4 hours ago, Hassouni said:I just got back from a short trip to Chengdu (and a day trip to Leshan) and was pretty underwhelmed by the "standard" tea. We went to a fancy tea shop and they did a full gong fu tasting for us and that was quite nice (and of course guilts one into buying tea, though I wanted to anyway), but most restaurants just unceremoniously plopped a large metal pot of barely lukewarm, preposterously weak tea down on our table, and at the famous and quite busy He Ming teahouse in central Chengdu, there were several choices of decent-sounding teas, and fair enough, the water provided was quite hot, but the amount of tea given in the gaiwan was fairly stingy for the 20 kuai they were charging.
I actually got one of those 茶π teas, the rose and lychee, from what looked like a fridge, but was heated to 38ºC. Not hot. Literally body temperature.
As I understood it, the Chinese drink lots of hot things (including lots of plain hot water), but it seemed that "hot" rarely exceeded slightly warm. Is this just a phenomenon in Sichuan?
I've haven't been to Sichuan yet, but maybe @liuzhou can weigh in?
On another note, when we were in Hong Kong, we went for yum cha several times and each time, the tea was as hot as normal and used a good amount of tea. Most of the time we would get lung ching (cantonese... long jing in mandarin - otherwise called Dragon Well). We also went to a tea class in a high end tea house where the tea master demonstrated how to make a few different teas - green, gong fu tikuanyin (oolong) and red teas, and all were what I would call perfectly done. The gong fu oolong was poured just off the boil then distributed using a small pitcher. The green tea was poured into two small cups - one was the smelling cup whcih was tall and narrow, which my wife dubbed the "finger burning cup" and after smelling, it would go into the shorter, wider tasting cup. Personally I didn't have a problem with the finger burning cup, but I drink a lot of chinese tea and am used to holding the cup by the edges - I think my wife held the cup further down the side where it was much hotter.
