Ending a Session

When you get down to it, this is an article about cleaning. Bear with me for a moment.

Before we get to the real point of the article, a story springs to mind. A few years back, I was visiting one of Beijing's universities. North-west Beijing has more universities than you could ever imagine, and many of them are the nation's very best. It's like having Oxbridge, Harvard, and Yale all next to each other, on one another's doorsteps. It's a truly awesome sight, particularly given the vast scale of large Chinese universities, where each is more like a small town than a campus.

One day, I found myself having tea with an elderly professor in his office. His English was much better than my Chinese (which isn't too hard to achieve), and we got on well because of our shared love of tea. I liked him especially because he uses precisely the same Hengfu tea-table as we do at home. He insisted on calling me "tea professor", which I took with a huge pinch of salt, given (i) I'm a yangguizi [foreigner, lit. foreign ghost!], and also far too young to be a proper professor, (ii) his encyclopaedical knowledge of tea, and (iii) the tendency for Chinese to flatter their guests like no other race on earth without justification. Despite the entirely undeserved flattery, we had some good tea.

The one thing that struck me about his brewing was that he didn't clean up. Anything, at all. The pot looked so grim it must have been used daily for years. No sultry shine, no lovely luster, no perfect patina. Just grimness and stains. I wanted to reach over and give it a rub with my sleeve, but stopped myself. The words of the drug dealer from Pulp Fiction came to mind: "You don't mess with another man's car. You just don't do it."

Like most Chinese I've met, he didn't bother using a hulu [filter] - he just inverted the teapot and let it rest in the gongdaobei [fairness cup / pitcher]. The gongdaobei was made of glass, and was approximately as grim as the teapot. The last time that glass was clean was when it was bought.

The tea was, of course, very good and entirely unaffected by the grimness of the vessels.

This is something that continued through my various tea experiences in China. Though some vendors made an effort to at least wash out their gaiwan once in a while, the majority were quite slap-dash about cleaning.

This is odd, because the Chinese are typically quite fastidious about cleanliness, in their own way. Certainly, most of the sanity facilities look as if they are about to grow new forms of interesting sentient fungi previously unknown to man, but this is a race of people for whom collecting piles of clean slippers at the door to give to one's guests is the norm, so as not to bring in dust from the outside world. Eating vessels are usually meticulously scrubbed. Trying to dip your own chopsticks into a communal dish is liable to result in a stern look at best, or a justified Wudang-style chop to the throat at worst.

It just doesn't extend to teapots.

Back home, I consider the tidying up after a tea session to be an integral part of the proceedings. The show isn't over until the calorifically-resplendent matriarch sings, and the tea session isn't over until the pot has been wiped (gently, while warm and damp), the gongdaobei has been buffed to a gleaming shine, and the tea-leaves packed off to the compost heap (pictured below).

It somehow doesn't feel right, somehow feels disrespectful, to leave everything smeared and dirty. Besides the slightly obsessive-compulsive overtones of my desire to clean my tea-gear, it makes for good sense: if you leave your tea-table wet, without adequately wiping it down and removing water from the drip-tray, it will rot within months. With a good rub and clean after each session, our chapan [wooden tea tray] looks almost as good as the day it was new, and it's quite a few years old now, and has consequently seen a lot of action.

Similarly, if you don't clean your tea-brush, heaven knows what manner of unspeakable evil might be lurking within those dark bristles, waiting to be introduced to your lovely teaware in future.

It doesn't take long to perform an adequate clean, perhaps a few minutes at most, and everything is a joy to behold and ready for the next use, as well as being potentially extended in lifespan.

I'm also quite keen on cleaning our tea equipment from a Buddhist point-of-view. It doesn't do to leave your equipment in a filthy state when you're hoping to achieve an atmosphere conducive to relaxation and mindfulness, and there are a number of surprisingly lengthy passages in various Buddhist writings about the benefits of a good old-fashioned clean. "Cleanliness is next to Godliness", so the old saying has it.

I look at the typical character of the Chinese (of which forms half my family, these days) and Japanese (of which I am familiar from my studies), and cannot surpress the thought that the national characteristics are evident even in this smallest aspect of the tea ritual: the Japanese is clean, orderly, perfected centuries past and brought to life with each enaction, while the Chinese is, well... rather like the charming old professor with whom I started the article. Endearingly chaotic.