My go-to tea is Japanese sencha, but I can’t deny the pull of Chinese greens.

This morning, I had biluochun (or pi lo chun), “green snail spring”, one of the well-known Chinese green teas. While enjoying the tea, I read about it, and here, I found a legend about the tea:

Pi Lo Chun originates in the Dongting Mountain region on Jiangsu province. These days, it is also grown in other parts of China, most notably Zhejiang and Sichuan provinces, but the ones from the Dongting area are by far the best. Biluochun from other regions has larger and less uniform leaves and a nuttier and fruitier flavor.

As mentioned, the name translates as Green Snail Spring, which refers to the shape and the early harvest time. But that wasn’t the original name. This tea was first called “scary fragrance”.

Legend has it that a tea picker carried some of the tea leaves between her breasts when she ran out of space in her basket and after a while, her body heat warmed the leaves and they began to emit a strong smell.

It was renamed to the much more pleasant current name during the Qing Dynasty. An emperor visited the area and loved the tea, but did not think the name was appropriate. He renamed it to the current “Green Snail Spring.”

Drinking tea is pleasure enough. But sipping from a cup, thinking of a story, something that might have happened or not, a long long time ago, even if the story contains tea carried around between the breasts, mixing with the heat and, I’m guessing, the sweat — I don’t really know if that’s supposed to be attractive or a tiny bit disgusting… Anyway, with a myth of its own attached to it, you drink age, you drink centuries, you drink tradition. A sudden awareness of where the tea was grown, the generations of cultivation it went through, transforms tea drinking into a cultural experience, giving you a sense of tradition and of the realm of the simple things that remain unchanged, and can be relied on as often as you need them.