Spring Harvest ushers in a new season of Green Teas

The following is an excerpt from an article about tea in China. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article.

Spring harvest ushers in a new season of green teas
- Olivia Wu
Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Shanghai -- Editor's note: This is the first installment of Olivia Wu's food columns from China. They will appear regularly over the next several months.
I
n a city of some 20 million residents, the signs of spring are easily smothered, whether by smog or glitz or the trampling of 20 million pairs of feet.

Riding into the racy tempo of Shanghai, which one of my friends describes as "New York and Las Vegas on steroids," Giorgio Armani arrived in early April to open a retrospective at the Shanghai Art Museum.

The following week the Rolling Stones gave their first concert in China.

First flowers emerge Amid such noise and flash, the fragile buds of the season are quietly pushing through in the gardens and parks of the city. Pink and white flowers, as well as tender green leaf buds, are making a brave show in the ground and in planters. Among them are large, hot pink camellias. The flowering camellia is a close cousin to Camellia sinensis, the perennial bush also known as Thea sinensis, or tea.