Englishman corners China tea market

'It was a piece of cake', explains tea entrepreneur

by Norfolk'n'Clue

An English entrepreneur has turned a chance conversation in a pub into a multi-million pound import/export business, we can exclusively reveal.

Long-Wa Tseng, 39, explained to our tea correspondent: "It came about when I was chatting in the pub. I had been talking about the possiblity of starting a tea selling business. A mate I was talking to told me that I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of making money selling tea, and that you wouldn't catch him starting a tea-selling business for all the tea in China. Which gave me an idea..."

The canny businessman quickly realised he was onto a winner when he went to China and saw the poor quality of tea packaging. "What I noticed was that they had all this tea coming out of their ears, but it was packaged so badly. They just used cardboard, with a hand painted watercolour copydexed to the front, and all that jazz. Inside was a muslin bag, filled with the product. I thought to myself: 'Easy pickings!'"

"Next thing I knew, I'd paid my interior decorator mate 50 quid to come up with a new box design, bought a heat-sealing device, and started importing tea from China."

It was a simple job from there. "All I had to do was convince the Chinese that packaging it more prettily actually makes the product taste as fresh as a daisy. I pulled out all the stops; after that, it was a piece of cake."

Mr. Tseng's business has grown to the extent that he now buys all of China's tea to sell back to them. "They haven't cottoned to that yet," he added. "Talk about snow to the eskimos..."

When asked by our reporter if he ever got tired of talking in idioms, Long-Wa replied: "Not on your nelly. It'll be a cold day in hell when that happens."

Chairman Mao is 98.

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Englishman corners China tea market

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