Further Adventures in the Tea Trade

English tea - a neo-colonialist celebration

Tea, apparently, is an evil and disgusting vestige of colonialism, a filthy brew of wickedness emblematic of oppression, racism and exploitation. Leftists and progressives who know imperialism when they see it never touch the stuff. Those that insist on drinking it are reprobates, fascists, villains, and probably homophobes as well.

This is the sort of thing that, as they say, you simply cannot make up. No. In all seriousness, it is a sentiment lifted from an article that appeared in the Guardian – where else? – by a supposed “journalist” Joel Golby written for all those pearl-clutching latte elitists desperately concerned to purge every last trace of colonialism from their miserable, guilt-ridden lives. “Liking tea,” he writes, “has its roots in colonialism…” and we wouldn’t want that, now, would we? The article – no kidding - was a follow up piece to how post-colonial social justice warriors should eliminate HP sauce from their diet! Both items – tea and HP sauce – are – horror of horrors! – British, and in these enlightened times only members of the Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan would even consider keeping such things in their kitchen.

The barking mad absurdity of this is unfortunately not isolated nor even a joke. Several posts ago (see here) these pages featured a restaurant in Portland named Saffron Colonial that had fallen foul of the lunatic self-righteousness of joyless cultural Marxists. In that case, the restaurant in question serves fine teas by local tea suppliers - and they may well serve HP sauce too - to accompany a British Empire themed menu. They have attracted protests and petitions, hatred and tantrums, because they dare to serve British food. This has become a favorite battle-field for contemporary Left-wing bullies. Not content with insisting that men sit down to urinate it seems these tedious busy bodies have decided that we must now eliminate all things British from our diet. 

The present author was therefore amused to be walking along in Muslim post-British Langkowi recently when he saw the following restaurant catering to tourists:

This classy and popular establishment is owned and operated by a young hard working Indian family. Not a social justice warrior in sight. The menu features cuisine from British India and celebrates the great diversity of India brought about by historical waves of invaders: Turkoman, Mughul, Portugese, French, British, etc., a heritage of which the Indian owners are proud. The menu also features a selection of excellent teas from the tea plantations of Malaysia, such as those in the Cameron Highlands, which were established, of course, by the British.

Inspired by Mr Golby's unhinged rant about the politically incorrectness of tea drinking, this page is duly dedicated to tea. 

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First, a note about coffee. In India - most notably Calcutta - tea (chai) is consumed with milk and sugar. It is more a confection than anything else. It is very milky and very sweet, and taken in small earthen cups. In Pe Nang, where the author has been resident for the last month or so, this mode of consumption is reserved for coffee - the renowned Penang White, a unique local speciality. It too is taken more as a confection than as a beverage. 

A 'Penang White', for those coffee connoisseurs who are unaware of it, is made from beans pan-fried in butter and sugar rather than roasted in the usual way. It is then served with condensed milk. It is enjoyed throughout the Prince of Wales Island and is a feature of many coffee establishments in the old quarters of George Town such as the ramshackle cafe on China Street pictured below: 

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The real joy of George Town, however, is the many Chinese tea houses and tea traders. It will no doubt come as a surprise to the Chinese that tea drinking is a vile colonialist habit to be eschewed and frowned upon by all right-thinking people: the Chinese tradition of tea drinking extends back thousands of years, and even in more recent times the Chinese of George Town (and the wider Malay peninsula) were supporters of the British and enthusiastically embraced British habits. This includes the British manner of preparing tea (the 'Western method'), although the more traditional methods ('Gong Fu') continue as well. 

TWG Tea Salon, Gurney Plaza, George Town.  An up-market store featuring the very finest (and most expensive) teas in the world. 

A traditional Chinese tea house, George Town

Residing in George Town allowed the present writer to explore a full range of fine Chinese teas. There are several categories listed below:

The Chinese character for tea

White Tea - very little processing. More or less fresh tea buds sun dried. Subtle and fresh. Extremely light in flavor. Sometimes with slightly nutty notes.

Yellow Tea - a rare grade of tea once preserved for the Imperial court. A flavor profile in between white and green tea with a lingering sweetness.

Green Tea - young buds and leaves, but unoxidised. Chinese green tea is pan-baked to stop oxyidization. Japanese green tea is steamed. The Japanese style has grassier flavours. The Chinese style is nuttier and more complex, less grassy. Fresh tasting with some astringency and a clean finish on the palette. 

Oolong Tea - semi-oxydized tea with a wide range of flavours depending on the extent of oxidization. Darker grades produce fruity notes. Suitable for serving with food. 

Black Tea - fully (or near fully) oxyidized tea. The Chinese refer to it as "hong cha" = red tea, because the liquor it produces is reddish. The most common grade of tea drunk in the West. Full flavoured. 

Pu Erh Tea - fermented dark teas. Often fermented for ten or more years. Very earthy flavours. These teas are a real joy - hearty with complex flavours - but can be quite expensive. 

Scented Teas - jasmine tea, rose tea, Earl Grey etc. 

The author's tea set with a collection of Chinese teas. Essential equipment when travelling. The small 'buttons' of tea shown are various grades of Pu Erh (fermented) tea. 

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PREPARING TEA

There are two main methods of preparing tea: the traditional oriental method – called Gong Fu (or 'Kung Fu', a term that merely indicates a subject of study that requires ritual and patience) – and the modern Western method. Everyone is familiar with the latter. You put some tea leaves in a tea pot, pour over boiling water, let it sit for a few minutes, then it is ready. This can be refined in several ways, such as by using high-quality loose leaf tea, and by using water at the optimum temperature and steeping for the optimum duration, but it is essentially a straight-forward method that requires little expertise. Gong Fu is rather more elaborate, an art, but it is not a difficult art to master. Below are some notes on preparing tea according to the traditional method:

GONG FU

1. Pour hot (not boiling*) water over the leaf tea to clean it. Dispense with the water immediately. This cleans and softens and activates the leaves.

2. Pour hot (not boiling) water over the leaves a second time. Let stand for about thirty seconds. 

3. Pour into a small cup. Drink. (You should "slurp" tea, taking plenty of air into the mouth when drinking. This maximizes flavour.) 

4. Repeat steps 2. and 3. for a second cup. 

Most good teas can be used for six or seven or more infusions. Each infusion will be slightly different. The idea is to taste the tea in small cups over many infusions to extract and experience the full flavour profile of the tea. 

In the 'Western method' the tea is left to infuse for two minutes or more and all of the flavours are extracted at once. In the 'Gong Fu Method' the flavours are extracted in a series of short infusions which are sampled from small tasting cups.

* = most grades of tea should be infused in water at about 80-90 deg.C., which is to say just under boiling point.  

Note: One of the surest ways to improve enjoyment of any tea is to purchase loose leaf tea from a single tea estate rather than a blend of teas from many estates. This will cost extra and only speciality stores will be able to oblige, but it makes a great difference. Tea from one location differs in flavour from tea from other locations. 'Blends' even out these differences are produce a uniform product. 

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The secret of tea is this: that while a stimulant, it is – quite unlike coffee – internalizing. It both stimulates and relaxes. This is the attribute of tea first discovered by the Chinese and adapted to the typical temperament of oriental spirituality. Coffee, by contrast, is an externalizing stimulant. It was, accordingly, adapted to the quite different spiritual temperament of the Saracens, namely an outward-looking and active mode of contemplation compared to the more quietist internalizing contemplation of the Far East. 

This is to generalize, certainly, but everything the present author has seen on his long journeys both recent and past confirm it. In the Sino-Asiatic world in which he is currently travelling, tea has historically been regarded as a spiritual adjunct, aside from its social roles. In the Near East and other parts of the Muhammadan world by extension, coffee tends to play this part; it has historically been used as a stimulant by the Soofis and the Irfans and assorted Islamic mystics. As a stimulant it is better adapted to the typical modes of Muhammadan spiritual life. These modes are externalist. The Muhammadans, for instance, do not have an institution of monasticism and world-renunciation, nor practices of internalizing meditation. As a stimulant – paradoxical though this seems – tea is better suited to the internalized modes of oriental spiritual life. It was for this reason that tea was revered as the fabled “celestial drink” of legend - a sacred drink - before it became a common beverage. The remarkable property of the drink is that it both stimulates and elevates.

We might compare the different modes of stimulation of coffee and tea, Islamic and oriental, with, say, the different narcotic properties of hashish on the one hand and opium on the other, where hashish is 'externalizing' (exciting the senses) and opium is 'internalizing' (dreamy, sleep-inducing). The differences are not absolute, but they are real enough. In general terms we can say that coffee is best adapted to Islamic modes of spiritual practice. Tea, on the other hand, goes naturally with the practices of Taoism, Boodhism and related oriental modes of spirituality. These are not merely historical accidents. The two stimulants, tea and coffee, have different effects upon the human sensorium and upon consciousness itself and so are each adapted to different temperaments. 

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Yours,

Harper Mc Alpine Black

Shanghai Women - 1920s and 30s

Love Lane in central George Town is so called, they say, because in former times it was the district in which Chinese businessmen were inclined to keep their mistresses. Today it is a fashionable street of terraced ‘link’ houses full of boutiques, tea houses and coffee shops, many with a nostalgic theme invoking the romance of this former era. The present author is staying in a cheap hotel just around the corner and not far from the Sunrise Sweetheart Café, a venue famous for ladies of easy virtue. It is in many of these shops and cafes on Love Lane - such as the very commodious number 41, the entrance of which is pictured below - that one can find reproductions of posters, advertisements and calendars from the golden era of Shanghai fashion, the 1920s and 30s – Chinese nostalgia. This ‘Out of Phase’ post is accordingly dedicated to the same. George Town is not all Chinese temples.

It was the fashion designers of Shanghai who transformed female attire and the Chinese female image under the Chinese nationalist Republic during the 1920s and 30s. After the turmoil of the revolution in the 1940s these same designers shifted to Hong Kong and Singapore and other outposts of Chinese culture, such as George Town, but by then the transformation they started had been complete. The attire of the Chinese woman had been changed forever. Chinese women were brought into modernity. The communists tended to regard the new fashions as ‘Western imperialism’ and, ironically, female attire after the revolution reverted to older, utilitarian, and hence more conservative styles. This regression into dowdiness reached its peak during the catastrophic Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s. In more recent times, the increasingly open policies of the People's Republic have re-embraced the fashion revolution of the early XXth century, which is to say they have rediscovered style and good taste and the great sartorial revolution of the 1920s and 30s is at last widely acknowledged in mainland China.

At the centre of the Shanghai style is the garment called the cheongsam. This is a single-piece, tight-fitting full-body dress that became the characteristic garment of the modern Chinese woman. Contrary to claims that it was an importation of Western styles, its roots are in older Chinese garments and so is a continuation, or a modern adaptation, of distinctly Chinese traditions. The genius of the Shanghai design houses was to create a modern garment that is as Chinese as it is modern. Either way, the Moaists frowned upon it as bourgeois while, conversely, it has been a symbol of the anti-communist pro-capitalist Chinese, a badge of modernity and liberation. Here is a picture of the typical modern cheongsam:

Here is a picture of traditional women's attire - the forerunner to the modern cheongsam - from the period immediately before the Shanghai design houses reinvented the garment in its modern form:   

As still prevails in Islamic attire, the traditional Chinese garment was designed to completely obscure the female form and allowed no naked skin to be visible at all. The modern cheongsam, in contrast, is tighter fitting, accentuates the waist, makes a virtue of the feminine form, celebrating female beauty, and shows bare arms. The original Shanghai cheongsam is full length and goes down to the feet; later versions became knee length or three-quarter length.

The liberation of the female form from the dowdy sacks of past styles was then embraced and celebrated in Chinese popular culture. Women in the cheongsam began to appear in advertising and in items of popular visual culture such as wall calendars. Some examples:

Images from that golden era - China in the 1920s and 30s - are now highly collectible and are regarded as the finest fruits of early Chinese modernity. The blossoming of China, later interupted by the Moaist revolution, is on display in these images. They show the Chinese creating their own distinctive modernity. A similar blossoming occured in Japan too. These were closed societies, long insulated from modernity. Then - often with trauma and upheaval - they belatedly decided to embrace modernity on their own terms. This, finally, is what such images as these are really about. They are not just 'nostalgia' and even less are they 'soft porn'. They are a record of how the oriental genius came to terms with the realities of the modern mode, and even more so, confidently set out to forge a modernity of its own. 

There are many modernities. In some cases it is a mode imposed by European civilization upon others. The Chinese, like the Japanese, were never going to be content to receive modernity passively like that. After resisting modernity for a long while, when they finally opened their societies to the new modern world they were determined to do so in their own way, with their own aesthetic values. They were never going to be mere imitators. They were going to appropriate and transform. Insofar as these images show a Westernized sensibility, it has been appropriated and transformed.

Below readers can find a selection of pictures from the Shanghai golden era - advertising posters, calander girls, erotica - images that adorn the shops and tea houses of George Town, setting the high-point and standard of modern style in Chinese women's attire and conventions of beauty.

It is worth adding here that the Chinese (Asians in general) continue to have fine taste and that Asian women are undoubtedly among the best dressed in the world. This has been very noticeable to this present writer on his travels. The Indian/Hindoostani world has been nowhere near as succesful in creating its own modern aesthetic. Hindoo women remain beautiful in traditional attire but on the whole have not made a succesful transition to modern dress. There has been no equivalent to the modern cheongsam in India. (And Indian men, let it be said, are almost uniformly badly dressed, whereas the Asian gentleman's appropriation of the business suit has been entirely succesful.)

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Murals & Street Art of Penang

The instinct to use walls and other public spaces in an urban environment for art and decoration is a sound one. The alternative to such an art is graffiti, a vacuum that invites the ugly urban illegible 'rap' scribbling or else the talentless and dreary stencilling of subversive and grubby vermin such as the stupidly named “Banksy”. It is far better to lend public spaces to muralists and competent artists in the hope of developing a genuine public art. 

This has been the strategy in George Town and in other towns across the Prince of Wales Island where the present author currently resides. The island is home to a beautiful heritage architecture which is, thankfully, almost free of the scourge of graffiti. The island's walls and alleyways are remarkably clean. Instead, the art community of the island has taken blank walls and adorned them with impressive mural work and other forms of engaging street art. 

Much of it, admittedly, is of the representational and illusionistic type – a failing of imagination to which muralists everywhere are prone. The mistake is to regard a wall simply as a screen upon which one projects an image, or else to dissolve the wall with an illusion of depth  - as if making an image large is a statement in itself and as if a wall is not a very different space than a canvas (a "window") that accordingly demands a very different type of art. A proper mural art respects the solidity of the building (and is therefore largely two-dimensional) while developing a communal vocabulary of motifs, patterns and decorations befitting a public art. It is never is personal indulgence. 

We must admit that other countries – notably some parts of Latin America – have developed richer and more impressive traditions of public art, but in those cases it is largely a politically motivated art along with all the limitations that implies. 

The murals of George Town, Bilak Palau and other areas of the Prince of Wales Island are impressive and charming, are a credit to the local art community, and are much loved by tourists. Most of them (but not all!) are tasteful and most add to and enhance rather than scar and detract from the old architecture and the urban ambience of the old city areas. Some are witty, some are playful, some are lovely, many - a developed theme - celebrate the traditional crafts and occupations of the Chinese and other inhabitants of the island and so have an element of the heroic.

Readers will find examples of the street art of Pe Nang below:

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Taoist Portal Deities

The old city area of George Town, and other older areas of Pe Nang, boast some of the most beautiful and illustrious Chinese Taoist temples outside of China proper. The Chinese settled Prince of Wales Island and the straits of Malacca at an early period for purposes of trade. At first they established temples to gods sacred to seafarers, but over time they also established clan temples devoted to ancestral worship. It is now the clan temples that are most prominent. They house the gods of the various clans, memorials to ancestors, as well as acting as social organisations and meeting halls for clan members. In the XIXth century there was often fierce or even violent competition between rival clans, sometimes leading to outbreaks of killing and riots. The sagacious British rulers of the isle had to sort it out. Today, the rivalry between clans can be seen in the efforts each has made to render their respective temples bigger and better and more beautiful than others. This has made these temples especially splendid, and in recent times there has been an effort to restore them to their original state. 

Some of the Chinese temples in George Town have Boodhist features, and some - including the central Temple of the Goddess of Mercy in Pitt Street - include Hindoo deities, but most are Toaist and house Taoist gods. One of the keys to understanding Chinese religiosity is that its dominant theme is the continuity of life and death. This often leads it to be characterised as "ancestor worship". Very often, illustrious and important ancestors become worshipped as gods. This is a Taoist extension of the institution of the boddhisatva in Mahayana Boodhism. A famous physician, for example, will be said to forgo eternal felicity (nirvana) after he dies in order to continue to assist the ailing among the living, and in this way he becomes a god of healing. His image is set up in temples and prayers are made to him for intercession. Famous ancestors of particular clans are elevated to the status of deity after the same manner. Prayers concern the prosperity of the clan, wealth, good fortune and social advancement. The dead do not move on. They continue to look over and assist the living. This is one of the main themes that the Chinese take from Mahayana Boodhism. It goes neatly with their "ancestor worship". 

One of the most outstanding features of the George Town clan temples are the portal doors. In many temples these large, heavy wooden doors are painted with images of protective deities who prevent evil spirits from entering the temples. The protective deities are two generals who lived in the Tang Dynasty. They once stood as guards for the emperor. Now, in the afterlife, they have sworn to continue in this role and so they are worshipped as guardian deities; their images adorn portals and doorways and other places where it is necessary to prevent the entry of malevolent influences. 

The photographs on this present page show examples of the protective portal guardians from several George Town clan temples, as well as some images of the interior spaces of the temples themselves. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black