There are tea mascots that are entirely charming and wonderful. Of course I am partial to my wonderful bat, who I decided to name Xingfu (幸福), and who sits at the tea table during nearly every session of Gongfu Cha, receiving frequent doses of tea and water over his shiny clay body. But there are [...]
While I do generally try to avoid anthropomorphizing inert pieces of manmade stuff, I still find it kind of distressing when a nice piece of teaware languishes unused in the back of a cabinet – even if that cabinet is a beautiful antique Japanese tansu, dramatically striped and accented with richly hued persimmon wood. But [...]
After quite a bit of online searching for olive pit and other types of charcoal to use in my Chou Zhou tea stove, I finally stumbled upon a source locally for good, affordable charcoal. Pal-Do World is a chain of Korean markets, three of which are in this general area. They carry boxes of SaengGeo [...]
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 [...]
