Bowl tea is the cheap end, deliberately
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Dawancha means, literally, big-bowl tea: coarse leaf brewed in quantity, poured into large thick bowls, sold at a stall or a table on the pavement to people passing — carters, labourers, travellers, anyone hot. It was sold by the bowl for a nominal sum, and the point was volume, availability and price rather than anything about the tea. Bowls were often covered with a glass sheet against dust and drunk standing. It is the opposite pole of Chinese tea from a gongfu table, and it is the form in which a great many people in northern China actually drank tea. The practice has largely gone as street trade has changed, and it survives in a few places as a self-conscious revival — most famously at a stall associated with Qianmen that grew into a well-known tea house on the back of it. TeaHQ records the revival as a revival. A stall that now sells bowl tea to visitors is doing something different from a stall that sold it to porters, even where the bowl and the price are the same.
Why the north drinks jasmine
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Scented tea — xiangpian, most often jasmine over a green base — has been the default in Beijing and much of northern China in a way it is not in the tea-producing south, where scenting is regarded as a category rather than as the normal thing to drink. Two explanations circulate, and TeaHQ finds both plausible and neither established. One is distance: leaf carried a long way north arrived tired, and scenting covered it. The other is water: Beijing’s water is hard, which flattens a delicate green tea and does less damage to a scented one. Both are the kind of tidy explanation that fits and is difficult to test, and this record marks them as such. What is not in doubt is the preference itself. A Beijing household buying tea buys scented tea by default, the grades and prices run a long way up, and a good jasmine is bought and given as a serious present rather than as a beginner’s tea — which is precisely how it is positioned in export markets, and one of the sharper mismatches between how a tea is regarded at home and abroad.
The theatre tea house
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
The northern commercial tea house developed with performance attached: storytelling, crosstalk, opera excerpts, acrobatics and magic, with tea and snacks served at the table through the show. The modern versions are ticketed venues where the tea is included in the price of the seat and the programme is the product. This is a real Beijing form with a genuine lineage, and it is also a tourist product, and both statements are true of the same establishments. Distinguishing them is not always possible from outside and TeaHQ does not attempt it. The wider point is that the northern tea house has historically been a room with something happening in it, where the Sichuan house is a room with nothing happening in it, and that difference is more informative than any comparison of what was in the pot. A visitor who books a Beijing tea house and expects a quiet afternoon over leaf has misread the institution, and one who expects the Chengdu experience will find that it is not sold anywhere in the city.
The tea house as a stage set
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
A great deal of what outside readers know about Beijing tea houses comes from one twentieth-century play set in one, staged continuously since and filmed, which uses the tea house as a room through which several decades of Chinese history pass. It is a superb piece of work and it is not an ethnography, and its influence on how the institution is imagined — a place of gossip, faction, decline and old men — is substantial. TeaHQ notes the influence because a reader should know when their mental image of a place comes from a drama rather than from a description. The same caution applies to the photographic record. The Beijing tea house that gets photographed is the restored one with the lanterns; the ordinary northern tea shop where somebody buys a hundred grams of jasmine on the way home is not photographed at all, and it is where most of the city’s tea actually changes hands.