In the old days, there was the following poem describing Xiguan in the Ming and Qing dynasties:

When I went out, I saw that the streets were all over the place, and some people shouted to sell the four alleys, asking God to worship the Buddha and divination, and there were all kinds of things.

From this, we can get a glimpse of the prosperity of Xiguan in the past.

Once it was the only treaty port of the Qing court, the thirteen lines were in the limelight for a while, comparable to the two Huai salt merchants. In 1822, there was a fire on Shisanhang Street, and 40 million taels of silver were turned into nothing, and the history called "foreign silver melted into the ditch and grew to one or two miles". A fire burned clean!

After the Opium War, British merchants were allowed to trade with Chinese merchants at will, and Lingnan lost its advantage in foreign trade, and the glorious era of the Thirteen Lines came to an end.

While the car was moving, Fang Monan could still see the prosperity of the past. Now it is very quiet, green and shaded, and you can see many elderly people strolling leisurely along the streets, or pulling their grandchildren on the way to the teahouse.

The car was parked outside a restaurant, the restaurant building is 4 stories high, the appearance is red walls and green tiles, carved beams and painted buildings of the Republic of China architectural form, full of Lingnan architectural style.

"Let's go! This Tao Tao Ju is a famous time-honored brand, established in the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty, and has a history of 100 years. The meaning of its signboard is to come here to taste tea and pottery. The prices are very affordable and the food is good. Yan Guangxing said as he walked. It is rumored that the three words "Tao Taoju" were written by Kang Youwei, using the "Shimen Ming" tablet method. When Kang Youwei was lecturing at Wanmu Thatched Cottage in Guangzhou. I often go to a teahouse to drink tea, so I inscribed the plaque "Tao Taoju" for that tearoom. After the failure of the Wuxu Restoration, the "Kang Party" was traced, and the owner of Tao Taoju was afraid of being implicated, so he removed the name of Kang Youwei from the signboard, and "Tao Taoju" became a nameless signboard. As for the truth or falsehood, only God knows. ”

Fang Monan and the others walked into the teahouse, and the hall room facing them was spacious and bright, with elegant furnishings and antique colors. The building is a three-storey reinforced concrete structure with a hexagonal pavilion on top, and the selected painted gray ornaments are very Lingnan-style. There are card seats such as the main compartment of the card seat, the Grand View Garden, the Lianxi Qingshe, and the gossip graphics. Ingenuity. In order to add to the elegance of the literati. The walls of the interior are also hung with calligraphy and paintings of celebrities, poetry couplets, especially poems and paintings engraved on the colorful glass screens, for tea guests to enjoy.

"I booked a seat, thinking that I wanted to really understand life here, the hall doesn't mind!" Yan Guangxing said sideways, with the only understanding he had about Fang Monan, it would not be wrong to choose the hall.

"The hall is bright." Fang Menan said with a smile. "I can observe all kinds of life better."

Drinking morning tea is the most common thing in life here. No matter what day it is, wherever there is morning tea in the hotel or teahouse, the hall will be full of people and noisy. Sit around and whisper if you want to. There must be no way to hear it.

Yangcheng people drink morning tea, to be divided into several bands, no matter how many bands, young people are very few, they generally do not come here to eat. They are more than willing to pursue what they call fashionable and trendy "foreign gadgets". It will take a few years for young people who are tired of foreign gadgets to "return to the basics" and regain a strong interest in traditional domestic crafts. It is really 30 years in Hedong and 30 years in Hexi, and the so-called feng shui takes turns. That's pretty much it. The so-called trend is constantly spinning. Jump from one circle to another.

When Fang Monan and the others came in, they were just in time for the first wave of old people to leave. Some drank morning tea and continued to chat.

Most of these old people are retired. After the exercise, several elderly people gathered together to drink tea. Their simple and unsophisticated points are all affordable, thunderous and untouchable one-and-two. The so-called "one cup and two pieces", one cup refers to tea, and two pieces refer to dim sum. And it's the cheapest pot: "Pu'er" or "oolong tea" occasionally has a "fried pho", or a "barbecued pork bun", which several elderly people eat together. It's kind of a breakfast.

They can sit for an hour or two. Talk about everyday things. "What is the price of a small dish", "What is the daughter-in-law of the family", "What is the shortness of the parents of this family, and the idle affairs of that family" and so on. Their main topics are all trivial things that are commonplace.

There were seats in the hall, and Fang Menan and the others sat by the window, just in front of the entire hall at a glance.

Fang Monan and they had just taken their seats, and the waiter came to ask them to order tea and pastries.

Yan Guangxing came as soon as he opened his mouth, "pork brain fish soup, colorful fresh shrimp, stir-fried meat crab with ginger and shallots, West Lake chrysanthemum fish, shredded salt-baked chicken, sliced skin hanging duck, turquoise shrimp tube, phoenix crispy shrimp, pipa shrimp fan, as well as crab roe siu mai, crispy egg tart, braised chicken abalone wings, thin-skinned shrimp dumplings." "It's all the signature dishes here." Tea, good tea, oolong tea, Tieguanyin. Remember that the water used to make the tea must be the water of the Jiulong Spring of Baiyun Mountain. ”

"Okay, please wait." The waiter, despite his surprise, smiled and retreated. This tea guest is obviously knowledgeable, and can eat, and orders a lot.

"What's so special about this water?" Fang Monan raised his eyebrows and asked.

The waiter came up with tea first and poured them one by one for Fang Monan. Yan Guangxing took a sip of the teacup, the tea went down the esophagus into the stomach, and he felt that the cells in his body were much more comfortable, "Good tea also needs good water to brew." When Tao Taoju was first founded, more than 10 young monks were hired to go to Jiulong Spring in Baiyun Mountain to fetch water to cook tea. The little monk starts working in the early hours of the morning, and the walking route and where he rests are relatively fixed, and his bucket is covered and locked. There is a "Jiulong Spring" water sand paper strip pasted at the riding seam, and a small flag is planted on the burden, swaggering through the city to attract the attention of passers-by.

Tao Tao Ju is equipped with a large vat to store water, and the tea seat in the hall is 5 cents per person, and the small hall is 1.5 millimeters per person. There is a small red clay stove that has been lit next to the door of the small hall, and the half-cut olive kernel that burns up without variegation and tastelessness is made as charcoal with a bamboo fence next to it, and the Jiulong spring water is boiling in the tile tea pot, and a special person waits on the side, which is quite exquisite. ”

"Huh...... Spread the word. Fang Monan said with a smile, don't underestimate the wisdom of the ancients.

Soon, the dishes ordered by Yan Guangxing came up one by one, and Yan Guangxing greeted Fang Monan and them, "It's all your own people, don't be welcome." ”

Fang Monan and Chang Jiuchun will not be polite, the bird's nest puff pastry egg tart, several layers of golden and crispy egg tart shells contain tender yellow, silky bird's nest, at first sight, it has aroused people's appetite, not to mention the perfect combination of the sweet softness of the bird's nest and the pink and crispy puff pastry after the entrance, which is so delicious that people can't stop it.

Morning tea must have cheong fun. It is to put the rice milk in a special multi-layer steamer or cloth and steam it into a thin skin one by one, put meat, fish fillet, shrimp, etc., steamed and rolled into long strips, cut off and put on the plate. The most famous cheong fun is soy sauce king beef sausage, which is stuffed with beef plus shiitake mushrooms and ginger juice, with raw oil, lard, light soy sauce, monosodium glutamate and other sauce condiments, and the cheong fun is shallowly soaked, not only good-looking, but also thin and smooth to eat, and the taste is quite good.

Fang Monan was in the morning tea hall of the teahouse, watching others eat and drink leisurely, while listening to other people's careful conversations, saying that they were all parents who were short and trivial, and they either shared the joy in their hearts, or cried about the boredom in their hearts.

Before you know it, you are full of tea and food, and this kind of morning tea is particularly leisurely and a scene of local life.

Fang Monan looked at it, most of them were the whole family sitting around a table, as breakfast, unrestrained, and enjoying the joy of family. Others do it for leisure. Most of the leisure people are retired elderly people in the neighborhood, they generally come the earliest and leave the latest, and they can sit from the opening of the teahouse in the morning until the "close" of morning tea. The environment doesn't have to be star-rated, go to the affordable small teahouse on the street nearby, and everyone can eat happily. "Morning tea" is also a common way for people here to socialize.

The reason why morning tea has been prosperous here for a long time is inseparable from the prosperity of trade and rapid economic development here since ancient times. Here, during morning tea, you can talk about business, exchange information, and meet friends and talk about the world. Businessmen use the teahouse as an important place for negotiation, and ordinary people relieve their stress here in exchange for a half-day of leisure.

Fang Monan and they ate very slowly, and really experienced the tea custom of "a cup in hand, half a day to talk". By the way, observe life.

Fang Monan squinted his eyes, rubbed the teacup, and looked at the tea guests coming and going, when the first wave of old people left, about ten o'clock, soon the second wave of people ushered in the teahouse They drove over one by one, and most of the people who came out of the car were some rich women in their thirties and forties. The first group of people who got rich first rushed forward.

"Puff......" Fang Monan smiled, looking at their most fashionable dress.

They are dressed very conspicuously, and as soon as they enter the hall, they are absolutely eye-catching. They are all covered with blood, they are wearing the fashion of the first international famous brands to enter the mainland, and their bodies are jeweled and can blind people's eyes. Carrying a stylish bag in his hand. After they woke up, they invited a few women of the same status to high-end hotels and teahouses to drink tea. They don't sit in the hall, they go upstairs to the best box or booth. They don't really come for tea and to fill their bellies, they come here to find a place to talk, and they can sit down for hours because they have time.

"What are you laughing at?" Yan Guangxing asked amusedly, and then followed Fang Monan's line of sight to the door of the hall. "Oh! It turned out to be them. ”

"How do you know each other?" Fang Monan raised his eyebrows and asked.

"I know the husbands of some of them, and some of their husbands are private entrepreneurs with names in the province." Yan Guangxing drank the tea in the cup, and continued, "When they were young, they almost accompanied their men to work hard, and now!" became Mrs. Kuo and began to enjoy life. Alas! In fact, some of them are also helpless. He said with emotion.

"Why are you gossiping so much and eavesdropping on other people's conversations." Fang Menan joked with a smile. (To be continued.) )