Tea city

The best day I spent in Beijing was the most off the beaten path. Not surprising, but worth a tale.

It may be because guidebooks cover it sparingly—Frommer's gives a nice description, but no subway or bus directions—but we didn't see any other tourists during our visit to Malian Dao. This wide street stretches longer than a country mile, and every single store along it sells tea. Just tea. Nothing else, not even (as we discovered) lunch.

Several multistory tea emporiums tower over the family shops. They're not knocking out the little guys, though—they're filled with small divided stalls, market-style. We started at Cha Cheng, or Tea City. A whole city of tea! You can imagine how I felt about that.

Almost everyone I met in Beijing was unfailingly kind, and the tea merchants were no exception. The first young woman sat us down for an hour, offering tastes of half a dozen teas and explaining the countless rituals that go into serving and drinking them.*

She also proudly showed us photos of her beautiful mountain hometown in southern China, where the finest white teas are grown. We tasted and bought a white tea delivered fresh that morning, with a deliciously musky, grassy flavor.

It's hard to describe the elegance of her perpetual movements, but I'll try.

She kept a kettle of hot water at a constant boil on an electric burner set low to the ground, using it to fill a smaller pot on the raised tea tray. This clay (I'm guessing) surface had a shallow moat around its edge, an open middle, and a fleet of miniature clay animals set to one side.

Before serving each tea, she rinsed out the tiny cups twice with hot water from the smaller pot, lifting each cup delicately with wooden tongs. Then she filled yet another small pot with leaves—clay for white tea, porcelain for green and pu'er (strong black tea that grows more valuable and fragrant with age)—and added hot water.

The first steep isn't for drinking; she used it to rinse out the cups again. The second steep has a richer color and flavor, both deepening with each subsequent steep. Different teas have different steeping limits: One rose-petal tea we tasted can be steeped six times, while a particular green should be steeped only four or five.

She kept steeping and pouring out tiny shots of each type until the serving pot was tapped, then poured the extra tea water from the pot and our cups over the heads of the clay animals. The water ran into the moat and down into a bucket tucked discreetly under the table.

A woman we met later—the owner of a café in the 798 district—explained that she treats the tea animals like real pets, or even children. "You can raise one of these for 10 years, and it will grow more valuable over time," she said. The clay also changes color as it seasons, so anyone with a practiced eye can assess its worth at a glance.

We only stopped at three stalls all afternoon, because each merchant spent at least an hour with us. Everyone working in the shop—cousins, aunts and uncles, childhood friends—sat down and tasted with us, while telling stories about each tea and the history of tea (or calligraphy or jade or antiques). There was never a hint of pressure to buy from any of them.

It felt like visiting family, down to the last semi-awkward moment where we had to politely excuse ourselves before I floated away or began twitching from overcaffeination.

"I was about to offer you a special black tea," the merchant explained, one grown near the most exclusive tea trees in China. There are only seven, and they produce just six liang (about 50g each) of tea per year. Only emperors and prime ministers get to drink this tea, and he had the next best thing.

"But it's fine," the merchant said with a quiet smile. "This tea is always here for you when you come back."

* Big kudos and thanks to Stacey for his intrepid translation during this trip and the rest of my stay. I would never have spoken with so many locals, if any, on my own. Meeting them was easily the high point of experiencing Beijing.