Late morning - a plain lunch first
Tea in Xi'an is drunk sitting down and talking, so the day starts with an ordinary lunch near the Drum Tower - a bowl of noodles or a plate of dumplings - and then moves to the table where the afternoon will actually be spent. Your guide uses the meal to set out the two tea geographies that meet in this city: the tea-horse road southwest towards Tibet, where brick tea was traded for horses, and the ten-thousand-li tea road that ran northwest through Shaanxi to the markets of Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Russia. Both routes explain the shape of the drink: it had to survive a journey measured in months, and it had to be countable at the border, which is why the leaf was pressed rather than loose and why the weight of a brick was a matter of tax as much as of taste. Vegetarian lunch options are straightforward and can be arranged on the day.
Afternoon - the brick and its golden flowers
The tea of the northwest is compressed for a reason. From the seventeenth century, leaf from Hunan and Hubei was carried to Jingyang, north of Xi'an, and pressed there into fu zhuan cha, Fu brick tea - dense blocks of about two kilos that survived months of pack animal and cart traffic, could be split with a knife, and could be counted and taxed at the border posts. Jingyang became the processing centre because of its water and its climate. The characteristic that makes the brick recognisable is jin hua, 'golden flowers': the yellow colonies of a mould that grow inside the compressed leaf during the slow drying, turning a bitter tea sweet, earthy and smooth. For a long time merchants treated the flowering as a fault; it is now the mark that a brick has been made and stored properly.
Afternoon - the teahouse itself
The session runs in a courtyard teahouse in the Hui quarter, around a wooden room with low tables, brass kettles and a stove kept at several temperatures. The service is gai wan, the lidded bowl: leaf in the bowl, water poured over it, the lid used to hold the leaf back and to scent the tea, and the bowl refilled without being asked until you turn the lid over to signal that you have finished. Alongside the fu brick you will taste Shaanxi green tea from the south of the province, and the sweet Hui version - rock sugar, dried longan and jujube, sesame, walnut and rose - which is a meal in itself. Tea snacks come with it: crystal cake from Weinan, honeyed san dao pastry, date cakes, peanuts and melon seeds.
Cultural Insight - the teahouse as an institution
Before the 1990s the teahouse in a quarter like this one did more than serve tea. It was where work was found in the morning, where disputes were talked through with a third party present, where a letter was read aloud to someone who could not read it, and where the afternoon passed. The Hui quarter's teahouses were also part of the trading life of the caravan routes. What remains is the sitting and the talking, which is still the point of the drink - and it is worth noticing that tea is not generally served with meals in the Guanzhong plain, in the way it is in the south. Here it is what you do when you stop.
Afternoon - a short walk to finish
The session ends with a walk through Huajue Lane to the Great Mosque - founded in the eighth century, rebuilt under the Ming, and Chinese in every architectural detail except its function, with timber halls, moon gates and a pagoda-shaped minaret - and back out to the food lanes, where the evening stalls are being set up and the smell of grilled lamb starts to take over the street. The mosque is a working one, so the visit is arranged around prayer times and shoulders must be covered. You can be dropped at your hotel or stay on for dinner; the guide will say where to eat, and the walk out through the quarter at dusk is the best ten minutes of the day.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.
