Tea Market in Guanghzou

This will be the Tea Market in a couple of rounds- I have several photos.
I'm back home from my trip, but still have lots of photos. Last Saturday we went to the Tea Market. I've been to China more than a dozen times, Guangzhou specifically, and never knew until last week that there was a Tea Market. Most specifically, I never knew there was a tea market of this immense size. One of my favorite things to do when I travel is to go to markets. It probably all comes back to the food aspect, in that you can really learn a lot about people by the food they eat, but I do love markets of all varieties. The tea market was especially fantastic for a number of reasons.

In Asia I find that people take much more care to wrap things nicely- to make something as ordinary as buying tea or books a little bit extraordinary. I'm sure it has little to do with presentation in the case of tea and more to do with identifying types of tea, but I've never seen tea pressed into such amazing and various shapes as in asia. Bricks and blocks and balls and various shapes of tea are wrapped in paper, packed into bamboo, or vacuum packed on the spot into fresh foil bags.
To look at these stacks of teas is like looking at gifts under a Christmas tree. I would have loved to have walked out of this shop carrying a stack of them just for the pure joy of their presentation!
This shape above I refer to as "bullets" as in "bullet tea". It's a common shape for Pu'er teas, (smoked red tea) but I think they also use it for other types of tea as well. The shape below is completely new to me- I don't know what the hard shell type objects are but the wire is so creatively wrapped, I could hardly resist a photo! I'm guessing this is similar to storage in Bamboo, where the tea takes on the aroma of the container/shell it is stored in. Similar to how vineyards use oak barrels in expectation that the wine will take on the oak-ey taste.
Tea is stored in everything from bamboo sticks, to cardboard boxes, grain type bags, and enormous pots like these.

I love photos of simple items in repetition. This takes the idea of presentation to the extreme- wrapping each small "bullet" of tea individually. This makes me want to run my hand through the pot and feel the little packets of tea slip through my fingers.
More on Presentation- I saw many of these containers that appeared to be strips of thin wood wrapped around stacks of disks of tea. In front of them you'd see individual disks of tea that had been pressed & carefully labeled for purchase.
I'd seen bricks similar to this in tea shops before, although I've never purchased them. I'm not familiar enough with the varieties to understand what type they are. I love the mold that was used- this time I saw this idea taken to the extreme. On the 2nd floor of the first building of the Tea market there was a shop selling molded Tea. Yes, Molded tea. Like this brick below, only more fine and with greater detail. The molds were of dragons and lions and various good wishes of luck and life in Chinese Calligraphy (raised emboss), and were framed discs in circular wood frames or square or rectangle plates in more traditional frames. While impressive, I did not see any that were small and too my liking. The few I liked were HUGE, and the small ones were framed in plastic, not nearly so nice! Perhaps next year they will create a small square one that will fit my taste! I truly loved the idea of combining a cultural icon (Tea) with another cultural icon (dragons or Calligraphy). It was a unique and fascinating combination!