Why Don't Young People Drink Tea?

Drinking tea properly takes fairly involved technique, and the spaces you drink it in are either dated or rough. Both may be what "gets in the way" of more young people falling in love with this culture.

Jesse counts as an oddity among young people. His Chinese friends think every one of his habits is exactly what an elder at home would do: invite people over, brew them a pot of Chinese tea, and chat while they drink it. "So strange," these young Chinese say, finding him hard to believe.

Jesse, 26 and American, picked up the habit for a slightly odd reason. As a newly minted xiangsheng (crosstalk) comedian, he found that Beijing's Maliandao tea wholesale market was the best place to learn Chinese. Everywhere else he goes, young Chinese want to practice their English on him; the tea sellers here don't speak a word of it, and to talk about tea you have to reach for fairly obscure Chinese words.

For most young people, Chinese tea is like the Maliandao market itself: tucked off in a corner, traditional, old. It may hold more appeal for lovers of the exotic. In Guangdong, Fujian and Chengdu, Sichuan, tea is both daily life and an important part of the culture — the way people live and the way they socialize can both turn on tea. But on the whole, tea lacks the push it needs, and young people's sense of distance from it is common.

Ma Yanran, 30 this year and living in Shanghai, says the first thing tea brings to mind is "the East," "then Zen, a sense of distance." With coffee, the key word is "everyday."

Asking what young Chinese make of tea now, and how they buy it, turns out to be an endlessly interesting subject. Most of them have some first-hand experience of tea, and even share certain memories: "At home, Grandpa would take a big iron pot and brew black tea himself. Dad used a thermos, brewing a whole flask of green tea to drink every day."

But they have lived through one fast wave of new drinks after another, through even the second and third coffee revolutions, and tea has become one option among many, fighting for the market alongside countless other beverages. The competition is fierce enough that large drinks companies, Uni-President among them, are watching sales of their tea drinks fall.

Including Jesse and Ma Yanran, we interviewed eight city-dwelling young people between 18 and 30, from Shanghai, Yunnan, Changsha, Jiangxi, Sichuan and Shandong. Most of them don't dislike tea — some are keenly interested — but every one had complaints about drinking it.

Most of those complaints have nothing to do with taste. Our interviews suggest that for young people, caffeine sensitivity, sensitivity to tea itself and personal preference aside, tea and coffee are not that different as drinks. What matters is the "space."

That idea once carried Starbucks around the world, and young people raised it first, unprompted. "The money all goes on the setting. What we want, in the end, is a place like that, an atmosphere like that," they concluded.

The gap between the café and the traditional teahouse also hints at a conversation between a new world and an old one: between new ways of spending and old ones, between young people and the middle-aged crowd around 40, hemmed in by their networks of contacts and not yet used to speaking plainly.

Tea is taken as a symbol of fuss and tradition. It does not have to be.

"People think teahouses are the preserve of middle-aged men in their 30s and 40s," says Lin Bo, 25.

1

Lin Bo works at a bank in Changsha. At lunch he goes with colleagues to buy milk tea. The shop, which looks like a dessert parlor, is popular in Changsha in large part because it says its tea is brewed from real leaves, which supposedly makes it healthier.

Lin Bo has noticed that the line is always long, and everyone in it is young.

Walking past a teahouse feels like the exact opposite. The Chinese-style teahouses Lin Bo has in mind rarely turn up in the main shopping districts; they pick relatively out-of-the-way sites. "For young people, that kind of privacy can come across as too serious, too formal." Even from the street you can "already picture" the few bamboo-and-rattan chairs and carved hardwood armchairs inside, the dim light. Young people "simply won't go in."

When Lin Bo does turn up in a teahouse like that, he is usually the youngest person there, seated with seven or eight senior colleagues and "bosses" in their thirties and forties, talking business. He has to be careful and can't speak freely. Because these are only first meetings, he noticed, they deliberately kept the price down when ordering tea and did not "order anything particularly good."

Lin Bo thinks he may never go to such a teahouse again — "unless one day I become the boss myself."

Few other soft drinks are tied so tightly to status and age. Interviewees including Jesse also reckon that young people who drink tea because of where they work are mostly in government or at state-owned firms. Jesse himself started drinking tea in 2011, while interning at The Nature Conservancy in Beijing, and bought a double-walled tea cup for the occasion.

But, he adds, "most young people don't have a job like that."

2

Young people who go to a teahouse to drink tea are, in the end, a minority.

Zheng Binbin, from Yunnan, is a history PhD student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is allergic to coffee, and since tea does the same job — a stimulant, something to linger over — that has pushed him some way toward it. When he wants to talk with someone, he picks a place where he can sit and drink tea; at karaoke he orders a pot of it too.

But he has found that when he and his friends go to a teahouse, the seven or eight of them may be the only people in the room. "Go to a café, though, even a badly run one, and there are probably plenty of people." The exception is a café that sells fruit tea and juice, or a bookshop near a university that also sells tea.

In those places tea can be quite popular as a drink, but Zheng Binbin thinks that there, "drinking tea is maybe just a way to wet your throat while you talk. It does the same job as a soft drink, the same as coffee, the same as beer. Tastes just differ, and you happened to pick tea."

He sees nothing wrong with talking about tea so lightly. Living in Yunnan (where, he says, teahouses are as common as cafés) left him understanding the difference between raw and ripe pu'er better than most young people do, but he still counts himself someone who drinks tea, not someone who tastes it.

"I can't taste it. However skilled the brewing, it doesn't come through to me as anything distinct," Zheng Binbin says. The atmosphere of the teahouse matters more.

Like most young people, Zheng Binbin thinks the sensible way to spend is to "pick a different space for a different occasion." He knows there isn't always a place for tea nearby. Studying and living in big cities, these young people find new-style milk tea shops and cafés wherever they turn; the competitive map has already changed completely.

According to figures from the New First-Tier Cities Research Institute, Shanghai has 5,296 coffee shops. Starbucks alone has more than 2,200 stores in China.

"I can turn around and buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. But I can't turn around and find a cup of good tea," Ma Yanran says.

Cafés do look like a better fit for the city. "There's something urban about them. Once the coffee label is attached, it's as good as saying young and relaxed," Zheng Binbin said in an interview in Shanghai. No teahouse he has been to left much of an impression on him; they tend to be "old" and "short on life."

The one exception was a teahouse converted from an old Huizhou house, where he saw several large panes of glass — a rare piece of modern design, he thought.

3

Ma Yanran works at a.o.i studio, a coffee-promotion outfit that promotes drinks of all kinds, coffee and tea included. She thinks some of the people promoting tea culture have made tea's stuffy image worse. They always want to wrap the drink in history, so that it "seems less like an everyday thing."

That is unlikely to win over more young people. It will only draw the sort who "wear prayer beads," "are into wellness," and "dress in coarse cloth, like some kind of hermit," Ma Yanran says. Their idea of a tearoom is closer to the one Huang Xiaoya describes: "lots of rosewood, or solid wood"; "you have to dress a certain way — linen and cotton, or it has to have Chinese frog buttons"; "you have to set out a guqin, some sort of folk instrument." A space like that belongs to a different world from daily life.

Happily, not one of the young tea lovers we interviewed holds views that rigid.

Huang Xiaoya works at an internet company, and calling her a heavy drinker of Chinese-style tea is no exaggeration. She owns a full set of tea things, brews at home, and sometimes drinks from midnight until 2 a.m., fretting like any serious coffee drinker over why the cup she made tastes "so bad. Was the water a little too hot?" For a while she worked her way "straight down the list" of teahouses on Dianping, one by one.

The teahouses left her puzzled. Space aside, they seem not to care how this new kind of customer buys things: they like standardized products, like choosing for themselves, and expect prices on the menu. A QDaily Research Lab survey, with 7,053 respondents, shows they also lean on chains to a degree, trusting big chain brands more.

At a Chinese-style teahouse, sometimes "one person has to order a whole pot. That logic strikes me as pure robbery," Huang Xiaoya says.

4

Another interesting finding: even a tea lover like Huang Xiaoya talks about Starbucks first when the subject is tea. If you're drinking tea bags, she says, Starbucks' white tea, White Peony, is good.

That doesn't mean Starbucks' tea is up to professional standards. It means there is almost no tea brand on the market you can trust. "Can you name a single channel where you could buy good tea leaves?" Ma Yanran asks. She doesn't think you can.

Chen Shouren belongs to a university tea society. In Taiwan he found a tea shop called Jing Sheng Yu that sells specifically to young people, and that he calls "standardized brewing," with strict rules for the vessel and the water temperature. That kind of drink, called qingcha, or plain tea, can be bought at milk tea counters in Taiwan; even gongfu tea is ready in three to five minutes.

Huang Xiaoya has recently come across new-style tea brands such as INWE Tea, which put their tea on sale in coffee shops. In their own stores they make tea the way coffee is made, using coffee equipment, and they have launched capsule tea. On weekend nights the stores are packed.

"Their tea isn't very good. Tea that tastes good is hard to come by, honestly," Huang Xiaoya says. "Most people have no idea what good tea tastes like." What customers call tasty is nothing like what a tea taster calls tasty: the taster finds the flavor thin, while the customer may find it not bitter, just right. In their minds, strong bitter tea is what their father drinks to stay awake.

But Chen Shouren, Huang Xiaoya and others think that for most young people, being fussy about how tea tastes is not what matters most at this stage.

What comes first is that "everyone feels drinking tea has class, or it turns into drinking tea being cool. Then young people will be willing to say, I'm going for a tea," Huang Xiaoya says.

5

Wei Qing's case is highly typical, and may be instructive for anyone planning to sell tea to young people.

He spent four years at university studying tea culture, but told us in an interview: "In those four years at university, tea didn't pull at me all that much." Whenever he considered paying for tea he would "hesitate and weigh it up," and decide he "might as well go and have a coffee."

Part of the reason is that brewed loose-leaf tea lacks "coffee's thick aroma and full taste." The worse problem is the one we raised at the start: what it is like to spend money in a teahouse.

Even once people see how much the space matters, few can bring themselves to run a teahouse exactly the way a café is run. Look closely at the elaborate steps of brewing and at a tea culture that seems to have no bottom, and it is hard not to treat it as a serious matter.

Wei Qing is planning to open a tearoom of his own, but after showing photos of the space he declined to say whether it was "traditional."

The photos do make one thing clear: where a guqin would normally sit, Wei Qing has put a cello. He has also turned the lights up.

Some young people will certainly take to a tearoom like this. Figures from Wei Qing show that 80 to 90 percent of those attending the classes he runs in the space are "young people in their 30s, even their 20s." "The trend is that more and more young people like it, and the age keeps coming down," Wei Qing says.

But most young people are still like Huang Xiaoya's friends: readier to accept new-style tea drinks such as INWE Tea, and so far still not choosing tea over coffee of their own accord.

It is all still too early.

"Tea has no big chain brand, no chain stores like Starbucks, to fix it in people's minds as an everyday drink," Ma Yanran says. Even when her studio promotes specialty coffee, it still wants to tell young people that specialty coffee is "only a cup of a drink," "just something fun."

As for the share of people who brew their own gongfu tea, Chen Shouren reckons it is as low as the share who grind their own coffee by hand.

Cover image: maistylepages, alicegao