jasmine flower tea

. . . as a follow up to my own post, I searched rftd and found this series of posts on a very similar topic:

I know no vietnamese whatsoever and don't know where to really start with the vietnamese on the package. But the most significant words appear to be "Tra Hoa Sen". Because I know some Chinese, that was my focus. There are three Chinese characters on the package: Mo4 (has grass radical), Li4 (doesn't have grass radical, but probably should), and Cha2 (tea). There is no English anywhere on the package. Now I am wondering if this is really jasmine tea or not.

Charles

What you had is flower tea, or hua cha. Like yourself, my personal favourite is the gong ju, or tribute chrysanthenum, although I am no expert. It is difficult to get hold of it here, although I have quite a few directly from China.

The usual jasmine tea mentioned in the West is a jasmine scented green tea.

They are entirely different, although may smell similar.

Does this help?

Julian

It's not. The Vietnamese is "Lotus Flower Tea." This is Hue style tea made with lotus, not Saigon style made with jasmine.

For some reason just about every tea from Vietnam is sold in the US as "Jasmine" no matter WHAT it really is.

--scott

That may help. My tea definitely has tea, not just flowers (though I was looking for the chrysanthemum flowers without tea when I bought it). I guess it could be a very low grade jasmine, and maybe that is why it smells so different. The tea itself is not what I would call delicate two-leaf-bud pickings. The leaves are rather large, but it is definitely green.

Strange, my last post appeared about 24 hours after I "posted" it.

In any case, one weird thing about this tea and its marketing is that it has not one word of English on it. It is entirely in what I presume to be Vietnamese, with the exception of three Chinese characters that I believe to be "Jasmine Flower Tea". So it was clearly not made for the U.S. market.

Thanks, all, for your help.

-charles

Vietnamese Tra Lai Jasmine Packaging

Vietnamese Tra Sen Lotus Packaging

Jim

PS: Sorry for my stutter> Strange, my last post appeared about 24 hours after I "posted" it. >

For some reason, I had never thought to look up this tea online. Here is a picture of the packaging:

I guess it is jasmine tea after all. Doesn't smell much like what I expect of jasmine. Maybe the problem is in my nose.

-Charles

Does your packaging Chinese characters match up with the packaging I showed? I put more stock in the characters.

Jim

I have seen this tea in one of the Thai markets here in Berkeley. It could very well be that it is just a different kind of jasmine. Lately, the jasmine has been in bloom around here and there must be a dozen different types with nearly dozen different scents. BTW, I have had Vietnamese Lotus tea, often and one brand hardly resembles another. Shen

Packaging

The packaging on my tea matches the characters on the Jasmine packaging above, except the "Li" character does not have the grass radical on top on my packaging (I think that is the grass radical, right?). That must be a sort of typo.

I guess. Another li4 character without the grass radical on top means sharp. You find that character using the dao radical on the right which is the downstroke and hooked downstroke.

Jim

Packaging

The "Li" character on my tea packaging is the "Li4" that means sharp. According to three different dictionaries I have (all from mainland), the "Li" used in the word "jasmine" is the same as the "Li4" that means "sharp", except with the grass ("cao") radical. Both "li"' characters appear to use that "Dao" radical within them, except I guess it is not the "radical" when the grass radical is on top.

Since we've gone this far into a Chinese discussion (it would be a lot easier if I could just post a picture of the character, but this has given me a great excuse to pull out old chinese text books), the "li" on my packaging contains the grass, or "Cao" radical on top (simplified form), the growing grain, or "He" radical on the lower left (similar to the tree radical, only with a slanted line on top), and the knife, or "Dao" radical on the lower right. It almost looked like, in the packaging you sent that the lower left in some writings of "Li" could use what I understand to be a "wei" character (meaning "not, no") instead of the "he" character. Due to the font, I can't tell which one babelcarp uses.

Interestingly, neither "Mo" nor "Li" appear to have any independent meaning. Anyone know why they are used together for the word "jasmine" (e.g., is the word is a phonetic approximation of a foreign word), or is that just the way the word is written?

-Charles

the "li"

Oops, I mean it does NOT have the "cao" radical, though it probably should.

Remove the grass radical for either jasmine or lotus and you get the same pinyin name with another meaning.

Jim

"Moli" is probably a chinese phonetic approximation of the south/ southeast asian terms for Jasmine. Jasmine is called "Chameli" in Hindi, "Melipu" in Tamil, and depending on where in Indonesia "Meulu" or "Melati".

Just a matter of curiousity, why don't you by the dried chrysanthemum and green tea separately and blend your own flower tea?

Well, I never actually found the dried chrysanthemums. The "tea" I had with chrysanthemums was just the dried flowers, no actual tea. I'm sure you can purchase them online somewhere, but I was in the store and just looking through their tea selection to see what I could find. I understand dried chrysanthemums to be good for your stomach and my wife was feeling a bit off at the time.