TeaForum.org

It could even cause hallucinations.

(To be serious, though, your question is indeed very broad: what tea? what temperature? what ratio of tea leaves to water? etc etc etc. The answer that fits best is "it depends," sadly.)

Late to the party, this seems like a very interesting discussion. When I visit China, I typically swing by tea shops to restock tea. Although fake Dayi is well known. I am curious if anyone has thoughts about trustworthiness of “authorized seller” from a certain factories? ;) Ask for proof of autho...

Superbuy looks interesting, I might give it a try. One thing I noticed right away about it that other taobao cart sites also have is the issue around seller stores, but maybe this changes once you have an account? That if you find an item, and then you would want to see what else that vendor has it...

- For anything involving tea, Superbuy will only permit EMS shipping (not always a problem, but sometimes you don't want to pay so much and are okay with writing) Is this a recent or location specific thing? I've had two packages from Superbuy shipped with SAL and one with EUB/Youbao earlier this y...

To sort of get back to the question of "best Taobao agent" I have a couple of thoughts: For quite some time, I used Superbuy as I find their system painless and effective. However, I have recently switched to making Taobao/TMall/JDMall/etc purchases on my own, when I can, and using Shipforwarder to ...

Ah, makes sense. Thanks for clarifying. I wonder if it's the same reason why Superbuy also does this. Although I could have swore I received at least one package from them where it had not been changed. Superbuy has an export license, it seems, or at the very least I had sent many packages of tea d...

Shipforwarder changes "Tea" to something else because they don't have a food export license and anything labelled tea would likely be returned from customs and not be allowed to be exported. Their pricing and service is spectacular, just be aware of that wrinkle.

also factor in shipping (which can be kinda all over the place depending on the vendor/platform) and also that once the thing shows up it isn't broken and/or that you actually got what you ordered or that the particular piece you get isn't totally messed up I can understand having a pretty healthy ...

The vendors who do this usually started way before the general public wised up to the existence of Taobao. To be fair at these times it was 100% more annoying to order something and it was by all accounts impossible for the non Chinese speaker without connections. It is still nearly that unless you...

I’m always a bit confused why western vendors sell stuff like this in the first place. More often than not someone will point out that the same exact item is available from TB for next to nothing. At least sell a unique or hard to find item if your gonna mark it up 500-600%. Well, I'm not going to ...

chadao Can you reveal to us the price difference? The teapot I purchased from Tea Habitat was ~$100USD and the one from Taobao was ~100 yuan. As Bok says, the premium is attributable to Tea Habitat investing efforts into communicating with potters, translating, shipping, customs, having a bricks-an...

Victoria ok, ok, apologies. It might just be similar looking teaware. However, it’s not uncommon that especially smaller retailers do that. Not a bad thing per se either, as they do the curation so to speak and work through the mass of available items, deal with the communication, shipping and cust...

Ching Wo is 政和 or Zhenghe with a heavy accent A lot of these "heavy accents" seem to me to be Cantonese pronunciations, which makes some sense given the status of Hong Kong and Guangdong as port cities - western traders "met" Chinese teas through Canton and Hong Kong and picked up Cantonese names f...

Seumoo, and is 邵武 -- Shaowu Another example of Cantonese influence - 邵 is "siu6" and 武 is "mou5" so siumou , in Cantonese. Lapsang Souchong also makes sense in Cantonese. The characters you often see - 正山小种 - don't map well to that transliteration in Cantonese (正 is "zing / jing") but the first cha...

Ching Wo is 政和 or Zhenghe with a heavy accent A lot of these "heavy accents" seem to me to be Cantonese pronunciations, which makes some sense given the status of Hong Kong and Guangdong as port cities - western traders "met" Chinese teas through Canton and Hong Kong and picked up Cantonese names f...