and cumbersome tea parties with the unique goal to meet and invite a prestigious guest. Proust also notes that once he'd been invited to a tea by the noble and respected Guermantes duchess, he easily got invited to other parties, for no other reason than by imitation and not because he particularly deserved it. But tea parties could also measure your demise, as the actress La Berma experienced in the last book. When only one person responded favorably to her invitation, while the rest of her acquaintances preferred to see her rival at another tea gathering, it literally broke her heart and she died thereafter!

These tea gatherings show that in the France of the early twentieth century, tea had a much higher status than coffee or wine. He even lets his mother say that coffee is tasteless! And while there are a few positive mentions of champagne, he also notes that 'tea is preferable to gin for the skin'. However, he's also aware that tea contains caffeine and that it might make it difficult to fall asleep if you drink it late in the day. 

2. Tea also helps us to better understand how Proust viewed love.

In Swann's Way, we can see that Odette uses her daily tea appointment with Swann to seduce him. The tea becomes his habit, his pleasure and Swann ends up marrying Odette even though he doesn't love her anymore. He's just to used to her serving him a perfect cup of tea, like one is used to a luxurious life. The narrator will try the same strategy to keep Albertine by his side in 'The Prisoner', providing expensive gifts, beautiful cloths..., not because he's in love, but because he doesn't want to feel jealous when she's away. So, tea is part of this luxurious lifestyle that can be used to charm and keep someone attached to you.

On the other hand, it's interesting to notice that the young narrator doesn't mention tea in the book 'Within a budding grove' when he meets and falls in love with Albertine and the other young girls in Balbec. These girls represent the innocence of youth and have an independent spirit, so tea would be out of place with them. However, tea was part of Gilberte's life, Odette and Swann's daughter and his first crush. So, tea helps us to understand who has a high or a low social status among the girls the narrator meets and falls in love with.

Proust also talked about homosexual love (both male and female) explicitly in 'Sodom and Gomorrah'. He was quite a pioneer writer on this subject. Before starting the book, I had read that 'taking tea' had a hidden, homosexual meaning in the book. However, I could only spot this meaning on one occasion in 'The prisoner', when Jupien's niece made a joke she didn't understand about 'paying the tea' of her boyfriend and Charlus got upset about it.

3. The whole book is full with references to art and we can see that the narrator has a real appreciation for paintings, music, books... At the end of the Search, we come to understand that for Proust, turning your memories into art (a book, a music or a painting...) is a way to attain eternity, because the same moment, the same feeling can be lived again and again. His first experience of such a reminiscence comes from a madeleine that he ate with some tea. The combined flavors of the brew and cookie recreated the environment he grew up in his childhood. This 'madeleine and tea' experience is of such central importance in the book that the narrator brings it up on several occasions. That's how he starts to link his memories with a desire to create art in order to preserve these memories. His 'search' is to find a way to preserve the time that flies away. For a long time, he pursued an idle life of pleasures, but one days he figures out that he has to write this book in order to preserve all his memories and gain a feeling of eternity. The memories were buried deep in himself. Tea was just a way to access them and enable him to turn them into literature! 

Baozhong instead of bunny in the Easter week

I returned to San Hsia for the first Baozhong of spring 2023. Despite finding a fresh bunny hole dug in the tea plantation, I didn't encounter any bunny even though it was the Easter week! What I did find was a new batch of Qin Yu Baozhong made from the new cultivar #22. It's quite interesting to see this new plantation grow. Here you can see it 2 years ago. You can notice how the soil had to be protected from rain and erosion.

This is what the Qin Yu plantation looked on March 14, 2023:

And this is what it looked like on April 7th, 2023, after three weeks with plenty of rain in northern Taiwan (and higher temperatures than in winter). And this is taken 2 days AFTER the harvest!

If you go back to March 14th, you'll notice that on the right hand corner in the foreground, a few tea trees were replanted, because some trees didn't survive the early years of this new plantation.

The farmer has set up this little nursery in order to grow new tea trees. He grows them by planting branches of tea trees! 

In tea harvesting, producing and brewing, timing is everything! The window of when the leaves grow and mature just enough to remain fresh is narrow. It all happens within a few weeks, as we can see from these pictures.

Below are the 2023 (left) and 2021 (right) versions of this Qin Yu Baozhong. While both have these incredible floral fragrances that are characteristic for this cultivar, the 2023 Qin Yu Baozhong is more about freshness, while the 2021 is sweeter and calmer.