IN SHANGHAI — CHINA’S most technologically superior megacity — earlier than the pandemic, De He feels subdued, removed from its raucous Chengdu predecessors. There are busier spots on the town, maybe above all of the tourist-besieged Huxinting Teahouse, an ornate pavilion rising on stilts over a lake of lotuses. However among the many metropolis’s 1000’s of teahouses, a brand new vanguard suggests a shift from populist engagement to retreat and refinement, whether or not in settings stocked with vintage furnishings, as at De He, or styled in a self-consciously edgy aesthetic, just like the Tingtai Teahouse, within the M50 artwork district within the onetime industrial zone of Putuo, with its tiers of personal chambers in elevated stainless-steel packing containers. At some, tea sommeliers provide high-priced kinds of Bingdao Pu’er, Tieguanyin oolong and Dianhong (black tea from Yunnan Province in China’s southwest), ready tableside. Reservations are sometimes required, with cut-off dates imposed, lest clients linger too lengthy. It’s an escape, however not from time.
In “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,” a 1980 research on the usage of public plazas in New York Metropolis, the American journalist and concrete planner William H. Whyte observes that though folks “converse of getting away from all of it,” proof reveals that they’re in actual fact drawn to busy locations: “What attracts folks most, it might seem, is different folks.” But on the different teahouses I go to with Loh (and, later, with the meals author Crystyl Mo), encounters between strangers are saved to a minimal. Males in fits, swinging briefcases, disappear into discreet, closed-off rooms. There’s an aura of exclusivity, as at a non-public membership; one spot, a department of the Yinxi mini-chain on Yuqing Lu within the former French Concession, is unmarked from the surface save for a row of chubby, blank-faced monk dolls set into the wall. To enter, Loh presses down on the top of the second doll from the precise, and when the door opens, we ascend steps over billowing mist. Within the backyard, tables stand cocooned in glass cylinders surrounded by water, reachable solely by steppingstones.
With espresso retailers now as their rivals — amongst them the mammoth 30,000-square-foot storefront of Starbucks Reserve Roastery that opened in 2017 in Shanghai’s Jing’an district — teahouses have needed to adapt. Some tempt the youthful technology with their interiors; others make tea the main focus, with formal ceremonies requiring a talented practitioner, or as a luxurious product, with costs for notably uncommon varieties rising into the 1000’s of yuan per pot, the equal of lots of of American {dollars}. These trendy iterations don’t fairly match the basic mannequin of “one of the inexpensive public social areas,” as Shao has described it, and it’s tough for an outsider to inform how a lot they preserve the spirit of the freewheeling teahouses of outdated, the place “atypical folks” may gossip and specific opinions and “launch damaging feelings and deal with social change” with out concern of consequence or authorities interference. As an alternative, they seem to embrace a unique nostalgia, for an imagined time when the world was much less demanding or simpler to close out. Maybe the promise will not be engagement however its reverse: retreat.
