Tea absent at A-share market

By Li Zhixin

American tea seller Teavana began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the TEA symbol on July 28. Since then, China’s tea sellers and economists have been wondering when the nation’s top tea makers will follow the Atlanta company’s lead.

“Teavana’s shares soared 64 percent after an initial public offering raised $121.4 million on the first day. This shows the robust vitality of the tea industry,” said Li Lei, an economic analyst at Hexun.com, China’s top financial portal.

“However, the A-share market does not trade any tea companies, even though the tea industry is larger than the liquor industry in China.”

It’s not as if the tea industry has not considered it.

Going public has been a popular topic for tea industry insiders the last several years, especially with companies struggling to resolve funding problems. “Some major tea-producing provinces passed preferential measures to stimulate tea makers to go public,” he said.

Businessman Wu Jian said the industry is in the process of blind expansion due to “venture capital and private equity investment funds.”

“It is a good thing that the tea industry can receive such capital, but in terms of modern industry, China’s tea industry is still in the early stages of development,” he said. “Its industrial capacity is small.”

Wu painted a dark picture of the tea industry, describing business owners, marketing teams and other employees as poorly qualified and unaware of the importance of brand building.

Li Tao, a senior tea seller, said tea enterprises are not suitable for listing as their products are hard to standardize, varying with geographic conditions and timing.

“China has been consuming tea for thousands of years. Tea has very strong geographical character in China, and people in different provinces have different preferences,” Li said.

“Fujian people prefer Tieguanyin (a variety of oolong tea), Beijing people prefer Pu’er and Shanghai people prefer Longjing tea. If they were industrialized, they would lose their unique tastes and lose their consumers.”

Tea not healthy for all

By Han Manman

Tea is one of the most consumed beverages in the world. It helps refresh tired minds and bodies. With more reports on the benefits of drinking tea, such as the prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer, more are begining to drink tea in their daily life.

However, Chinese experts recently found drinking tea excessively may be dangerous, especially for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.

Dangers for pregnant women

A recent investigation, conducted by the Peking University Institute of Reproductive and Child Health, found that daily tea drinking during pregnancy was associated with an elevated risk of neural tube defects (NTDs).

NTDs are a group of malformations that result from the failure of the neural tube to close within 28 days after conception. NTDs are an important cause of prenatal mortality, and infants who survive often have lifelong disabilities.

Ren Aiguo, director of the research team, said the survey followed four rural counties in Shanxi Province from 2002 to 2007. Experts interviewed the young mothers of 631 children with NTD and 857 healthy children about their tea drinking habits before pregnancy and during their first trimester.

The survey found that women who drank tea every day had a three times greater risk of giving birth to a child with NTD.

He said the elevated risk associated with daily tea drinking remained after adjusting for maternal age, educational level, occupation and periconceptional folic acid supplementation.

Ren said a separate survey in Japan found that women who drank four or more cups of tea a day had a deficiency of folic acid in the blood.

Ren suggested that pregnant and breastfeeding women should limit their tea intake or begin taking a folic acid supplement. He said they should also eat more foods rich in folic acid, such as green vegetables, oranges, beans and animal livers.

Introduction to tea

Event information

Event name:Introduction to tea

Host:Cutlure Yard

Event typeMeetings – Other

Time & Place

Date:September 24, 2010

Time:13:00 – 15:00

Neighbourhood:东城区(Dongcheng) District

Phone:010-84044166

E-mail:contact@cultureyard.net

Event Description

Don’t know the difference between a white and green tea? Which tea should be kept in the fridge and which should be kept in the room? What tea tastes better when drinking from a cup, and which from a glass? The answers to all those questions and much more you will find out on Culture Yard’s Introduction to Tea Workshop.

Jiang Jienfen, a tea grower, wholesaler and tea master will teach you just enough to start to understand and enjoy Chinese tea.

During the workshop you will learn to recongnize the basic tea kinds, how to store them and drink it properly. The workshop will include a lecture, demonstration and tasting.

*The lecture will be in Chinese with translation

Date & Time: Sept 24th, 13:00-15:00
Avenu:Culture Yard, no 10 shique hutong, beixinqiao station
Registration: workshop@cultureyard.net
only20 spaces avaiable, so register early to save your seat.
Price: 45 RMB pay in advance and receive 10 RMB discount

Researchers back cancer-fighting properties of papaya

(AFP) – – Researchers said Tuesday that papaya leaf extract and its tea have dramatic cancer-fighting properties against a broad range of tumors, backing a belief held in a number of folk traditions.

University of Florida researcher Nam Dang and colleagues in Japan, in a report published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, documented papaya’s anticancer effect against tumors of the cervix, breast, liver, lung and pancreas.

The researchers used an extract made from dried papaya leaves, and the effects were stronger when cells received larger doses of papaya leaf tea.

Dang and the other scientists showed that papaya leaf extract boosts the production of key signaling molecules called Th1-type cytokines, which help regulate the immune system.

This could lead to therapeutic treatments that use the immune system to fight cancers, they said in the February issue of the journal and released Tuesday by the university.

Papaya has been used as a folk remedy for a variety of ailments in many parts of the world, especially Asia.

Deng said the results are consistent with reports from indigenous populations in Australia and his native Vietnam.

The researchers said papaya extract did not have any toxic effects on normal cells, avoiding a common side effect of many cancer treatments.

Researchers exposed 10 different types of cancer cell cultures to four strengths of papaya leaf extract and measured the effect after 24 hours. Papaya slowed the growth of tumors in all the cultures.

Dang and a colleague have applied to patent the process to distill the papaya extract through the University of Tokyo.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20100310/tts-health-us-japan-papaya-972e412.html

Emergency stash – Food to help survive the winter

By Zhao Hongyi

Ancient Chinese people believed winter was the season to eat more and better, to recover the energy spent in summer and fall. This, plus the difficulty of finding fresh vegetables in the frigid northern winter, resulted in a tradition of storing food for the season.

Though industrialization and globalization makes almost everything available year-round, locals have kept the practice of setting aside food for winter. The National Agri-products Fair sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, held November 13 to 24, offered people thousands of choices, such as dried seafood, processed meat, as well as tea and coffee.

Below are some of the highlights of the fair, a popular yearly event among Beijingers.

Assorted dried food

Locals also enjoy dried fruits like bananas, kiwis and dates. Beijing is famous for these products and visitors rarely go home without them. They are affordable and cost 20 to 50 yuan a kilogram.

Dried fungus and agarics comprise another category of dried food. They are popular additions to soups and fried dishes, together with meat, freshwater fish and seafood. Southerners love them, believing they have special health benefits since they are ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine.

Most medicinal fungi and agarics grow wild in the mountains. These “wild fungi” sell at 80 to 150 yuan per kilogram, about 40 to 50 yuan more than their cultivatedounterparts.

Another type of dried food popular at the National Agri-products Fair was bamboo root. Bamboo, which grows in almost all the provinces south of the Yangtze River, is a southern staple and has become more popular in the north in the past decade.

Dried bamboo root is used in preparing soup and other watery or sauce-filled dishes.

Rongshi Dried Food
Add: 35 Chang’an Lu, Xinghua, Zhejiang Province
Tel: 15952659855 (Look for Rong Jie)

Drink a Bag of Tea

The Dragonbeat blog posted a contentious article about why a brand of mediocre tea is beating the beejeezus out of local producers in China, which introduced the world to the joys of tea; a case study, really, about other Chinese industries:

Both at home and abroad, Chinese tea brands struggle to compete with foreign competitors. In China, Unilever’s Lipton brand has a market-leading share three times that of its closest local rival.

I remember years ago going to government and company offices throughout China and being served up a crappy cup of Lipton green tea at nearly every meeting. I would always think to myself afterward, “I travel all the way to the Home of Tea for a lousy paper cup of Lipton? Pull-eeze!” Occassionally, I’d get some leaves pulled from a box of local stuff (popular in the Yangtze Delta: Longjing from the West Lake District; and Biluochun, especially from around Changshu and Suzhou fields). Offices in Fujian are always nice to visit, because the officials and businessmen often go through the abbreviated ritual of serving up a pot of local Wulong tea. Admittedly, some of the nicest gifts I’ve received from government and business representatives in China have been boxes of lovely tea. Never the really good stuff, though, like Da Hong Pao. They keep that for themselves.

The challenges facing China’s tea industry are the same as those facing a host of Chinese industries: product quality issues; excessive competition in the domestic market; low prices and meagre earnings abroad; and weak branding.

China was once at the axis of world trade with its monopoly on tea (cf. my review of the book, For All the Tea in China).  A combination of corporate espionage on the part of the East India Company and the revelation that Chinese growers had been poisoning British consumers for a couple hundred years in pursuit of profit ended the British taste for Chinese tea in the mid-1800s. The British proclivity for rationalizing production and creating and then adhering to quality standards was Britain’s own  Boston Tea Party, serving notice of the end of Chinese hegemony of the tea trade.

Monitoring quality across millions of scattered tea gardens is an impossible task, and Chinese tea exporters have consistently had trouble meeting foreign safety standards. Chinese tea sells for an average of just US$2 per kg on international markets, compared with US$2.70 for Indian tea or US$3.40 for highly regarded Sri Lankan leaves.

Interestingly, most of the comments on the post were from Chinese esthetes, who accuse the writer of missing the point: Chinese tea in all its perfection was never meant to be debased through such crass commercial activities as branding and mass marketing, they argue.

Tell that to your ancestors.

http://thisischinablog.com/

For All the Tea in China: A Wonderful Book

The world was shocked last year after the Olympics when it was revealed that China’s largest producers of milk and milk-products had laced their offerings with a plastic derivative, melamine. Fast-backward to the year 1851, when the British public learned during London’s Great Exhibition that the green tea they had been drinking for nearly two hundred years had been laced with cyanide and gypsum (calcium sulphate dehydrate). The blue color of cyanide and the yellow color of the gypsum combined to make a green dye that satisfied the British tea drinker’s eye for uniformity of color. The Chinese had known for generations such consistency in picking was near-impossible, especially since they had for decades been selling the British the third- and fourth-flushes of their country’s most strategic asset – Tea.

Such is one of the revelations found in the most fun and exciting new book I’ve read this year. For All the Tea in in China: Espionage, empire and the secret formula for the world’s favourite drink, by Sarah Rose, tells the story of how Robert Fortune, a Scottish gardener and botanist, infiltrated the interior of China disguised as a Mandarin “from north of the Great Wall” to steal tea plants, tea seeds and the secrets for making green and black teas. Mind you, he did this during the mid-1800s, when it was highly illegal and certainly inadvisable to be caught, drawn and quartered as a Westerner traveling beyond the permissible foreign concessions on the east coast. As an avid tea drinker and collector of Chinese teas and paraphernalia, and having been taught the dark art of preparing Wulong tea, I just couldn’t put the book down.

Aside from Fortune’s personal adventure, which Rose tells compellingly, she explains the geopolitics and macroeconomics involved in tea’s being at the center of world trade for nearly two hundred years. The book also discusses the genesis, triumph and demise of the East India Company, the first true multinational in the world and arguably the most enduring until Parliament “revoked its charter at the stroke of a pen” in 1857.

With Fortune’s successful transfer of Chinese tea plants and processing techniques to the Himalayas, to what is now commonly known as Assam and Darjeeling, and with the British quite queasy over the thought of drinking more green-colored tea, no matter how authentic, the way was open by 1852 for Britons to entertain drinking black tea. Until Fortune’s successful run of corporate espionage, the West actually thought black tea grew from plants different from those of the green tea they had become accustomed to. Fortune illustrated that the color and taste of black tea came from certain varieties of green-leaf tea that underwent a more stressful process of refinement than is found in making green tea. The surplus of sugar poured into Britain from the British Caribbean colonies made drinking the more-bitter black tea a pleasure for all classes in the newly industrialized society.

Of course, in all this, the poppy and its addictive syrup cannot be ignored, a history Rose writes about frankly and unashamedly. Another interesting historical point was that after the Second Opium War, in 1857, when China figured “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, China sent its own spies to India to cop the poppy seeds and the secret for processing opium to undercut British prices to customers.

So get out your Brown Betty teapot. Get the book. Read it. Learn and enjoy.

And remember: take the tea to the water – not the water to the tea.

http://thisischinablog.com/

Six Chinese Tea Mixes

By Ernie

Pills don’t heal, nature does. Alright, we’re not saying pills are useless, but it should be acknowledged that even the cleverest medicine, say Viagra, is a synthetic compound mimicking more natural substances. Because they’re synthetic, pills have side-effects, and your body can’t use them as effectively as it could something natural. That’s why vitamins will never replace five servings of fruits and vegetables, and why you should brew some of these Chinese tea concoctions. Nature can be combined for synergistic effect, just like chemicals.
Red Tea and Lemon
This combination improves blood circulation and brings more oxygen to the brain. The vitamin C increases skin defense, preventing rashes, pimples, and anything else that makes your largest organ other than the smooth, creamy hide it was meant to be. In the wintertime, throw some ginger in there, to help warm your stomach, and your body to sweat out sluggish winter humours.

Red tea with lemon also kills cold germs in your mouth, so a glass morning and evening is an oral zinger and a real body booster. Dianhong, chuanhong, xiaozhong hongcha, all are varieties of red tea whose semi-fermented flavor is fresh but earthy. The lemon adds some pleasant tartness.
Oolong, Chamomile, Cassia Torra Seeds, and Lotus Flower Seeds
One step removed from green tea, oolong, whose most popular variety is tieguanyin, is just a touch fermented, giving off an overall fresh flavor with a hint of maturity.

Oolong tea has certain oils, which when mixed with the flavanone in Chamomile, produces a compound unmatched for fighting inflammation and infections. The seeds promote digestion and improve spleen function. In sum, this tea mix is a great natural cleanser that boosts the metabolism and gets fat burning, especially around the waist. Make sure to boil the cassia torra seeds for thirty minutes before steeping in the tea, as they are extremely tough.
Green Tea and Pomelo
This tea can relieve an anxious mood. It virtually shuts down your body’s release of adrenaline, which even if no danger looms, is always on a low-drip as we go about our stressed out lives. In this relaxed environment, the properties of green tea can do their detox work even more effectively. Naturally, the citrus powers of pomelo give the body a nice shot of C, something almost any civilized soul can do with more of. If the combination is too bitter, a small drip of honey will make things go down sweeter. Too much though, or god forbid a spoonful of sugar, will neutralize any salutary effects.

 

Green Tea, Honeysuckle, and Mai Dong
Mai Dong refers to the ophiopogon root, and looks as pictured. It dispels body fire and dryness, including the irritability that is their side effect. The combination really gets saliva production going, along with other body fluids, and is just the thing for dry, hacking coughs. Honeysuckle moisturizes internally too, for a combined one-two chill-out punch that should leave you cooler than that cucumber at the bottom of the fridge vegetable bin. Any green tea is the perfect environment for these two firefighters.
Red Tea, Jujube, Rosebuds, American Ginseng, and Luohanguo 

Luohanguo is also called momordica grosvenori, not available at your local American mega-grocers, but most definitely at the Chinese market. This tea is sovereign at balancing female hormones, while leaving skin soft and rosy. The jujube and ginseng act in tandem as an all-over body tonic, improving mood and energy levels.
Red Tea, Rosebuds, and Jiaogulan 

Jiaogulan is China’s immortality herb, an adaptogen that has no common English name. A shame, too, given its amazing powers of lowering blood pressure and cholesterol while strengthening the immune system. The entire mixture acts as an all-around rejuvenator, restoring natural energy. Nothing like a caffeine kick, but sensitive people will feel the effects, while more callous folks will without realizing it. Another benefit of this one-of-a-kind tea mixture is deeper sleep.

As for measuring, one person gets one teaspoon of tea. Add one teaspoon for each additional person drinking. Pinches will do for herbs, roots, and herbs, while it’s teaspoons again for fruit and flowers.

 www.chinaexpat.com