Does anyone here read the One True Script?

[fivemack]

I have just finished a box of particularly superb green tea that some Chinese colleagues of my mother gave her as a Christmas present; it was refreshing and gloriously smooth, and I would like to get some more.

Unfortunately, the box was clearly brought from China, presumably from Dalian in the north (a relatively obscure port with only twice the population of the Birmingham metropolitan area, formerly known as Port Arthur) since that's where the researchers came from, and its one concession to the script of the Western barbarians is the cryptic text 'JING ZHI CHA LI'. I am perfectly illiterate in Chinese; I fear all my readers may share this deficiency, but I know some of them know a great deal about tea.

Can anyone help me find more tea?



[trying to find in Wikipedia the name that Chinese people use for the Chinese script, I came across the beautiful fact that the obsolete character for 'verbose' is the character for 'dragon' written four times in a little square. 'Dragon!' is one of the few exclamations I can easily forgive being repeated four times ...]

Comments

[pm215]

The large characters 茗茶 in white both mean 'tea', according to this Chinese character dictionary. Babelfish simply translates the pair together as "tea".

JING ZHI CHA LI is a romanisation of the characters 精致茶禮 in the black rectangle. 精致 seems to be a word meaning 'delicacy', which gives you [delicacy] [tea] [gift]. Babelfish renders this as "Fine betrothal gift"...

Anyway, that's about as far as my Japanese and google skills will take me for the moment; I'll see whether anybody else actually knows Chinese :-)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much!

I've managed to find the bottom two letters on the white rectangle using the dictionary, but am having trouble with the other two. I'm assuming that the radical is the left part of the character, and that a box with N horizontal strokes in takes N+1 strokes to draw, so the radical for the second character is bei4 貝, but I can't figure out how many strokes the other half of the character takes, and I can't see anything in the radicals table that looks like the five-barred ladder with half its right side missing and wearing a hat on the left of the first character.


佳 'jiā' (jia5) seems to mean 'excellent'
品 'pǐn' (pin3) seems to mean 'product'

which seems enough to indicate that that won't be a usable-for-search description of the tea either.

[pm215]

The first two characters are 饋贈 . The radical for the first one is 食, a 9-stroke character meaning 'food'; it changes shape a little as a radical, and is further stylised by this font. The right hand side of the second character is 11 strokes (2 single strokes above, 5 for the box-with-cross 田 (the cross stroke here is very faint) and then 4 for the 日).

Personally I do character lookups using the WWWJDIC multi-radical search, because it lets you tick boxes for the bits you do recognise and provide a range for the stroke count, so it's more forgiving of errors. It's Japanese rather than Chinese, of course , though (usually OK for trad. Chinese like this, not much use for simplified).

A little more googling turned up a better C->E dictionary which lets you put in a sentence and guesses the word boundaries itself. That reckons that we have 饋贈 present 佳 excellent 品 product, which is as you say not very good for pinning down its origin.

[pm215]

Oh, and the four columns of writing on the back are repeated on the front. I strongly suspect that they're the advertising copy, especially since the last line goes something like [one] [cup] [smell] [tea] [self] [exist] [heaven].

The stuff in the red square on the front almost certainly just says 'product of China' but I can't make out the fourth character (seal script is a pain to read).

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

Not that obscure, necessarily; not only is there the Russo-Japanese War connection I'm sure you know of, it's also a level in the game Battlefield 2 ;)

[(Anonymous)]

You could always go to see the Chinese man who runs the Chinese shop in King Street. I don't know if his shop sells tea (I only ever bought an exciting wallet for holding Polaroid photos), but he might be able to point you in the right direction.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I suspect finding the tea is probably going to be harder than getting hold of a translation as only a very small proportion of the teas you can get over there will be imported here. I'd go along to a shop that sells lots of Chinese tea and show it to them. I can recognise a few of the characters (the three squares, pǐn is definitely goods or products yes, by the way, it's in the names of half the shops over there!) and probably some of the ones for small connecting words that a Japanese speaker might not, but getting hold of a native speaker shouldn't be so hard.

The other practical option is to try chinese teas that you can get over here and find one you like as much I guess which is what I did when the tea I brought back ran out :-)

[naath.livejournal.com]

You could try asking in First Class Teas - they have a large selection and might know enough to know what it is.

First Class Teas

[(Anonymous)]

Hi, it's Will the Manager of First Class Teas here.

Just to say I'm going to China this week for a fortnight and so I'll print off the photo and try to ask around when I'm there. In the meantime, if you can send a better quality photo to will[at]firstclassteas.co.uk then I'll have more luck I expect.

all the best,

Will (www.firstclassteas.co.uk)