Chao-Shan Gongfu Cha

I translated an essay on Chaozhou gongfucha from Chinese, finished today and posted it on Teadrunk.org. The style is a bit chatty, and sometimes too verbose, but I did learn a couple of interesting things from it, the most prominent in my mind being the explaination of the distance between the stove and the tea service. Traditionally, the small stove is kept seven steps away for both aesthetic -- the sound of water heating can be heard, but the device is not seen -- and practical reasons.

The four treasures are also expounded upon, which ought to prove fruitful search terms for further research, and we even learn one term in the local dialect - 冇炭 - which means "extinguishing the charcoal." Anything with Cantonese characters gets me excited.

If anyone is interested, the translation can be read here. The link to the original article is posted at the top of the thread.

In celebration of my new seal. Nothing goes better with tea than calligraphy.

My new love is matcha. I bought a Chinese chawan for 8 USD, but didn't like Chinese matcha, and had to get some from Japan. The dried tea leaves in the photo were collected in Wenzhou, Zhenghe and Wuyi.