For the 100th Chaguan column, customers at a chaguan muse on life

DECADES SPENT brewing tea in rural Sichuan have left Li Qiang with firm views on what makes for an authentic chaguan, or Chinese teahouse. If age and beauty were the only tests, his shop, the Old Teahouse in Pengzhen, would pass easily. A place to drink tea for more than a century, the grey-roofed, timber-framed building dates back to the Ming dynasty, when it was a temple to Guanyin, a Buddhist immortal. Maoist slogans painted on the walls, in characters of faded red, reflect Pengzhen’s history as a people’s commune. Hours before dawn the air is already thick with tobacco smoke and fumes from a coal-fired stove, for the first customers arrive for “early tea” at half past three in the morning. Human companionship makes a teahouse, says Mr Li, who rented the hall from a collective enterprise in 1995. Only when customers treat a teashop like a home is it a chaguan, he declares. Until then, in Mr Li’s withering judgment, it is merely “selling tea to passers-by”.

Your correspondent visited Pengzhen this week to mark the 100th Chaguan column, a name that pays homage to China’s teahouses and their history as places where ideas are exchanged. Mr Li’s establishment draws a stream of locals. Many are old men in farmers’ blue cotton jackets and caps, puffing on pungent cheroots or cigarettes in sturdy bamboo armchairs. Those photogenic customers lure Chinese urbanites, who carry expensive cameras and look for images of rural life or selfies to post on social media. Such a diverse customer base makes Mr Li’s teahouse a good place for an experiment: an unscientific survey of how Chinese think. It being unsafe and unfair to ask Chinese citizens directly, in public, about Communist Party rule, this columnist spent a happy (if painfully early) few hours asking people two questions often used to assess morale in different countries. The first concerns a subject’s own economic circumstances. The second is about whether future generations are likely to be better off than their parents.