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When a Tuo is not a Tuo

Warning. I'm wearing my pimp hat askew. I recently received a shipment of Xiaguan 5x100g 'horseback tuocha' from Gordon at Dragon Tea House on Ebay. It has scenes printed on the unique cylindrical cardboard drawstring wrapper of horses with backpacks,courtyard stacked with tuos,mysterious pyramid symbol. I resolved the horseback and tea characters stamped all over the packaging. Try as I might I could not determine what should have been the tuo character commonly used. Gordon sent me the tuo character which means carry on back or piggyback which isn't on Zhongwen or in my printed dictionary but on Unihan. Damn confusing PinYin. These are the characters for horseback tuo:

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Jim

Reply to
Space Cowboy
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What a starting sentence! Quite possibly the best thing I've ever read on here. I actually laughed out loud here at work, and drew a few strange looks... good stuff. It must be the heat wave beginning to melt everyone's brains and bring out the humorous/delerious sides. Pure gold, I tip my non-pimp hat to you on that one. :)

Sorry I can't contribute anything helpful to your thread on the characters, but I will say that I am beginning to find that I really enjoy the Xiaguan pu-erh's. Every one that I've tried has been great. Now I'm in search of the best of the best green pu-erh in the style of the cheapie Xiaguan green tuo cha with the crane on the yellowish/brown wrapper, I'm sure a top end green pu-erh with that type of flavor would be the ultimate for me.

- Dominic (Still chuckling) :)

Reply to
Dominic T.

This should be a common chinese character that means carrying on back.

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this is the chinese character in tranditional chinese: 馱 and simplified: 驮

Hope this helps a bit.

~Samw

Reply to
suhoiw

I still don't understand what the question is, but reading this got me to look up the 'tuo' that is normally in 'tuocha' (沱) and according to my dictionary it means 'a small anchorage' and is frequently used in place names, especially in Sichuan. 驮 is a much more common word and I think might be intended to evoke the tea-horse road that Chinese people lately have begun to find very romantic.

Reply to
Alex

The answer is rather simple.

Tuocha generally means the little bowl shape compressed tea from Xia Guan

Although both are 'TUO', they mean different things as Alex pointed out.

Xia Guan Horseback Tuocha means "Tea that is carried on horseback" - this can be any tea in any shapes and sizes, it so happened that Xia Guan probably decided to have a little wordplay on the word "tuo" on their Ma Bei Tuo Cha products, so as not to repeat the same tone teice.

Hope this clears up some confusion

Danny

Reply to
samarkand

For once I wasn't confused. The wordplay only becomes obvious with the PinYin. It could only mean something to someone like myself who would think a tuo is a tuo especially limited to talking about puer. I just couldn't figure out why the seller keep refering to 'horseback tuocha'. There is no PinYin on the packaging except for the XiaGuan TuoCha logo. I didn't get it until he sent the character. It is the Simplified character which is on Unihan but not in the radical/stroke index. You need the Traditional character to find it. I put on my pimp hat askew for analysis and context but it lead to more confusion. Menghai uses the PinYin and characters for Tuocha on their Dayi packaging. So I think in general it can be any little bowl shaped puer. Maybe Xiaguan used it first.

Jim

samarkand wrote:

Reply to
Space Cowboy

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