Serving up the elixir of life with passionate zeal

Cheng recommends tea to a customer. Wendy Leung / For China Daily

It was the meticulously hand- stitched coin purses that first caught my eye.

We were on our way to Tai O Heritage Hotel for afternoon tea, but I paused to admire the handiwork on display outside a shop called Shui Heung Cha Liu.

Its proprietor, Law Wai-man, introduced herself as Mrs Cheng, explains that the textiles were made by local women in Inner Mongolia autonomous region. "I lived there for a while," she says.

She invited us inside, where I noticed an avant-garde tea pot that resembled a purse - similar in style to one that I collected from rural Quebec, only in a bright shade of fuchsia.

"That's a very special collection of tea pots that I imported from the US," Cheng explains. "Why don't you sit down? We can enjoy a cup of tea together."

She pours a gray-colored tea from a water bottle that contained a fine built-in sieve and offers us each a small cup.

The tea was light and easy drinking, but I couldn't place the taste of the leaves. "It's raw puer," says Cheng. "It has a very clean taste that helps to purify the water that it is steeped in."

Even the water bottle is worth noting. Dubbed Travel Buddy, it is a Red Dot Award-winning design from Taiwan that allows anyone who wants to drink freshly brewed tea on-the-go.

"The plastic is the same kind used in baby bottles and can withstand water temperatures up to 127 C," Cheng notes. "But I don't like to store tea in it. I usually let it steep, cool down to room temperature and transfer it to a ceramic container."

She reveals two similar looking traditional Chinese clay tea pots and urges us to tell them apart. "What do you think is the difference between them?"

I lifted the cap off one and inhaled: it had no scent at all. The other reeked of plastic.

"That's how you know when you have a fake on your hands," she smiles.

Four years ago, Cheng suffered a major stroke, leaving one side of her body paralyzed. She realized that she needed to change her lifestyle - particularly diet and attitude - and fought hard to regain her health. "We drink too much sugar and eat too much junk," she says.

Tea became her saving grace. She now operates Shui Heung Cha Liu five days a week and lives nearby. She closes the shop mid-week for two days and heads into the city to study under her tea master.

"We went on a tea research trip to Wuhan recently," she says. "Master taught us to taste the leaves of two different tea bushes. He explained that one was 500 years old while the other was more than a millennium. You can really taste the difference between their leaves."

"A friend told me that the process for enjoying and studying tea is just the same as wine," Cheng says.

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