Tea in Shanghai is not one scene but two, and both are worth an afternoon. The old city around Yu Garden keeps the classical teahouse, a building designed for sitting still with a pot of tea and watching other people do the same; the rest of the city has developed a tea culture closer to specialty coffee, with single-origin leaves, brewing by weight and temperature, and long communal tables. The two share an obsession with the leaf and almost nothing else.
The classical teahouse
The best-known example is the Huxinting Teahouse, a two-storey timber pavilion built out over the pond in the middle of the Yu Garden bazaar and reached by zigzag bridges. It has been in continuous use for tea since the nineteenth century, and the format is unchanged: you choose a tea from the list, it arrives in a covered cup or a small pot with a thermos of hot water to top up, and you sit as long as you want. Windows look into the garden on one side and out over the bazaar on the other. Similar, plainer teahouses operate inside the garden itself and in the surrounding lanes, usually for a few tens of yuan a head.
The modern tea bar
Elsewhere in the city, tea has been rediscovered by a younger audience. Shops serve single-origin green, oolong and pu'er teas brewed to order, with the origin, the picking season and the brewing temperature on the menu, and often with tasting flights of three or four teas. The setting is closer to a design cafe - minimal furniture, concrete counters, careful lighting - and the prices are correspondingly higher. This is also where you will find good Chinese tea to take home, sold in sealed packets with the harvest date on them rather than in decorative tins.
Practical notes
In a classical teahouse the price is per person and includes unlimited hot water, so a single order buys you an unhurried hour. Snacks are usually bought separately and are often sweet, salted or dried fruit alongside the tea. In the modern bars, expect to pay per pot or per flight, and ask for a recommendation rather than guessing at names. The old-city teahouses are busiest in the late morning and at weekends; the modern bars fill in the later afternoon and stay open into the evening.
