Dressed in a bright red Chinese shirt and with her eyes wide open, Tseng Yu-hui sits at a table, concentrating on proportions of tea leaves and their infusion time.
The Taiwanese tea master opened her Maison des Trois Thes (House of the Three Teas) on the Rue Mouffetard, a lively Parisian street in the French capital’s fifth district, two years ago. Today, she is writing a guidebook about tea and has set up her own Web site on the Internet.
Tseng prides herself on having created the first traditional Taiwanese style tea house in Europe that offers quality and range - there are 40 kinds on the menu, and many other kinds for sale.
“There is no school to learn about tea, and the art of tea, which used to be passed on from generation to generation within families, is disappearing,” she said.
Following a long apprenticeship, Tseng has become a genuine tea master. She has been practising the art since her childhood, first with her family in Taiwan’s Nantou region, then with several tea masters. When she was a child, her grandfather used to wake her up in the middle of the night to have her smell the scent of the “Queen of the Night”, a special flower that blossoms at night only once a year.
Yet growing up in the world of tea plants and preparations does not fully account for Tseng’s rare mastery which, as she explained, came about as a result of manifold skills. She explored fields as varied as music, calligraphy, martial arts and traditional medicine. “All of these experiences are part of the understanding of the spirit of tea,” she declared.
Tseng practised acupuncture in a Taiwanese hospital for two years. Later, as a clarinetist, she won top national awards in Taiwan in 1970 and 1971. Her musical skills carried her to Europe and eventually to Paris, where she decided to stay in 1990. Two or three times a year, Tseng returns to Taiwan and China. She likes to stroll in tea gardens and walk the hills of Fujian and Zhejiang, and even ventures into the remote mountainous areas of Tibet.
Within the very private club of tea connoisseurs and growers, Tseng has developed an important network. The “Tea Road”, as she calls it, allows her to pinpoint the right soils and best vintages before going there herself to taste the newly harvested teas. “Tea leaves are handpicked and then undergo several operations, from seasoning and withering to fermentation,” she said. Each step is carefully monitored, with time and heat being important factors. Storage is yet another delicate operation.
Her trips back to Asia are akin to treasure hunts. Selecting high-quality teas and discovering rare and old varieties requires good connections and a great deal of time.
Some top range teas, prized in competitions, can cost up to US$ 20,000 a kilogram. Fortunately, not all high qual-ity teas are sold at such prohibitive prices, yet each time she returns to China her best-informed clients order some of her very best and most expensive teas.
Mastering the preparation of tea also means knowing how to use the right implements. First of all, you need the right teapot. Tseng gets hers from traditional potters in Jiangsu province, where the famous Yixing pots are made.
“One variety of tea, one kind of clay. Colored teapots and rather ferrous clays are good criteria. You have to watch out for fake Yixing artifacts,” said Tseng.
To find the right clays and pots, Tseng goes to small and highly protected quarries. The choice of the right pot also depends on its technical qualities, such as its “air-tight aspect”. And there is a great demand for some pieces: “There are many collectors in Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong. In Taiwan alone, there are about one million (collectors). This does not mean, however, that they are tea connoisseurs.”
A visit to Tseng’s tea house is a subtle form of entertainment as she readily discusses the spirit of the earth and tea-leaves, the fragrances and blends of teas - much like a wine expert passionately talks about the aroma of a good wine, its vintage and qualities.
Sometimes she organizes meetings with confirmed amateurs.
“You should see them,” said Fabien Maiolino, Tseng’s enthusiastic partner. The meetings start around 8.00pm and last well into the early hours of the morning. People talk endlessly about the color of a tea, its resemblance to a fruit or a flower - “that such a thing can happen with French people is just unbelievable,” Maiolino said. “They can spend a whole evening tasting only three sorts of tea. And when they come here, they know they should not wear any make-up or perfume because it would spoil the scents and flavors of the teas.”
The smell of bamboo coming out of the earth, the perfumes of flowers and coconut and the flavor of honey are among the many references used by initiates. It often takes time to translate and adapt Chinese words describing the consistency of tea, and some amateurs seek advice from the agronomists at the Paris botanical garden.
Tseng has won wide recognition as a tea master and has her own mastership seal. An increasing number of trendy tea houses and shops in Paris call on her for her expertise. Her outstanding sharpness never fails to astonish: She can even tell what type of plant grows in the vicinity of a tea garden.
Tseng recently established a partnership with the famous George V tea club in Paris. There she organizes tea workshops to introduce French amateurs to the basics of the complex art of brewing Chinese tea.
Participants are first taught about the history of tea, its cultural and sociological environment. They learn that the practice of infusion goes back to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) - in earlier periods, tea was stamped and boiled. They also learn about the main regions for tea plants and the importance of weather and soils, and that in Taiwan there are about seven harvests a year while there are only three in China. They are told how to differentiate green tea from yellow, red and black teas, or how to sort out varieties of green-blue teas.
Getting down to the ritual of the actual preparation, one carefully watches how to first rinse the teapot, inside and out, as well as the leaves to avoid burning them. The teapot is then filled until it overflows so as to get rid of the froth. It is a scrupulous process which offers its greatest reward when one breathes the the scent emerging from the cup. Tseng herself spends hours every day tasting and smelling, breathing and inhaling out of sheer pleasure and to the delight of her customers.
Asked about the right water to use, she sighed, saying that this was in fact the hardest part of the job. After testing many mineral waters, she decided the best thing to do was to filter tap water. “Actually, the best would be to use the famous Galloping Tiger spring water in China, but we can’t afford it,” she said.
Today, tea houses in China are popular places where you can enjoy having a drink and some food, she said. In Sichuan province, there are about 200 of them. In recent years, Taiwanese have opened fashionable tea houses on the mainland.
But most of China’s tea rooms are not places where you can appreciate the quality of tea, according to Tseng. One must keep in mind, she said, the damage done by the Cultural Revolution. Tea at that time was associated with Con fucianism and “the old ideas”. The Red Guards destroyed many 800-year-old trees and entire varieties were lost.
The Chinese “spirit of tea” or gong fu cha is quite different from the complex Japanese tea ceremony, in which etiquette and measured gestures are more important than appreciating the qualities of the tea itself. Sitting on a cushion on the floor in Tseng’s soberly decorated room, one can enjoy infinite varieties of the beverage and dream about their mysterious names: Long jin (dragon’s well), tie guan yin (iron mercy goddess), bai hao (oriental beauty), dong ding (ice peak). Or fall under the poetic spell of green-blue teas, with their rising twirls of delicate full-bloom scents.
Close your eyes and enchanting visions of the foggy landscapes, mountains and rivers of a Song dynasty painting, come to mind.