Fangcun - a revisit

If you are into Chinese Tea and you happen to be in Guangzhou, it is essential you make a visit to Fangcun tea wholesale centre. You will get to see more than 2000 tea merchants selling all things tea and the amount and variety of tea and tea accessories sold there will make any tea drinker enthusiast go gaga for a very long time.

As usual, we had dim sum every morning at the chinese restaurants around the hotel. A dim sum meal with a choice of chinese tea costs US$20 for 6 of us. A dim sum breakfast can be quite filling in that we only get hungry again at around 2-3pm. My kids were pretty fascinated by the piglet red bean buns and made a couple of reorders to fulfilled their amusement.

Well anyway, you can easily get to Fangcun by subway. Its clean, convenient and fast. We used the subway every time we travel in Guangzhou......even the express train station from Guangzhou to Hong Kong (Guangzhou East station) has a subway stop at the basement. One word of advice; it gets extremely crowded on Sundays. As Sunday is a rest day, the trains get very packed. Be prepared to get shoved and pushed on Sunday. I have been on many subway trains in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Taipei, Bangkok and Singapore and I can say that the level of 'pushing and shoving' here on Sunday can be pretty intensive. I reasoned the capacity level of the trains were exceeded on these peak hour weekends. Weekday subway rides were however very comfortable.

Back to tea. Fangcun is the place to go for Chinese tea in Guangzhou. I would like to stress again.....you must know your tea you are buying. Be aware of the relative prices and always sample the tea before a purchase. Mostly cash sales even you are buying 50000rmb of stuff.

One of the bigger tea complexes there housed a commemorative giant pu erh cake. Weighs a ton I think. The room even had a guard to prevent people like me taking this cake home as a souvenir.

There were also shops that sells dried floral and fruit infused tea. There were rose buds, dried citrus orange slices and many other wonderful smelling stuff which I could not identify. I bought a bag of dried Iranian rose buds and another bag of unopened chrysanthemum buds.