You want a good tea? Higher your standards!

I need to talk about tea, because I have been quietly suffering about it for a while now.

In China, tea is not a hot drink. It is a whole opinion. Where I grew up, “a good tea” means the leaves, the water, the temperature, the second and third steeping that are often better than the first. You don’t rush it. You don’t drown it in sugar. You certainly don’t leave the bag in until the cup turns the colour of a wooden table.

Then I came to Albania, where I was handed – with enormous warmth and pride – a çaj that was mostly sugar wearing a tea costume. And everyone looked at me so happily that I drank it, smiled, and said it was lovely. Reader: I have said it was lovely many times now.

I don’t want to start an international incident, so let me be fair. Albanian mountain tea – the real çaj mali, the kind that actually comes off a hillside – is genuinely wonderful, and I’ve become a little obsessed with it. That one, we agree on completely. My quarrel is strictly with the version that is ninety percent sugar and served scalding in a glass that burns three of my fingers.

So here is my gentle, foreign, entirely unsolicited advice to my adopted city: you already have good tea growing on your own mountains. Raise your standards. Steep it a little longer, sweeten it a little less, and let the leaf do the talking.

I will, of course, keep drinking whatever you hand me and telling you it’s lovely. Some standards are worth keeping. Politeness is one of them.

Yang Wang is a Liaoning transplant who runs a small Chinese massage parlour a short walk from Bulevardi Myslym Shyri – and has strong feelings about tea.