Lunar New Year was yesterday and is celebrated all over the world, but primarily in Southeast Asia. Along with China, I know that Korea, Mongolia, and Vietnam all celebrate Lunar New Years. Japan used to celebrate Lunar New Year as well, but changed to celebrating on January 1st in the 1870s.
For those of you unfamiliar with the calendar cycle, there are twelve years with corresponding animals. The rat is the leader of the animals - starting off the twelve year cycle - and ends with the pig (last year’s year). Each year has its own energy with positive and negative traits. I am not able to go into detail on each year and animal here, but if you’re curious I do recommend looking it up.
There’s also a lot of mythology around how and why each animal was chosen for its year. The story I was taught had an emperor invite all the animals to a party. The clever and tricky rat told its rival the cat that the party was on a different day, thus the cat was excluded from the calendar. The rat then tricked the ox into allowing it to ride on the ox’s snout and this arrived first to the party. This is why the clever rat is the first animal in the calendar.
The anime/manga Fruits Basket goes into this a little more.
This year, my friend invited to a Chinese tea ceremony and then have Dim Sum after. A Chinese tea ceremony is very different from any other tea experience I have had. Tea is treated more like wine or whisky in how you sample it.
Our tea master would show us the tea before we tried it. It came in big blocks wrapped in dried bamboo. Each tea had its own tiny clay pot that it was steeped in. You don’t drink the first time the tea is steeped. You need to let it open up and “breathe”. It’s the second time steeping that the flavors begin to blossom. Before taking a tiny sip, you’ll want to smell the tea - each time the tea is poured it may smell different. Then you take a small sip out of tiny porcelain cups and massage it around your tongue. Every cup of tea, even from the same pot, could taste slightly different. Everything depended on how hot the water was, where the water came from (filtered is better than bottled), which tea pot you use, and even how many times you steep the tea.
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| Packed raw dark tea |
It took us a little over two hours to try five different types of tea.
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| A dark tea |
And there are a lot of types of tea. It’s not just black or green tea. There’s also oolong tea, white tea, yellow tea, and dark tea. We mostly tried dark teas which have a very different flavor from teas you’ll find in a US supermarket shelf. We also tried a black tea and white tea. All were very different in taste and smell. My favorite was a dark tea that had some crossing with rice plants. It tastes sweet and resembled sticky rice. The other I loved was the white peony tea, which was light and delicate - my friend liked it to being the white riesling wine.
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| White tea |
These were some of the most amazing teas I had ever tasted. The teas were never bitter and always had unique flavors. You won’t get the same experience from drinking tea from a bag.
I have a place I go to to buy my teas. I’m lucky that the guy who sells my teas knows how to properly prepare them and gives a lot of advice as to how much to use and how to drink the tea. The tea I make at home is pretty good. Still the experience of trying tea during a Chinese tea ceremony is one I don’t think I could replicate.
I hope that tea ceremonies or tasting become more popular in America. I think there’s a market out there similar to how people try whiskies, wine, and beer. Your focus is entirely on what you’re drinking that you can taste all of the different notes and flavors.
So, Happy Year of the Rat! May it bring you a new beginning and good fortune throughout the year. And if you have a mind for it, try a Chinese tea ceremony.
Until next week.
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