Adapting tea culture to modern life

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02:58

The Asian Cuisine Festival is now underway in four major cities across China: Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. Among the events in Hangzhou, a city famous for its Longjing tea, was an international tea forum on Friday.

Tea is among the world's most popular beverages, and there's different methods to the tea-drinking. Most tea drinkers in Asia put the leaves straight into hot water, while in the west, it's often ground, bagged, and eventually steeped.

Tea may represent a slow lifestyle, but the making of it is a race against time. It takes half a day to roast just one kilo of the leaves by hand, a combination of patience and labor.

An international tea forum was held in Hangzhou city to promote tea cultures across the world. /CGTN photo

Qiu Xiaohua, a tea roaster told CGTN that “machine-frying is five times faster. It may overfry some of the leaves or break the shape of them. However, most buyers cannot tell the difference, except for real tea lovers."

Dr. L.S.K Hettiarachchi, who is the additional director of Tea Research Insititute of Sri Lanka told CGTN that the prime challenge they face right now is the inadequate number of workers in tea fields and during the harvest, and keeping the sustainability into account.

This kind of hand roasting practice is disappearing in the face of modern technology. /CGTN photo

China was the first country in the world to have planted tea and remains the original homeland of tea culture.

Most Chinese people drink tea without anything but water, while people from other countries like to add sugar, milk, even fruit, and herbs.

Inadequate number of tea workers have become a challenge for tea cultures in Sri Lanka. /CGTN photo

That is why Chinese experts say the key to further promoting tea culture is to adapt it to modern ways of life.

Wu Xiaoli, Director of China National Tea Museum told CGTN that different countries have various cuisine cultures based on their geological and historical reasons. But in this fast-changing world, Chinese tea lovers also can learn from other countries' ways of tea drinking and tea products.

In addition to training more tea workers, they also hope to work together to expand tea consumption among younger generations. /CGTN photo‍

Nowadays many Chinese businessmen have seized the chance to innovate different flavors of tea, and bubble tea has become one of the most popular drinks among China's younger generations.