In English..Finally!

Uh, Pu'er? What's that?

/Lew

Hi Danny,

Do you know the title of the book, or the publisher or any other info? Price?

Thanks.

Lewis snipped-for-privacy@panix1.panix.com11/23/06 10: snipped-for-privacy@panix.com

It's nasty foul stuff, foisted upon an unwary American public enamored of all things Eastern. Among these things are cow dung, barnyards, rotten old moldy books, compost heaps, grimy old leather, dry fallen apples rotting on the ground, dried and preserved plums of dubious pedigree, and more such. Trust me. You won't like it. Just ship yours out to me. I'll find a way to dispose of it.

Michael

Book title: First Step to Chinese Puerh Tea

Author: Chan Kam Pong

Publisher: Wu-Shing Books, Taiwan

ISBN: 9789789578962

Price: US$29.99

These are the same people who publish the puerh-teapot magazine.

While I'm sure the book will be a good one, and the information very useful, honestly, Wu-shing's editing skills are sub-par. There are so many typographical errors in all of their books/magazines, it's not even funny. Whoever is their editor does not do their job well. I worry that will be true for this book especially simply because it's in English, and the errors might not be picked up by its readers because many are less informed about puerh.

I hope I'll be wrong.

MarshalN

You ain't wholly wrong.

The book does have typo errors, and the pinyin is at times inconsistent, but compared to the 3 Newborn series which have English 'subtitles', this book has much lesser typo errors - but then again, many English novels from the classics to pulp fiction are guilty of proof-reading oversight; so the bottomline is whether you wish to concentrate on the typo erros (which can be an eye sore to the puritans), or useful information.

Puerh-teapot magazine has also launched its first English issue of the magazine, with A.D. Fisher as the main editor. Fisher, as some of us are familiar with, was the spammer who got many of us peeved recently with his evasiveness when confronted. I'm sure that magazine might have useful info too, but Fisher left such a pungent wet storage taste in my mouth I did not have the desire to flip through it.

Danny

I haven't seen the book yet, so I can't really judge it. I just worry that some of the typos/misprints will be significant -- i.e. a cake is, say, a Menghai 7542 and they labeled it a Xiaguan Iron Cake, that kind of thing.

A novice who hopes to rely on the book as a reference might be misled that way, if it happens. I honestly don't know how Wu-shing can be so casual when it comes to proof-editing. It's really not that hard. Every issue of puerh-teapot there are at least a few errors that are corrected in the next issue.

MarshalN

That, MarshalN, is something I've yet to encounter in the book. The author is as cautious as a lawyer preparing a case to be presented; one of few points I disagree with him are more on technical issues than the correct identification of products.

I would say several issues, not every. In the errors commited by the editorial board, the errors appeared sporadically sometime from the 9th issue onward, so I wouldn't quantify it as every issue. The other errors are commited by the advertisers themselves, that, are plenty.

Even though that magazine is not what I would recommend to anyone - the magazine seem to benefit vendors more than poor readers like me, there are still useful info between its heavily ad-laden pages, kinda like what Vogue is these days.

Danny

I bought the magazine too.

I seems obvious to me that they literally translated the whole thing from Chinese to English. Any of you know if those articles also appeared in their Chinese version's magazine?

On top of that, their RM 50 (USD 16) (compared to the much thicker chinese version, RM 35) price tag is a bit hard to swallow.

Hee

Lewis,

No, you shouldn't get your hands dirty. I will send someone over to your place and collect them from you!

Hee

Nope, didn't get the magazine, and at USD16, that's very expensive isn't it?

I won't be surprised if there are translated articles from Chinese, I guess most magazines with different editions and wide racial readership would do that, but at that price, one might think twice getting it - I think...

Even in the Chinese edition of the magazine, there are several articles in English, and I found Fisher's article in it too. Urgh. & one from Guang, owner of Hou De - well written, but something seems to be amiss...

Danny

I don't doubt Mr. Chan at all with this. The editors are the ones I doubt -- I worry that they will put Xiaguan where Mr. Chan wrote Menghai, if you know what I mean. I've seen them do that with their magazine, which is in Chinese, so I won't be surprised if they do this for their English publication where they, presumably, have less experience in dealing with.

In the 3-4 issues I've seen of puerh-teapot, I seem to remember at least one error of some significance in every one of them. I can't say that's giving me a lot of confidence in their editing skills.

Yes, it's more a trade rag that isn't really appropriate for the regular consumers like us. It's mostly about trade shows and stuff anyway....

MarshalN

The First Step to Chinese Puerh:

1) Mr. Cham Kam Pong wrote and edited this book completely on his own. He is a brilliant and very careful writer, and also a lawyer so I'm sure his mistakes are ones of grammar/spelling not misinformation.

2) A North American version of the book is underway, revised and edited to address the few English errors. Wu Shing only has 3 English/Western editors and all were busy with the magazine at the time of the book's publication. The North American version will be available in a month or two.

The Art of Tea Magazine:

1) The magazine's cover price is 12.99$ U.S., not 16, as is clearly stated on the back of the cover.

2) This may perhaps sound slightly expensive, however the magazine is

188 pages and only has around 12-15 pages of advertising. That means there are more than 160 pages of article. Very few magazines in the world can boast such content, and this focus on content will continue in future issues. The Chinese version is cheaper and thicker, but it has way more advertising. The dilemma is one of taste, cheaper with more advertising or more expensive with more content. We feel that 160 pages makes the magazine last 3 months, and that it isn't too expensive considering that its quarterly and so full of information.

3) About 60% of the articles were translated from previous issues of the Chinese version, and 40% were written exclusively for the English magazine, whether in Chinese or English. More than 15,000 copies were allocated to an Asian market that can't read Chinese and wants access to back issued material. All of these translations have been reformatted with the author's help, correcting errors and revising style to English.

4) Unlike the Chinese version, the English magazine is about the "Art of Tea", which means all Chinese tea, not just Puerh (though Puerh will be included in every issue). It also includes culture, art, yixing, teaware, travel, cooking, health & science, and even spirituality.

5) The Executive editor is Xiao Liang; Managing editor is Cham Kam Pong, author of the above book. These are the only administrative positions on the magazine since its inception. There are then 3 junior editors/proofreaders as well as 3-5 translators. This, also, is clearly stated within the cover of the book.

6) The magazine will soon be available through various online vendors as well as various bookstores throughout North America and Europe.

Greetings,

Thank you for posting your clarification. We look forward to reading the book and the magazine. That will afford all of us the opportunity to know where the truth lies, the truth being in the pudding, so to speak.

Would you care to identify yourself?

Michael

art of tea snipped-for-privacy@14g2000cws.googlegroups.com11/28/06

21: snipped-for-privacy@artofteamagazine.com

Just my two cents on the whole Art of Tea magazine controversy. I have two copies of Pu-Erh Teapot. As others have correctly pointed out, the Chinese-language magazine is about 95% roughage. I wouldn't even call it a trade magazine, more like a glossy book of ads. Pages upon pages of ads. It makes Vogue look like Foreign Affairs. Quite a few of the articles are also thoroughly pointless, e.g. seven pages of inane and badly-lit pictures of oily people sitting on daises (corax., if you're there, can we get a plural for dais?), sweating, and shaking hands. However, many of the articles are lengthy explorations of topics that are of extreme interest to many of us, and personally I would be happy to pay $12 just to get translations of those articles and spare myself the time and effort of trying to read them myself. So, I like the sound of only 12-15 pages of advertising and English-language access to these articles, and if the photos are correctly labelled, so much the better.

I am not holding my breath for good pinyin, though.

Nameless magazine defender, I hope you translated all of the steeping articles with the neat little hand-drawn sketches, and none of the "we had a conference and 400 fat people came" articles.

Alex Foggy shuixian for a foggy day in New York

Thank you for your message. I have not said, at any point, that Mr. Chan is providing misinformation or will provide misinformation. I'm not sure where you got that impression. I am simply referring to the typos and mistakes that the Chinese reference works and publications that Wu Shing has published to date, and hope the same won't show up in Mr. Chan's work, which I am sure is itself brilliant. After all, this is an audience who don't have anything else to rely on, thus any sort of mistakes on the part of the publisher will not be necessarily corrected for there are no other works to use as a cross-reference.

I think those are most copy-editing mistakes, something which is out of the hands of any author, and which is a direct responsbility of any publisher transferring the texts and images from manuscript to print form.

MarshalN

I have a feeling we'll see Wade-Giles, instead of pinyin. Oh well, get used to it! :)

MarshalN

[Alex] badly-lit pictures of oily people sitting on daises (corax., if you're there, can we get a plural for dais?) [corax] indeed i am. and, of course, you've got it exactly right -- 'daises' is fine ['daisses' is also acceptable]. it is rather unusual, isn't it, to need a plural for this word, as the dais tends almost by definition to be singular.

you might also be interested to know that the word is related etymologically to 'dish,' which gives us the sense that the dais was, in the anglo-saxon-speaking world at least, specifically connected to

*dining* -- not just to ceremonial display, unconnected to food and drink. it would be interesting to know the extent to which this was also true in ancient china.

the japanese cha no yu [which might offer us at least a glimmer of tea-service techniques in 12th-century china as well] places emphasis on the *humility* of the participants -- thus the door to the ceremonial chamber is low, requiring that one actually bow to enter. i sense something fundamentally un-dais-related, or even anti-dais, about that. and of course the participants typically kneel/sit, seiza-style, on a tatami. [it's true that in ryu-rei, the matcha is served to guests seated at a table.]

in any case, it's always difficult to unravel originary practices from later accretions, even when textual evidence is fairly explicit; and anything we know now about the cha no yu will have been heavily influenced by the subsequent *monastic* traditions to which it was specifically adapted in japan. such practices, meant to harmonize with the principles of zen buddhism, are likely to be a far cry from the luxuries that had once been found in the house of a song-dynasty aristocrat -- not to mention the splendors of the dragon throne.

i'm betting there are some readers here who can tell us more about the role of the dais in ancient chinese tea ceremonies [you'll notice i hew carefully to the singular of 'dais' there!]. of course there's a voluminous bibliography, spanning several hundred years, on the cha no yu; if i were sufficiently familiar with it all, i might be able to point to some specific citations that would shed light on the chinese antecedents of this tradition, which took root so vigorously in japan.

actually, this whole topic suggests a book that ought to be written [for waiguoren], if it hasn't been already: THE CHINESE ORIGINS OF THE JAPANESE TEA CEREMONY. though maybe with a more poetic title, befitting the beauty and distinguished history of the topic? accessibly written, carefully documented, copiously illustrated -- i'd pay good money for that.

But really... the Japanese tea ceremony is very much of a self-invented thing, with Sen no Rikyu and his posse in the late 16th century making up the rules as they went along, and then getting refined for the next

2-300 years to evolve to what it is today.

I have a feeling that while the tea itself is prepared in similar ways (i.e. the whisk, matcha, all that) the formality of the ceremony is very much a Japanese invention. I've got not proof of this, and it's more of a hunch than anything, but, for one... women never used to participate in such things when it first got started, and people like Rikyu would probably be horrified to learn that they are often the ones making the tea these days.

MarshalN