Tea is made to turn over a new leaf

Customers taste tea in Papp's Tea in the Sanlitun area of Beijing. [Photo Provided to China Daily]

The menu includes not only some of the best Chinese teas including Pu'er dark tea, Dragon Well green tea, and Phoenix oolong tea, but also a collection of high-quality world teas including rooibos from South Africa, chamomile from Croatia and black tea from Nepal, to name but a few. Here you will pay for a cup of tea about the same as you will pay for a cup of tea or coffee at Starbucks.

Papp says that if tea is to be for the young and to be modern, it needs to be international.

"Chinese tea is a small part of the tea culture. Tea is an international phenomenon, so I want to create an international experience, and the variety of drinking tea, educating the Chinese community about foreign teas, and foreigners and Westerners about Chinese teas."

Some good Chinese tea brands still exist, he says, such as Zhu Ye Qing (Bamboo Leaf Green), a Chinese green tea as well as a company trademark, "but they don't do the international approach". "For example, I went to a nice teahouse in Chengdu that had a modern and cool setting, but all the teas were only from Sichuan."

Apart from single-origin teas that Papp's team selects directly from tea farms all over the world, the functional tea blends go for more fun. These include Get Well Tea, to get over a cold, Study Tea, with a refreshing aroma to get the work done, and Bedtime Tea made of rooibos tea that is caffeine free.

There is also a Throat Soother Tea made of Silver Needle white tea, and a combination of orange peel, mulberry leaf, stevia, honeysuckle, mint and chamomile, which is said to reduce inflammation and relax the throat.

Another critical problem Papp sees in China's tea industry is a lack of education.

"There is no good system to educate people about tea. It's way too complicated; it's way too scattered.

"If you look at Chinese websites about tea, there is much mixed, scattered, and different information," Papp says, in fluent Chinese.

"We take in and organize all this information and put it in a simple and easy way that anyone can understand."