2006 Sanhetang - Xizihao "Taiji"

Lei is heavily pregnant at the moment.  She is 6.5 months through, and so has 2.5 months to go (all being well), and yet is absolutely enormous.  I think our second child is going to be a big'un.  I think I've mentioned before that he's a boy, which will be great fun for Xiaohu and a blessing for us both.  As an amusing consequence of working in biomedical research, Lei gets plenty of ultrasonic equipment tested on her by our overexcited doctoral students.  The upside of this is that we get 3-dimensional baby scans in utero; the new baby looks almost exactly the same as Xiaohu did at the same gestational age, even down to the structure of the nose.

The good doctor and I are off to the USA today*.  If you're going to IEEE EMBC 2012 in San Diego, then send us a message!  This time, I get to be the "partner" - Lei has been invited to give a lecture and chair a session, and so I will be humbly presenting a separate paper (which is also hers!) in a parallel session as a second author.  It's good to be put in one's place.

I leave you in the capable hands of Sanhetang.

*The only other time we have been to the United States was for a conference in Montana. It was cold, but entirely excellent.  We saw bison.

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Following my recent communications with my Eastern European chums, it is with great thanks to long-time teachum TA from Slovakia that I sat down to try this "taiji" cake from Xizihao.

I recall that when these cakes came out, I was travelling to another city to see my new wife - we lived apart for the first year of our marriage, while she finished her PhD.  However, after three hours on the train, I got to spend every week-end with her.  These days, I have the luxury of seeing her every day, and thinking back to that time when we were apart reminds me of how lucky I am.  It's quite something to look back and see how dramatically life has changed.

Set against that background, the Taiji cakes from Xizihao were teas that I always wanted to taste, but never got around to it, and the price of which would have then been far beyond my means (as a humble DPhil student myself, at the time).

You know the drill with Xizihao.  They typically look amazing, and this cake is no different: the long leaves (pictured above) have gathered some redness / darkness through age, and they give out a very decent sweet scent.

I didn't take any photographs of the soup, and so you will have to imagine the heavy orange colour looking cheerful in my small little white cup.  This is a Laobanzhang cake, and the heavy slug of sweetness that it delivers to the throat is very decent.  As you might expect (and hope), it has the complexity of good honey, which persists throughout the mouth.  It is a penetrating tea, and we are reminded once again that Mr. Sanhetang makes reliable cakes.  His record may be somewhat variable, but he certainly made solid cakes back in 2006.

It's probably for the best that I cannot remember how much this tea costs.  Currently, it hangs in the balance between the green nature of its youth, and the darkness of age.  The storage, presumably at Houde headquarters in the southern United States of America, has been good to the cake.  It remains substantial.

Given that this cake is the black-wrapper version, I imagine that it is the "yin", whereas the white-wrapper version would presumably be the "yang", if the usual symbology for the "taiji" is used (i.e., the famous yin-yang circle).  I've no idea of the differences between the two, but this black version is fine by me.  If you own a cake or two of this, I assume that you are very happy with your purchase!

It reminds me of a very special time in my life, and it is a great pleasure to revisit.  Thanks again to TA for the trip back to those student years.