Mon Aug 02, 2021 5:18 am
Having lived in Asia for 28 years, i did it the Asian way.
I started off having visited a Chinese tea house in Singapore around '91 when i was a traveler on the overland trails, which got me hooked immediately. Equipped with John Blofeld's 'The Chinese Art of Tea' - at the time the only English language book on Chinese Tea - i explored then the tea growing areas and tea houses in China in '93 (and '95).
In '97 i was then introduced by a tea friend to my tea master - Paul Lim (Lim Ping Xiang) in Malaysia. There i really began learning about tea and i have visted him regularly.
There are many different schools of thought, methods and philospophies of drinking tea in the different Chinese diasporas and in China itself, and all of those are of course in constant discourse and development. The tea world is a vibrant and exciting culture.
I have in the past already angered some people by saying this, but blogs, internet forums and such only go that far. It is awasome that the internet enables access to tea. When i started off there was almost nothing available in the west. But there are too many echo rooms, myths and misunderstood half truths around as well. One does not get a correct frame of reference there.
After a certain point, when one wants to develop further in his/her tea drinking, there is no way around spending some extended time in Asia's tea world, get access to tea circles there, drink tea with experienced tea drinkers, and if possible find a tea master/tea teacher. Teaknowledge and -understanding isn't something that one can simply pick up in a course with certificate, it's a life long exploration, and in Chinese Asia there is a history of millenia behind that.