Why Tea Is More Than a Drink in Chinese Culture

You want to really calm down, become one entity, into a kind of state of tranquil… but tea is the easiest way. Okay, so the tea, white dew tea, 白露茶(bái lù chá). It's tea you pick up in a tea field, you collect it. There is a very special quality, characteristic, or property of this kind of tea. It is because of the wide temperature difference between day and night in this period of time, when time moves into autumn. It gives the tea a distinctive mellow sweetness, distinctive mellow sweetness, delicate fragrance and smooth, moist mouthfeel. If you drink tea, if you never pay attention, you want to pay attention to taste it. Some tea was collected in spring, some tea was collected in summer, and this tea, this white dew tea 白露茶(bái lù chá), is collected in the beginning of autumn. Different tea collected at different times tastes different. So this one, tastes a distinctive mellow sweetness, delicate fragrance, and smooth, moist, moist kind of mouthfeel. When you drink, you don’t like to drink water and swallow it. No. When you drink tea, that's called 品茶(pǐn chá). You want to have a three—this character called 品(pǐn) means you want to drink a little bit, but multiple times. Three means multiple. 品茶(pǐn chá). When you drink it, you want to leave the tea, the soup of tea, in your mouth for a while. Let your lips and all the parts in your mouth, including tongue and all parts in your mouth, feel it, okay? Then you swallow it little by little, and you feel all the smell, the feeling, the fragrance of the tea, from the lips to your stomach. So in that sense, you have to be really in a kind of state of very quiet, calm down, slow down, calm down, or even in a certain kind of tranquil state. If you go to Japan, they have this kind of rites, very slow, long time. if you really, you're taking a holiday trip to there, you want to really spend time there. They learned it from China, from the Tang Dynasty… and Song Dynasty. Right now, that kind of matcha, matcha is from Song Dynasty, okay, which means a thousand years. Unfortunately, in China, we lost a lot of these things, right? They're trying to bring it back, okay? If you go to China, visit China, you might find a certain place that has this kind of rites, help you to really enjoy how to taste different tea from different areas and from different seasons, very different. But you want to really quiet down, calm down, take your spirit, take your emotion, take everything, calm down your mind, and take everything of yourself as one thing, as one, and come back to yourself, turn back your heart. Then you can taste. Actually, in traditional Chinese culture, it's not just tea. If you drink wine, if you enjoy very good, tasteful, delicious food, or even you're doing some handcraft thing, it's the same thing. You want to really calm down, become one entity, into a kind of state of tranquil… but tea is the easiest way. So collect this kind of tea, white dew tea, 白露茶(bái lù chá), so the special kind of taste, the mellow sweetness, clear fragrance, fragrance, and also gentle, lingering smoothness, smooth. The tea collected in spring usually tastes kind of a little bit bitter, and the tea collected in summer relatively tastes kind of dry because summer is so hot. All those tea leaves, the water is evaporated, evaporated more compared with spring and also... autumn, okay? Autumn tea collected, and s white dew tea 白露茶(bái lù chá). You want to enjoy that. And one more thing, when you taste the tea from different seasons, like for example, this white dew tea 白露茶(bái lù chá), in Chinese tradition, Chinese culture believes that this tea collects, absorbs all the 氣(qì) in this period of time from heaven and earth, from Mother Nature. So in that way, you are enjoying, or you put your mind and body through this qi to melt or fuse yourself back with Mother Nature. At this moment, tea is just a medium. The feel, the smell, whatever, okay? That's the basic idea of drinking the tea.