Potted philosophy from a Singapore tea master

VERNON SMALL

From his podium, part stage, part altar, Singapore tea master Vincent Low makes you wonder just how many sins you regularly commit before breakfast.

At our place the wake-me-up cuppa is Earl Grey tea, made with boiling water poured over teabags in a large mass-produced pot, downed with a dash of milk and sugar.

To Mr Low's mind, that breaks almost all the cardinal sins of tea appreciation.

His sermon is delivered with the certainty of the pulpit.

Tea should be made in a small, fired clay pot, sipped without additives from small drinking cups. The water should be heated to 75 deg C - not boiled - and poured over the tea. It is then immediately drained before the pot, stuffed with the best leaf, is topped up to "brew."

"It takes time to understand who is a good and who is a bad person - it is the same with tea," the Chinese say.

If you want to know if a tea is a good tea, let it get cool. A good tea will smell good even cold.

It should be consumed for pleasure, not to slake your thirst, and is to be appreciated in the same way as fine wine.

Moreover, it has the same helpful health-giving chemicals that make red wine in moderation good for the heart.

For the connoisseur, teabags are out - "sweepings and dust," says the maestro - while Earl Grey is beyond the pale. The bergamot oil that gives it its distinctive flavour assaults the guru's tastebuds.

"Dishwater," Mr Low proclaims with a slight smile and a curl of the lip.

Despite the array of specialty teas on the supermarket shelf, there is only one tea plant. And make no bones about it, we have a 4000-year history of Chinese tea drinking to thank for it.

Green tea and black tea do not come from different plants but are variants based on the length of time the leaf is roasted.

Peppermint tea, and all the other range of flavoured "teas," are merely infusions or flavourings (although he makes an exception for the flavouring in jasmine tea).

Clearly, the West's tea-drinking habits bemuse and slightly scandalise him. But he insists the reverence afforded by the Chinese to the appreciation of tea is not, as it is sometimes described, a religious festival but a social one.

You could easily be forgiven for making the same mistake after visiting his teahouse in a meticulously restored two-storey Chinatown shophouse "shrine" to tea, filled with a bewildering array of pots and equipment needed to make it.

For $S12 ($S25 with Tinsum lunch included) the Yixing Xuan Teahouse (roughly translated as "a small happy relaxing house") offers all-comers, including misguided Westerners, a sample of tea appreciation. It is an amazing half-hour or so watching someone so fascinated by what we take for granted.

The names of the teas roll lovingly off his tongue - the exquisite Oolong, Maofeng from south of the Yangtze and Shandong from the north.

Tea, he says, is a symbol of prosperity. Only a well-off society could afford the luxury of rituals and the fine appreciation of tea in an atmosphere of relaxation, conversation and digestion.

Just to learn the basics of tea-making takes 21 hours of lessons a week.

It is held that the more important tea drinking became, the more prosperous was the dynasty in Chinese history.

Harry, aged 9, schooled to be culturally polite for the occasion, sat through it in reverential boredom but it clearly had an effect. He now regularly berates the adults in the family, "That is not tea appreciation," whenever we revert to our philistine brew.

* Vincent Low's Yixing Xuan Teahouse is at 30/32 Tanjong Pagar Rd. Talks of 45 minutes start at 11 am daily except Sundays. Bookings can be made on ph (0065) 224 6961 for a minimum of five people.

* Vernon Small took tea in Singapore with the help of Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Tourism Board.