Friday, October 23, 2009
Posted by 醉茶生 at 02:40 PM | Comments (5) | Permalink
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Making tea kungfu style needs a tea sea (a cumbersome translation of
the Chinese 茶海 or 茶盤).  The function of the tea sea is to act as a
drip tray for all the spills that occur naturally as part of the
tea-making process.
I travel a lot and the tea sea is the most cumbersome part of a
Chinese tea set.  The best ones are made of heavy ceramic and are
easily broken during transport.  My last one was plastic, but even
that succumbed eventually to ill treatment, so I was pleased to see a
reasonable sized bamboo one on sale in Singapore on Mosque Street.
The rectangular packaging (compared to the traditional round shape of
a tea sea) made it easy to pack into my suitcase and bamboo is far
less likely to break than clay.  The price of 25 Singapore dollars
(USD18 or GBP11) meant that if it did break, it would not have caused
too much heartache either.