worry about, and admits to being “a coffee man” himself, despite the first stop on our urban hike: Maliandao, Beijing’s tea street. “Better to go without food for three days than without tea for one” goes an old Chinese proverb, and after 4,000 or so years the West seems to be catching on to the drink’s health benefits (especially those of green tea, with studies showing that polyphenols may prevent cancer, lower cholesterol and even fight tooth decay). In Maliandao, however, my vague preconceptions are dashed once again as I am met not with a back-alley bazaar thick with oversize bins and loud bargaining, but a brightly lit, modern shopping center, and the biggest tea market in Beijing. The fresh scent of jasmine hangs in the air, and each shop has colorful, carefully stacked displays, clearly marked prices and smiling attendants (though English remains rare). That the market resembles the country’s ornate, apothecary-like pharmacies is no coincidence: the Chinese turn to both for what ails
them, and the cures are often more than the sum of their parts. Locals pay top dollar for ingredients like bird’s nest, ginseng root and royal jelly, gazing on as pharmacists fill their prescriptions via mortar and pestle and pack pills and powders into gilded envelopes. Here, customers get up close and personal with the ingredients they are about to ingest. The filling of prescriptions takes on an elegant transparency, not just for the method of delivery but because, at these pharmaceutical companies, the human trials have been under way for millennia. Similarly, tea, while valued for its health benefits, is also appreciated for its beauty. In one window, objects that I first take for carved rosewood murals turn out to be artworks made of compressed tea leaves, used to decorate the boardrooms and offices of powerful Chinese businesspeople. Behind locked display cabinets I find dark brown nuggets of compressed Puer. They resemble large black truffles, and are just as prized. Once used as currency between Yunnan and
THIS PAGE In China, feeling ill can mean a trip to a pharmacy where natural ingredients are prepared before your eyes, or to a tea merchant for a custom infusion based on your symptoms.
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