Sit at the tea shop
Han Xu
"I went two or three miles, and there were four or five tea shops. There are six or seven towers, eighty or ninety flowers. "A poem of bamboo branches in the Qing Dynasty, a miniature of the market picture, a vivid sketch of the old Chengdu tea shop. The memories scattered in the old tea shops in old Chengdu are actually the philosophical relationship between the market and life.
Chengdu people love tea, but they don't like to drink tea. Old Chengdu people love to say: "Go wow!" Go for tea!" Don't talk about teahouses, teahouses are the name of northerners, and old Chengdu people prefer to call it a tea shop. A sitting word makes tea and tea shops come alive. Sitting in the tea shop is a plot that old Chengdu people can't get around.
The front of the Chen Jin Tea Shop on Tiexiangsi Water Street in Chengdu is full of people basking in the sun and drinking tea for leisure (Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Shen Bohan, source: Xinhua News Agency)
Tea, make tea, make good tea.
Sit, please, please.
Just like the poem of the genius Li Tiaoyuan of the Qing Dynasty, one is tea, the other is sitting, and together it is sitting in a tea shop. The old Chengdu people have really shaped the tea shop into an indispensable way of life, and it has evolved into a label of Chengdu culture, which cannot be torn or torn off.
From a historical point of view, Chengdu's leisure is largely due to sitting in a tea shop. Before the Song Dynasty, Chengdu people loved to play and drink, and after the Song Dynasty, Chengdu people loved to play and eat tea. The way of life that began in the Song Dynasty has stubbornly taken root in Chengdu and has never been affected by the change of dynasty. Even if the legendary Zhang Xianzhong almost killed all the Sichuan people, this social style was preserved unharmed, and then quietly assimilated the outsiders who filled Sichuan with Huguang. Therefore, Chengdu's leisure is a self-contained tea shop, and this kind of leisure that goes deep into the bone marrow can only be solved in Chengdu.
At the Heming Tea House in Chengdu People's Park, people are drinking tea and chatting for leisure (Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Shen Bohan on June 30, 2021, source: Xinhuanet)
It has been said, "The best place to get to know Paris is in its bars." Those who say this clearly have a back-to-basics understanding of Paris, where the world's most famous perfumes, fashion, cosmetics and French women who combine perfumes, fashion and cosmetics can be best interpreted in the bar.
So what about Chengdu? There is no doubt that it should be a tea shop. One street and one tea shop was once the unique scenery of old Chengdu, Li Jieren wrote in "Before the Storm": "There are many tea shops in old Chengdu like this, on average, there is always one on a street...... Chengdu people step out of the house can not walk a few steps to have a tea shop, the tea shop in the old Chengdu is almost all the spiritual and cultural life of the people, eat tea, watch plays, listen to books, put the Xuanlongmen array are in the tea shop. As Mr. painted, the tea shops in old Chengdu are full of all kinds of people, elegant and vulgar, vividly condensing the lives of Chengdu people in the tea shops that can be seen everywhere. Therefore, if you don't have the love of sitting in a tea shop, you can't be considered an authentic Chengdu person. If you want to understand the connotation of the leisure city, you must sit in a tea shop. As soon as I sat down, the fireworks in Chengdu that were so thick that I couldn't dissolve them naturally came to my face. The most Chengdu gaiwan tea, mahjong, long cards, vegetarian pepper mixed sauce noodles, and even leaf smoke are clearly staged in front of you. The atmosphere has a high level of acceptance and makes you blend in without even realizing it. You can read a book or read a newspaper by yourself, bake the sun in winter and hide in summer; You can also have three friends and four friends in the south and north of the world to swing the dragon gate array to rush the shell, a burst of impassioned, a burst of laughter; You can also call an ear picker, with a tilt of the head and a squint of the eyes, and vividly present the expression of enjoyment between the eyebrows. This kind of leisure is so comfortable, so comfortable, and so comfortable!
Foreign friends experience Sichuan tea culture (Photo courtesy of Sichuan Tea Brand Promotion Association, source: Sichuan Daily)
My favorite thing is to sit in the tea shop in a daze. Emptied his thoughts, arrogantly occupied two bamboo chairs, one to sit, one to stilt, in a lazy half-leaning and half-lying daze, no need to entertain others, no need to entertain himself, just empty head, don't want to do nothing, unscrupulously squander time, so that the busy tired body and mind relax. Sometimes when I think about it, it is really a very happy thing to be able to take a break and be in a daze quietly in the fast-paced city life. And this kind of happiness can not be found at home, it seems that solitude, tea, and daze at home often breed boredom and loneliness.
Nostalgia, the tea shop of Daci Temple, the tea shop of the Cultural Palace, the tea shop of Xiaheba, the tea shop of Da'an Bridge, and the tea shop of People's Park.
More and more modern cities, more and more big teahouses, and the tea shops that used to be all over the corners of Chengdu have slowly disappeared from sight at some point. The era of tea shops in old Chengdu has finally passed, and the old tea shops in memory are no longer placed on the busy streets, and the days when the soul of the city was scattered in the tea bowl are fixed in the memory. Even if the tea shops in Daci Temple and People's Park are still there, it seems that they can't sit down with the original taste, but are more like landmarks that exist for remembrance, and there is no longer any casual taste.
The deepest impression is the tea shop of Daci Temple in the early years, when Chengdu people had no resistance to going to Daci Temple to eat tea, and they all loved to get together to drill here, regardless of gender, regardless of occupation. The tea shop is spread out behind the commissary, near the fence. Enter from the back mountain gate on this side of Dongfeng Road, go straight, and go through a long corridor and a large hall to arrive. The main hall is a patio that is not too big, and it is the territory of the tea shop. The flower shelves on the patio are always covered with morning glories, zeme, and grape vines, which shade the sky and the sun, and it is cool even in summer. I love coming here for tea in the summer, and I like the feeling that time slows down, slows down and gets boring, but I want to be bored forever. The cicada is tirelessly noisy and does not get annoyed.
Citizens in Chengdu Daci Temple relax in the teahouse (Photo by Hua Xiaofeng, source: Sichuan Daily)
Chengdu's cultural celebrities also love to squeeze to Daci Temple to drink tea. If you take a detour to the bathroom, you can see Liushahe chatting energetically with a few old men under the ginkgo tree. I once seriously discussed with a group of friends in the cultural circle why people in the circle love to go to the tea shop of Daci Temple, and everyone agrees with one point of view, that is, there is no why, just like to go.
Later, Jiechen wrote "City Affairs", and there happened to be a paragraph describing the tea shop of Daci Temple. That long-lost sense of familiarity was instantly regained by the words in the book. As mentioned in the book, the Daci Temple Tea Shop is as vivid as ever, and this vividness is like a body temperature for Chengdu people who are now forty to eighty or ninety years old.
In the winter of the previous year, two old friends invited each other, saying that they were going to Longtan Temple to eat baba tea. Walking to the ground, I knew that sense of déjà vu had returned. Find a place where the sun can get it, and each person drags two bamboo chairs with backrests to sit on. Well! This is the correct posture of the old Chengdu. The master walked over, and the iron boat shook off, and the blue and white porcelain tea bowls slid into the tea boat one by one. The master pulled his throat and shouted, "Boiling water is hot!" The long-spouted copper kettle was lifted high, and the smoking boiling water rushed out, and the fragrance of tea wafted along the steaming heat. Pull the lid twice and take a small sip to make a "sizzling" sound. The tea was swallowed, and they all let out a soft "oh". Everyone looked at each other, and I said, "This is the right place!"
Not long ago, the "Chengdu Daily" wrote that Chengdu has created a market life circle. On May 8, 2024, the "Chengdu Old Teahouse Archives" declared by the National Archives Administration of China was selected into the "Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Regional Register" at the 10th meeting of the UNESCO Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Regional Committee, along with three archival documents: "Engraving from the Collection of the Derge Printing Academy" and "Huizhou Millennium Clan Archive". I think that such a pure, pyrotechnic cultural phenomenon as sitting in a tea shop should awaken, right? Maybe our tea shop is coming back again.
All in all, a foreigner who has never sat in a tea shop is considered to have never been to Chengdu; Chengdu people who have never sat in a tea shop don't want to say that you know the city. As for the reason, only those who have sat in a tea shop know.
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Source: Sichuan Provincial Office of Local Chronicles
Author: Han Xu (Editor-in-Chief of the Local Chronicles Office of Jinjiang District, Chengdu, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of the Sichuan Provincial Association for the Promotion of Literature and Art Communication, and Director of the Sichuan Prose Literature Association. He has signed a contract with the starting point Chinese network and published the long-form fantasy elementary school "Red Moon Sect Master"; Editor-in-chief of the magazine "Taste Jinjiang"; He has edited and published more than 30 documentary works such as "Passionate Years" and "Chengdu Chunxi Road"; Presided over the compilation of nearly 20 books on local chronicles and historical geography)
Pictured: Fang Zhi Sichuan