Three visits to the Bangkok Chinatown

 

I write about visiting this area all the time, last to buy tea for gifts for people for Christmas, not that long ago.  The third visit was on that theme, buying tea as gifts for my wife to take for people while traveling, on an outing back to Hawaii, where we met and lived together in grad school awhile back.  Let's describe the outings in order though:

First visit, street food in Chinatown, buying tea to give to a monk

My wife and I went to Chinatown about three weeks ago now, in part to buy tea as a gift, but really to eat at a street food outlet with a friend of hers.  The Thai oolong for a gift we bought at the Sen Xing Fa shop, here:

The kids just weren't with us on that visit; this is from the most recent outing, which they did join.  Standard Thai light rolled oolong is ok, it's just not typically exceptional.  Above average range versions from Taiwan are better, and to me the higher end from Vietnam seems better.

Eye with her friend, and with me.  People make too big a deal out of how interesting and delicious street food is, when food courts or food shops sell roughly the same things, but that bowl of noodles and pork balls and the rest was fine.  I didn't get a picture of it but a shaved ice, beans, dried fruit, and longan juice was even better.  The feel of Chinatown is the thing, all the sights and sounds together.  They sell things that you don't see elsewhere, like fresh roasted chestnuts, but beyond that it's just a really interesting and diverse range.

Second visit:  visiting a temple with Sergey, of Moychay, and Chinatown dinner

Oddly this didn't relate to tea, even though we visited with one of the most interesting and personable vendors I know (the founder and owner of Moychay).  We toured that temple that I keep bringing up, Wat Pho, with Sergey, and went to Chinatown for a casual dinner afterwards.  Why mention it here?  Mainly to show a couple pictures of the temple outing.

Chinatown is 2 or 3 stops away from Wat Pho on the metro (subway), depending on which side you go to, so it's a quick 15 minute commute between the two.  We don't live near a metro stop so that doesn't work as well as a trip from our house.  I'll often take a river ferry there, since there is a river stop not so far from our house, which makes me feel like I'm on vacation.  I've walked from Chinatown to Wat Pho a few times and it's not that far, and although it looks a little rough in spots in the middle, as one place where homeless people sleep, I never felt like anyone was going to cause me any problems there.

My kids really enjoyed meeting Sergey.  We don't meet tea contacts for those sorts of outings, but when we do meet people on outings for different reasons the kids usually tolerate it instead of enjoying it.  I see it as a really good sign of positive character when someone can easily connect with children, as he did, or with animals.

Some people might think that for a neutral, objective, journalism media oriented blogger I'm a bit too familiar with Moychay, and it's that I don't see my tea blogger role in that way, like a major paper food reviewer role.  I think personal connections don't affect my descriptions of teas during reviews, but it would be normal if they did, and readers would be justified in assuming that it might work out like that.  In the last Moychay aged sheng comparison post I said that I liked the $100 cake more than the $150 cake, so apparently I'm not extending that to taking a complete party line, echoing what a marketing department would probably say.  

If anyone is concerned about this theme I also really like Cindy of Wuyi Origin, Anna of Kinnari Tea (of Laos), Rishi of Gopaldhara, and Geoff of Hatvala, and I tend to only express that all their teas are good, because I think they are.  The Jip Eu Chinatown shop owners seem like an extra aunt and uncle to me, even though we're not that far apart in age, but you have to be careful about selection there, because they sell a broad range of types and quality levels.

Third outing:  buying tea for gifts

My kids finally met those shop owners from Jip Eu I love visiting, and vice-versa.

only the one that never poses for pictures would pose; strange

It's really rare to find inexpensive versions of tea that are also medium quality level, as those were, pretty good teas, punching way above their weight for value.  I described it in this way in a comment about it:

I use quality as a broad blanket term with no clear meaning, not really even a clearly defined range of meaning. If I taste that shui xian beside a high quality wuyi yancha version a lot of specific meaning would come to mind. Such a tea would be more intense, complex, refined, and balanced, and it would brew cleaner from early rounds into a longer cycle of infusions than this one. One hard to grasp aromatic quality tends to stand out, a liqueur or perfume like aspect in better versions. But it's ok tea still, it's nice.

That makes it sound more limited in appeal than it really is, given that it could easily pass for a decent version of Da Hong Pao (or Shui Xian, what it is).  There I'm saying that good value 40 or 50 cents a gram versions are that much better than that tea, which costs under 5 cents a gram, but it's probably on par with a lot of what is selling for $10-15 per 50 grams in Western website outlets, at around ten times the price. Exceptions and value like that are really rare in Chinatown shops; you would have to try teas for years to accidentally run across one.  I can appreciate even more flawed teas than this though, but it's nice having it both ways, experiencing that value and tea quality.

The other tea, for gifts, is a jasmine green tea, a version they make themselves from a decent basic Chinese green tea.

We stopped by Sen Xing Fa again, that other shop, to check out tea bricks I didn't get around to trying that first time, due to being in a hurry.  I was just there to grab some Thai oolong as a gift the first time (which tends to sell for $10-15 for 200 grams, still inexpensive, but it's not so different than medium quality Tie Guan Yin, just ok for what it is).  The bricks I thought might be random aged sheng, which is an interesting scope to check out, well worth buying if the character is interesting and pricing is moderate.

it makes you curious, doesn't it?  air conditioning is not ideal related to storage conditions themes, but it could still be ok.

It turns out there were three kinds of bricks there, an aged sheng, what I expected it all to be, some Fu brick tea (hei cha), and an aged version of Oriental Beauty, which is unusual (Taiwanese highly oxidized oolong).  I would try the aged sheng then, right?  It didn't work out that way.

aged Oriental Beauty brick

The shop owner suggested that we try the Oriental Beauty, so we did.  It was 8 years old, if I remember right, and turned out to be quite pleasant, fruity and rich, complex, well-balanced, maybe picking up extra depth due to aging.  The catch:  it was selling for around $200 for a half-kilo brick.  

That's probably actually about right for what that is (40 cents a gram; it sounds expensive, but go price aged Oriental Beauty and see what turns up).  My wife joined us soon after and there was no way I was spending $200 on tea.  I wouldn't have anyway; if a sheng brick happened to be $50 or 60, and novel and pleasant, I would buy that (and I think it was more like $45, 1500 baht), but I've been spending too much on tea lately to go in for a standard $90-100 low cost aged cake.  If I buy any of it using cash and my wife isn't there it's like it never happened, no paper trail to see, but with her joining us that entire theme went out the window.

That Oriental Beauty would make a good gift tea, if someone wasn't keeping track of what they spent, which isn't how it works when I give people tea as a gift, which is why those others were at the opposite end of the pricing scale.  It had a deep honey sweetness, with lots of rich fruit showing through, and warm spice tones, exactly what pretty good OB is supposed to be.  I really wanted to move on to buying either that partly aged sheng, or at least get a modest Dayi cake, to serve the role of a paying customer, but three other people were waiting in the car for us to finish, so I had to put off that next step. 

What is the take-away from all this, the running thread?  I like Chinatown?  My kids were pointing out how it felt like we were on vacation while there that second time, even though we just stopped by for a dinner.  Chinatown in the day, that last visit, is noisy and smelly, which I love, but at night it feels less like a Bangkok wholesale oriented sales area and more like a different country, like China.  Oddly parts of China lack the rough edged feel of the Bangkok Chinatown version, even though others would surely be rougher.  This is a typical market and shop area in Shenzhen, the last place I've visited in China, 3 years ago:

That whole city is a new economic development zone that didn't exist when the Bangkok Chinatown shops already looked exactly as they do now in the 1950s and 60s, so it's not an equivalent comparison.  Hong Kong looks more like how people think of China and Chinatowns:

Hong Kong is cool looking, lots of parts of it.