Today was my first trip to an authentic tea house in Beijing. Throughout Chinese history tea houses have been important social and business gathering areas. For example, in Shanghai the first ever Chinese Communist Party congress was secretly held in a tea house and among those in attendance was Mao Zedong. Lao She Tea House is special in Beijing because of the history of whom it is named after and the foreign celebrities it has attracted. One of the foreign guests was George Bush Senior, and, in fact, the owner of Lao She Tea House enjoyed Bush’s company so much that now in the entrance to the dining room stands a stone statue of the two shaking hands over tea!
The history behind the name of the tea house dates back to the early part of the 1900s. Born in 1899, Lao She was a famous playwright in China and best known for his works Rickshaw Boy and Tea House. Lao She was also a teacher in Beijing and Tianjin. After the May 4th Movement of 1919, when imperialism was overthrown, Lao She stated that his motive to write literature began. During the rise of Mao Zedong and the CPC, Mao asked Lao She to be the voice of the revolution and lead China to a new literature frontier. Sadly, during the Cultural Revolution in the 1950’s, Lao She suffered discrimination and was occasionally beaten for being an intellectual and having studied abroad in London for some of his life. This mistreatment lead to his humiliation both mentally and physically until one day in 1966 he could no longer stand it and quietly walked to Beijing’s Taiping (Trans: Extreme Peace) Lake. There he took off his clothes, folded them neatly on the shore, and drowned himself. It was not until twenty years later Lao She was revived as a national hero.
Now the Lao She Tea House stands across from Tiananmen Square in the heart of the city. The Tea House features acrobatic performances, magic shows, and comedy routines all while serving guests snacks and tea. The shows were incredible! One acrobat specialized in balancing ceramic jars and tables of her feet while she stood on her head! The magic show was a bit mundane, but entertaining nonetheless. The comedy routine was hard to understand, but I was able to get some of the jokes because my “street” Chinese is better than my actual Chinese, meaning I know a lot of swear words and references…All in all an entertaining night.
The night was truly an experience and the Lao She Tea House is a must see if you are in Beijing for a bit, simply for the history…oh, also next to Lao She is the first ever KFC built in China in 1987. It took me a while to realize the significance of this as well, but think 1987 it was opened and sits right across from Tiananmen Square…this KFC basically had a front row seat to the Tiananmen Square massacre…Quite interesting if you enjoy fast food and history as much as I do.
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Jordan J. Foley
傅力波
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