EVERYONE KNOWS

Lock Cha Tea House as a lovely spot to share dim sum, but most probably don’t realise that the restaurant’s tableware makes the experience extra-special indeed. Each of its blue and white, dragon-patterned porcelain plates may look the same, but on closer inspection, some are painted in a lighter blue with little oval hollows along each rim filled with a jadecoloured glass. These plates were made in Jingdezhen, a city in China’s Jiangxi province renowned for its ceramics industry dating back more than 1,000 years to the Song dynasty, and whose exquisite exports gave rise to the term “fine china”. In the Eighties, entrepreneur Yeung Chi-wan, who founded the Miramar Hotel, imported some of the plates for a planned Chinese fine-dining restaurant in San Francisco that never came to fruition. Instead of letting the china gather dust, he gave it to his friend Ip Wing-chi, who opened Lock Cha in 1991. “Serving dim sum on these pretty plates means they’re prone to breakage,” Ip says. “They are so rare nowadays and I can only replace them with cheap, HK$10 ones.”