Gunpowder & White Jade Tiger

It has been a while since our last blog post, so thank you for sticking with us! The delay was in part due to having to locate the book we wanted to do (we thought we had a copy! We didn’t, and this was a review we had planned since before the blog came to life), but also because life got a little chaotic. But we’re here! For now, we are switching to bi-monthly instead of posting four times a week. We already have our next blog post planned, and moving forward I’ll try to post more tea and bookish things to our instagram to fill the void while you wait for our reviews!
But, back to what matters – tea! And books, of course!

This week we decided to feature Silk Road’s Gunpowder. The great thing about Silk Road is that it’s local to Victoria, British Columbia, and the book White Jade Tiger takes place practically next door to the teashop! Astra will touch on this a little later in her review!

​This particular review will be short, because it’s a fairly classic green tea. The tea itself is exceptional, and if you are a tea lover like us then you will appreciate the nuances it has to offer. If you are less of a tea enthusiast, then you might think – hey, what’s so special? It’s just a green tea!

If you think that then you are wrong.

A Chinese green tea, the smokiness that Gunpowder offers is a trait I often look for in my green teas. I find it very relaxing, and being a summer child with a knack for being nostalgic, anything that reminds me of my childhood summers is a quick way to my heart. Gunpowder takes me back to the nights we used to spend around the campfire. While lapsang tastes like a campfire, Gunpowder tastes more like it has been infused with smoke while still retaining all the wonderful aspects of a high quality green tea.

At first when I brewed this tea I thought that I had oversteeped it! I had made a fairly small pot this time, so I was worried I had been off in my ratios. I hesitantly sipped the tea to see if it was usable, and – mmmmmn! It was absolutely the perfect brew! Normally when steeping a green tea if the tea turns a darker yellow-green or almost amber colour (like this tea did) it means it is horrendously oversteeped. As I have mentioned many times before, there are always exceptions. Gunpowder is one of those exceptions.

For this tea I recommend steeping for about a minute, or a minute and twenty seconds if you like to push your luck. This tea is a great transitional tea, perfect for the cooler spring nights right before summer bursts on the scene. As always, I recommend 90 degree water for your greens!

Overall, this is a wonderful tea for anyone who likes simple, traditional, but flavourful teas! I don't recommend this tea if you have caffeine sensitives, however.

If you haven't tried this tea yet, or ever been to Silk Road, you can check it out here!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This week, we pair Silk Road's Gunpowder Green Tea with Julie Lawson's White Jade Tiger for a bit of hometown nostalgia. There are not a great many books set in the City of Victoria, but this one specifically deals with locales that I grew up in: Sooke, Douglas Street (and the bus rides into downtown), and Fisgard Street with "Canada's Oldest Chinatown". This book was one of my required readings in grade 4, and I hadn't reread it since then...until now. While a simple middle-grade book, the references to the "never-ending store" in Chinatown, the views of the Parliament Buildings all lit up at night, and even the historical description of the Inner Harbour which perfectly match the extant photos of the area in those days give credence to this historical fantasy. Lawson's details bring the vistas to life, and for those familiar with the area: you'll be nodding along. This sets the stage for an equally believable presentation of 1880s Victoria and mainland British Columbia, with gold-panning claims, railway worker camps, frontiers towns, and steam ferries.  

We follow Jasmine, a young girl from Sooke, as she becomes part of a 2000 year old Chinese legacy thanks to the ghost of Bright Jade and her missing white jade tiger pendant. In the story, Jasmine's aunt asks her to pick up some Gunpowder Tea from Chinatown—matching perfectly with this week's selection. Silk Road is a veritable tea institution in Victoria, located on Government at Fisgard. Inspired by the Chinese Silk Road tea merchants, and set in a heritage building that's part of Chinatown, their Gunpowder Tea is a rich and heady green tea with a smoky flavour that blends perfectly with the smoky transitions for Jasmine as she walks back in time through Fan Tan Alley, only a few doors down from Silk Road Tea Shop. 

As Jasmine finds herself sliding through time, present day collides with 1880s Victoria. Chinese immigrants were flooding into British Columbia to work on the CPR railway. Jasmine navigates very different social expectations by dressing up in a classic set of "coolie" clothes (a straw wide-brimmed hat, cotton jacket with frog clasps, cotton shoes, and loose pants), and soon discovers wearing it helps her to both blend in and understand Cantonese. While now considered a pejorative, Lawson uses the term throughout the book in its accepted Southeast Asian reference to mean a Chinese labourer, especially on the railway.

The MG narrative focuses on issues of holding tightly to one's individuality while still honouring one's heritage, though Lawson has a bad habit of sliding around in her POV. As a writer, this is something I've fought hard to overcome, so perhaps I'm overly sensitive to it. Aside from Jasmine, Lawson also uses Keung's POV—another Chinese coolie searching for his father along the rail line—as well as from the perspective of Bright Jade, the ghost connecting these two young people across the centuries. There is a soft-touch romance between Keung and Jasmine, but perhaps due to Jasmine's age (not to mention space-time paradoxes), this romance is not developed. Problematic issues from the time, like racism, exploitation, and opium addiction (Historical fact: Fan Tan Alley led to opium dens in the 1880s!), are clumsily addressed despite good intentions. 

The real merit of this work is its romanticism and appreciation for many elements of Chinese tradition. White Jade Tiger espouses respect for the sacrifices of our ancestors, embracing progress and change if done conscientiously, and willingness to work hard to keep fractured families from falling apart. The characters, while a tad melodramatic in the vein of MG fiction, are nevertheless charming and plucky. The scenes are lush and the prose fast-paced. All-in-all, White Jade Tiger is an easy and heartwarming read that finishes on a wistful note.

So come explore Victoria's heritage with us. Brew yourself some Gunpowder Green Tea, talk a walk down Fisgard's Chinatown (or Google Map street view, if you live farther afield), and journey with Jasmine as she tries to lift the curse of Bright Jade by restoring the white jade tiger to its rightful resting place. 

---