So, unfortunately the Vancouver Tea Festival was cancelled in 2022, and didn’t resurface for 2023 either. It hasn’t had a proper event since 2020, but I’ve heard rumblings that there are new parties interested in planning for it, so hopefully we’ll see that comeback this year.
That said, 2023 was the year I vowed to get things together so I could do some proper travelling… My passport being the key item. Not having the Vancouver Tea Festival did kick me into making the trek onto a ferry to attend the Victoria Tea Festival. We’ll see how things expand this year.
In the wake of the current Verdant Tea scandal, this seems like the perfect read. I started this book a little before the VTF, but juggling schoolwork and leisure reading, I haven’t really gotten to finishing it until recently. And I guess it’s perfect timing, because I think it’s a very relevant read to understanding the current drama. I won’t really be touching on that, because there are already half a dozen other tea-blogs that have covered it in depth, plus threads on TeaChat, r/tea, and Steepster to chronolog the drama (here’s 
Oh hey, I’m actually discussing a book that’s easily available for once.
For All the Tea in China is a very sprightly, up-beat work of non-fiction detailing Robert Fortune’s botanical espionage, and the racism of the times. It is, at this point, a Reading Requirement for all new Tea Drinking, Book Loving Recruits (or so I suppose, from Steepster’s general consensus). As some people might remember, I picked this book up… oh… two years ago, just a little while after I had returned from working Up North. I was picking up history books left and right at the time, but I force myself to read all my books in order, so as to make sure no book is left collecting dust for long (except for a small clause which allows me to put any owned book on hold in order to read any book from the library–this is due to the two-week limit imposed on most books, which forces me to finish them in a timely manner).