i suppose, above all teas, i love taiwanese dongding, although jasmine teas are very high in my regard too. my mother sniffs and says jasmines are bimbotic "young people's tea" whereas oolongs, she says, are for older people, who need teas that have more texture (and respectability. once i gave jasmine tea to a faculty member and my mother made a big fuss when she found out. she was sure i would murder him with the indignity.)

over the years, i had graduated from low grade, tattered leaf jasmines to the packaged supermarket xiangpians (in teabags) and then to real loose leaf jasmine needles, and then just after jc, took a leap right up to the novelty of "small pearls" - single, slim leaves curled in tight beads which later, in hot water, unfurled readily. and then, last july, after i had been swanning on what i thought was the height of jasmine sophistication for years, met an even more impressive tea and thus began to demand my tea as young leaf tips curled in single, firm rings. and now i was to encounter a new jasmine tea, which at the tea merchant we went to (on liulichang, the antique street) was named the mo xiang xue luo. (jasmine tinged snow spirals) tasting this, the nu'er huan which i had been drinking this past year with great contentment, and which was offered us as a starter tea for comparison, suddenly paled.

these leaves are tiny needles - wondrously pale, as if snowy, and massaged into loose spirals - the luo2 (shell) of the name. i was impressed when they expanded into small double-shoots - no more than half-inch long. the tea was light in colour, with clean fragrance and then the dry aftertaste and tranquility. i asked for two small cannisters to be packed for me.

for my second tea, i wanted something semi-fermented, and we sampled three of them: tian li (the name of a new dong ding harvested this year), gao shan cha (another typically taiwanese tea), and a tie kuan yin (from fujian - addy says we should drink fujian teas because of our ancestry, haha). in that order. i knew before i tried it that i didn't really want the gao shan cha - we do drink it at home, but i always think it's a little too fiery-heady for me, and i was looking for a more personable tea - something, i thought, feminine, if you can think of it that way, though not blatantly so like jasmines (in that sense, i think my mother is right - jasmines are a young woman's tea) i thought i wanted a tea that was - not quite floral - but with a more full-bodied aroma - and yet something still light, and something distinct. i asked for recommendations on a good dong ding, and the head saleswoman was inclined towards the tian1 li2, though when i eyed the packaging - just like the guo zhi xiang i had last year and made quiet calculations i thought - not if i can help it... she was surprised to find i was drinking guo zhi xiang last year and yet wanted to switch teas - incredulous, and also slightly miffed - you didn't like the guo zhi xiang? i did, but what we had was a gift from my mother's friend, and though it was exceptionally good i just didn't think i could afford to go on drinking it on uncertain income. no, i was steely-minded. no extravagance, i would buy a good, affordable loose-leaf dongding as a staple for the next year, and not splurge on a tiny amount of too-good tea. so we sat there, sipping tian li, all the time me holding firm and thinking - no, of course not - and half an hour and on the fourth round, what the hell, i gave in, i'm addicted, yes please i would like to take the tianli. and at that point, addy and yen both pipped up and said they wanted it too, and they hadn't even come in with the intention to buy tea! ah, communal imprudence, you see, it was that good!) do you realise, conscience wondered aloud, that we have each just spent $80 on just 70g of tea leaves? this tea costs a dollar a gram! we'd better be drinking this very slowly. *shut up shut up* right.

my two kinds of tea packed, and having picked out new wood instruments for tea making, i could now simply sample other teas. we tried a japanese green tea, with a distinct - green - that is, more vegetable than floral - flavour. and then, someone finds one last "tester" packet of the tang zhi zhen (the treasure of the tang dynasty). originally southern trees, they were transplanted by one of the tang emperors to the northern capital, for one of his southern-born concubines. still standing where they had been moved for over a thousand years, the trees continue to produce leaves (of a limited amount, mind) and those trees and the land on which they stand have now been "adopted" by tianfu - the popular tea conglomerate, which gave the name tang zhi zhen to the semi-fermented tea produced from these trees. i was unimpressed at first, because although trees of that age inspire some reverence that is no indicator to the quality of tea. i also thought that marketing the imperial association was slightly tacky. but when the tea was poured i was impressed. the colour surprised me - dark with hints of jade, and the taste was unusual, complex, and on the tongue heavy, smooth (almost oil-like) and in my heart i desired it and knew that though i would not ask the price i will always be happy that i have had the privilege of tasting this.

so that was what i bought on my trip, and that was half the experience.

the other half, i think, was the awareness of being here, now, and a sense of fate. because drinking tea, like the head saleswoman says, is all up to yuan2 fen4. (fatedness is not exactly the word, and luck is too casual (and comical) a word. though it certainly implies a fortuitous confluence of time and place and people and destiny.) each crop of tea, the type and amount produced and its distribution differing widely - every tea we encounter is surely due to a kind of yuan fen. my tian li had not yet been produced when i was in beijing last june - the leaves had only been picked in the april of this year - but i had had enough yuan fen to encounter it - i'd decided on impulse to come to beijing with addy. but if we had come a month later, we would have been able to sample this year's autumn teas as well, whereas here there were only spring teas from the first quarter - not enough yuan fen there. (spring teas are smoother and more nutritious. autumn teas, more aromatic) and, i have said, we were lucky about the tang zhi zhen. and after the tea was brewed and we had been served, other, more junior sales attendants were called to the table and invited to try some - each had enough only for a few sips. few had had the opportunity to taste this tea - few would be able to afford it for themselves - and not always do young people come in - where our age and the informality of the atmosphere left them free to drink with us - and that's their yuan fen with us, and with the tea too, isn't it?