What a viewTea – ‘China’s gift to the world’ – explored in BBC’s One Cup, A Thousand Stories; the evil evangelists return in the Righteous Gemstones
- Sumptuously filmed in China and around the world, One Cup, A Thousand Stories shows viewers how tea became a cultural cornerstone
- Meanwhile, satirical evangelical comedy The Righteous Gemstones returns for a second series on HBO
One Cup, A Thousand Stories (BBC Earth, now streaming) might not feature “all the tea in China”, to quote the old saying, but there’s certainly enough of it to make a decent brew.
Sumptuously shot, and smoothly narrated by Hugh Bonneville (the Earl of Grantham himself, to Downton Abbey fans), the six-part series travels within and beyond the Middle Kingdom to prove that what looks like a simple drink is really “a key part of human history” as well as “China’s great gift to the world”.
While the tradition of serving sweet tea to one’s elders at Lunar New Year is still widely observed, the first stop for One Cup isn’t a ceremony, but southwest China – and the continuing preservation of its arcane knowledge of tea preparation by an ethnic minority group that considers the magical substance “a heavenly gift”.
Strong, sour tea is central to the culture of the De’ang people of Yunnan province and the show dutifully follows Zhao Yuyue through leaf picking, sorting, steaming, rolling and fermentation by burial in bamboo tubes to, ultimately, drinking. In all this she is assisted by her former firefighter son, Li Yansuo, who has quit his job to learn the ropes of the production and safeguard tradition.
Multigenerational devotion to tea is also evident in subtropical Fuzhou, where the guardians of the “art form” of cultivating jasmine tea are the Chen family. Determined to ensure that the ancient techniques behind its preparation should never be lost, the Chens “leave home before sunrise and come back with the stars” to protect the “fragile thread of knowledge” connecting tea stewardship past and present.