You have a little more than a day left to enter Steepster’s Ultimate Holiday Tea Gift Contest, which will end at 8:00pm EST Friday, December 18th, 2009. The combined prize package is quite a large quantity of desirable stuff, ranging from modern, shiny tea accessories to a traditional matcha kit, and including quite a wide [...]
One thing that I find interesting about nearly all of the portrayals I’ve seen of Lu Yu, the 8th century Chinese writer of the Cha Jing (茶經, “Classic of Tea”), is that they are so consistent in style. He is almost always seated and shown with a teapot to one side of him on an [...]
If there’s one figure in history that those of us entrenched in Chinese tea culture have to hold in high esteem, it is the 8th century scholar Lu Yu (陆羽), often called the “Sage of Tea,” and sometimes called the “Saint of Tea.” His best known work, the Cha Jing (茶經, “Classic of Tea”), is [...]
I have written before about the greatness and convenience of Chinese tea thermoses. I use a Chinese tea thermos nearly every day on the way to work, either a glass one or a Yixing-style clay one. One of the necessary accessories for these thermoses – especially the glass ones – is something to transport the [...]
Some people call the human figures, animals and mythical creatures that hang out on the tea table receiving a bath of water and tea during a Gongfu Cha session “tea toys.” I prefer to call them “tea mascots” myself because that term seems to be pretty easy for anyone to figure out if they’ve ever [...]
A couple of weeks ago I ordered a charcoal-burning tea stove set from Tea Habitat. I will write more about this later, since I haven’t even had the opportunity to use it yet, but I have to share the complete absurdity of what happened after it arrived at my house. I unwrapped everything and had [...]
This past Saturday I had the incredible good fortune to spot this Japanese porcelain tea set in the glass cabinet in the back of an antique store, surrounded by uninteresting white china and Victorian glassware. I rarely see traditional styles of Japanese or Chinese teaware in antique stores, and it seemed even less likely in [...]
Closely tying in to the last post, I wanted to provide some details on the Banko-Yaki Houhin teapot that I referred to. I wasn’t really in the market for a teapot in this style when I came across this one several months ago, but I really liked the look of it so I bought it. [...]
In addition to my writing here, I am also a contributing writer for The Taste of English Tea Blog, which is connected to the English Tea Store. This has led me to pursue avenues of tea and tea research of a more English flavor. One recent example was that I started finding out more about [...]
This past November, in a thorough security scan of the British royal family’s residence, it was determined that a samovar which had been presented as a gift to the Queen by the Russians more than twenty years ago might possibly be harboring surveillance devices, leading to its removal from the premises. The need for security [...]
