Sunday, June 15, 2008

Gotheborg tea in Guangzhou

My sister, Robina and I were strolling around our relatives' place in Huadu District outside Guangzhou. I was looking for coffee while Robina was trying to get away from feeling bored. My sister was looking to buy some tea and we checked out several tea shops in the neighbourhood. Cantonese people must drink a lot of tea since there were literally one teashop around every corner.we were trying out pu-er tea in a teashop when I spotted a special edition Gotheborg pu-er tea bricks. apart from Chinese porcelain, tea was the major cargo for Gotheborg to bring back to Sweden. the ship returned to Guangzhou to great fanfare in 2006.
there was a Gotheborg tea brick and round tea "biscuits" which was compressed pu-er tea in a round disk shape. One tea biscuit was signed by Captain Peter Kaarling and another signed by the Swedish Consul. the chinese words on the commemorative brown carrier bag says: Gotheborg return to China; Yunnan Pu-er heads to Europe!
the lady manning the shop was very proud of the Gotheborg tea. She told us that her boss from the Yunnan tea company only managed to get those two signed tea biscuits, even the special edition tea bricks were all that were left. we were told that the 3 year old pu-er tea bricks tasted very good and mellow when brewed. we bought several bricks just for fun; one to drink ourselves and to give away to Siva who was on Gotheborg.

3 Comments:

At 1:50 AM, Blogger Jen said...

i am curious if it was a clever marketing tactic to under declare the number of signed bricks.... i'm sure there's resources to market such lucrative merchandise to a wider market? hee...

 
At 9:56 PM, Blogger Sivasothi said...

Gosh this was from 2006! So there is still some tea in circulation. Very nice reading this...

 
At 9:09 PM, Blogger Ivan Chew said...

It's just packaging. Doesn't mean the tea with the "Gotheborg" label is any better or worse. Historically, the "Gotheborg" was one of the first ship that carried the Pu'er tea (something like that... Siva should know). So they've packaged the Pu'er with the Gotheborg as a gimmick. I've seen the same packaged Gotheborg tea at a teashop in Singapore, over in Chinatown.

 

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