A History of Tea, page 4
Tea became the focus of Lu Yu’s life. He was relentless in his quest to learn everything there was to know about tea. The result of this consuming passion was the three-volume, ten-part book called Ch’a Ching, the Tea Classic, published in 780.
The book deals with the following aspects of tea:
1. Origin of the tea plant
2. Tools for gathering the leaves
3. Production and manipulation of the leaves
4. Description of the twenty-four implements
5. Necessary to serve and enjoy tea
6. How to make a cup of tea (methods of infusion)
7. Rules for drinking tea
8. Historical summary of tea and its usage
9. Sources of tea, plantations, and so forth
10. Nonessential tools
11. Illustrations of tea utensils
Farmers and agriculturists interested in learning to cultivate tea found an unlikely hero in Lu Yu, the man who’d gone from monk to clown to scholar to tea master. With an increased demand for tea came a corresponding demand for information about how to grow it. Although tea had been cultivated in the Szechwan district for hundreds of years, by the mid-tenth century, the practice of growing tea had spread through the Yangtze Valley and along the coast as well. With a growing market, farmers planted tea wherever they could find a patch of land, and by this time, tea cultivation was common and widespread. Nonetheless, knowledge about how to grow the plants and harvest the leaves was still spread only by word of mouth, passed from one generation to the next or from one neighbor to another.
A page from the Ch’a Ching, the Tea Classic, 780 CE
There was a resulting need for information about how to propagate and care for tea plants, how to prune the shrubs, harvest the leaves—in short, how to take tea from a shrub to a valuable commodity. In his Tea Classic, Lu Yu provided this information in written, accessible form.
The work begins with a description of the tea plant and its habitat. Lu Yu reports that tea plants growing naturally on the hills and beside the streams in the province of Szechwan are “sometimes so big that it takes two men to encircle them with their arms.” He goes on to say that the flowers of the tea plant are like “white cinnamon roses” and the seeds similar to those of the coconut palm. After describing the plant, he offers advice as to the best places to grow it: The most favorable is in “the soil of disintegrated stones,” the next best is where gravel is present, and the least favorable soil is yellow clay.
As for taste, Lu Yu decidedly prefers the leaves of the wild plants to those of trees growing in “confined spaces”—a comparison impossible for modern tea drinkers to make, since any wild tea trees that may still exist are extremely rare. During Lu Yu’s lifetime, cultivation of tea was not, of course, as widespread as it is today.
He advises tea growers to pick the new shoots, which he thinks are better than buds (in contrast to modern growers, who cherish the buds), and he considers the curled leaf tips to be superior to those that are uncurled.
The Tea Classic offers specific advice for harvesting the leaves, suggesting that harvest take place only when the weather is clear. Tea leaves four or five inches long should be picked during March, April, or May. Perhaps the following is the best-known quote from The Tea Classic: “The best quality leaves must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like fine earth newly swept by rain.”
Lu Yu’s masterful work covers the full spectrum of tea in Chinese culture. In Part Five, he says, “After baking … [the tea brick] should be put in a paper bag so that it will not lose its fragrant flavor” (a clear indication that paper bags were in use in China during the eighth century!). Much of his impressive expertise at preparing tea concerns the careful selection of water. One oft-told story is that Lu Yu could determine from a cup of tea precisely where the water to make it was collected—either along the shore of a river or midstream. As for his water preference for tea, he says the water from a mountain spring is best, then the water from a river, while the water from a well is of the lowest quality.
A brush used in the T’ang dynasty for the removal of dust during tea preparation; redrawn from an image in the Ch’a Ching, 780 CE
Lu Yu’s explanation of how to determine the best water temperature for making tea is nearly poetic: “When the water first boils, there appears something like the eyes of fishes on the surface, and a little noise can be heard. Then appears something like a spring rushing forth and a string of pearls at the side, this is the second boiling.” The tea, which has been broken off the baked brick and ground into a powder, is added to the water after the “second boiling.” The appearance of the “waves and breakers” is called the third boiling. A dipper full of cold water is added at this point, to “revive the youth of the water” and to enhance the flavor of the boiling tea. If the tea is left in the pot after the third boiling, it is considered “overboiled,” and Lu Yu advises against using it, if one wants superior taste.
Part Six gives instructions for drinking, and begins with the statement that all beings, including birds and animals, have to drink to live. Lu Yu suggests that this is what water is for, and that wine is used to drown sorrows, but that tea is drunk to avoid sleepiness.
Tea should be drunk, according to Lu Yu, four or five times a day for those who are “depressed, suffering from headache, eye-ache, fatigue of the four limbs or pains in the joints.” He also writes that bitter tea, combined with the roots of small onions, is good for “children who are frightened and tumble without apparent causes.”
Although many people were still adding spices and other exotic ingredients to tea, Lu Yu’s clear preference for superior taste (tumbling children notwithstanding) is to add nothing except a little salt, which is put in after the first boiling. As he puts it in the sixth section, “Sometimes onion, ginger, jujube, orange peel and peppermint are used, and it is permitted to boil for some time before skimming off the froth. Alas! This is the slop water of a ditch.”
The fourth section of the Ch’a Ching is dedicated to the twenty-four implements needed for the preparation of tea. This has been called Lu Yu’s Tea Code and is a precursor for the creation of the tea ceremony, first in China, then later, and more significantly, in Japan. Famous for his attention to detail, Lu Yu gives precise measurements for each of the implements used, including an “all-in-one” basket “one foot five inches high, two feet four inches long and two feet wide,” used to hold the implements needed to prepare tea.
The eighteenth implement that Lu Yu discusses is the china cup. He suggests that those from Yueh Chou are best, clearly preferring the beautiful blue celadon glaze that characterizes cups made in the North. He suggests that these give the beverage a beneficial greenish cast. White cups, he goes on to say, give the tea a pinkish cast that he considers distasteful.
Such attention to details may seem excessive to Westerners today, but Lu Yu lived during a time when Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism were all prevalent. Each of these paths was rich in symbolism and involved a deep spiritual practice. As Kakuzo Okakura, Japanese scholar and curator of Japanese art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, put it in his 1906 work, The Book of Tea, “The pantheistic symbolism of the time was urging one to mirror the Universal in the Particular.” It was one of Lu Yu’s greatest gifts that he found the means of expressing universal harmony and order within the particulars of preparing and serving a bowl of tea.
After Lu Yu had published the Ch’a Ching, he enjoyed enormous popularity, attracting attention both from peasants, who had heard stories of his mastery, and from the royal court. He and Emperor Taisung (763–779) eventually became friends. In spite of his popularity, however, Lu Yu remained restless and dissatisfied. Ironically, toward the end of his life, he sought out an almost monastic lifestyle that provided solitude, quiet, and time for contemplation and meditation.
A lacquer cup holder, commonly used during the T’ang dynasty to avoid burning the hands; redrawn from an image in the Ch’a Ching, 780 CE
Inevitably, Lu Yu had his own followers. Perhaps the most famous of his disciples was a poet by the name of Lu Tung (also seen as Lo Tung), who lived during the late T’ang dynasty and wrote at length of tea. One of his poems declares that the first cup merely moistened his lips and throat, but the second cup broke his loneliness, and by the fifth cup he was purified. The “sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The seventh cup—ah, but I could take no more.” Perhaps his most famous line is, “I am in no way interested in immortality, but only in the taste of tea,” a quote that is used frequently and enthusiastically by tea merchants even today.
THE IMPERIAL TEA TRIBUTE
Lu Yu’s work created a surge in the popularity of tea that resulted in more successful methods of tea cultivation and processing in many regions of T’ang dynasty China.
During this period, the finest tea grew in Yang-Hsien, a mountainous region near present-day Shanghai. In the late 770s, an envoy from the emperor was sent there to determine just why this mountainous region produced such superior tea. While there, he was given a bowl of tea, which he considered the finest he had ever tasted. The envoy immediately sent 28,000 grams (1,000 ounces) of this tea back to court. As soon as he tasted it, the emperor demanded that he be sent some of this tea every year. The demand for tribute paid with tea, which had actually begun in the fifth century, was to have tremendously beneficial results for the imperial Chinese economy over the years—and devastating results for the farmers and peasants.
During harvest time, usually in April, girls were sent to the mountainsides to pick the leaves. Picking ceased at noon. During the afternoons, the entire village worked to cook, powder, and press the tea into a paste that was then baked into cakes.
Even though the tea-making period only lasted a month in this mountainous region, it coincided with the time when the rice fields needed to be planted. Because the peasants were forced to neglect their own fields at this critical time, the rice and vegetable harvest was always severely depleted. The result was real hunger, and even famine later in the year.
The tribute created even greater hardship for the peasants and growers as more and more tea was demanded. During some years, thousands of catties (one catty equals twenty to twenty-one ounces) were demanded from a single region. And each year, it seemed, land in more and more regions was demanded for growing tea. Most of the tribute tea sent to court was sold to traders to boost the economy. Unfortunately, the peasants working in the tea gardens were not allowed to benefit from these sales individually, as private trade was forbidden. The very choicest tea was saved for the Son of Heaven—the name given to the Chinese emperor—and for the members of his court and family.
Tea’s Influence on Chinese Ceramics
The popularity of tea, aided by the huge fame of Lu Yu’s book, had a great impact on the ceramics and pottery industry of the time. Sophisticated artists created more and more elaborate ceramics for holding tea. At one time, craftsmen had used gold and silver in the ceramics, but the tea masters discouraged this practice, claiming that the use of metal ruined the taste of the tea.
During the T’ang dynasty, the tea cups or bowls were called wan and were classified according to the color of the glaze and how it influenced the color of the tea infusion. The first mention of Chinese porcelain outside China is from an Arab traveler, Soleiman, who wrote an account of his journey into China during the mid-ninth century. He reported, “They have in China a very fine clay with which they make vases which are as transparent as glass. Water is seen through them.”
The finest of these tea bowls were not only beautiful to look at, but also made a beautiful ringing sound when tapped lightly. Poets of the day referred to them as “disks of thinnest ice,” or “tilted lotus leaves floating upon a stream.”
Tea’s prominence, not only as a valuable commodity but also as an integral part of the Buddhist practice, helped it spread from one end of China to the other. But the fate of tea was closely tied to the fate of Buddhism, and when Buddhism began to lose favor with the government and court toward the latter part of the T’ang dynasty, tea, too, began to slip in popularity. As the power of the T’ang dynasty began to wane, Buddhists were persecuted, and 4,600 Buddhist temples fell to government proscription. It was, perhaps, a signal of the times that were to come. The T’ang dynasty ended in 907 when Tatars invaded, and for several decades, China was ruled by the Tatars. Tea, ceramics, scholarship, and many other essential elements of Chinese culture were, for the time being, abandoned.
TEA IN THE SONG DYNASTY
In 960 the country once again came under Chinese rule when Zhao Huangyin (927–976) became emperor and began the Song (also seen as Sung) dynasty. This dynasty was almost as splendid and refined as the T’ang, and tea once again played an important role in both the economy and the culture of the Chinese, from the peasant to the emperor.
It was during this dynastic age that enthusiasm and praise for tea reached a fever pitch. Lichihlai, a Song poet, said that the three most deplorable things in the world were: “the spoiling of fine youth through false education, the degradation of fine paintings through vulgar admiration, and the utter waste of fine tea through incompetent manipulation.”
Not surprisingly, the amount of imperial tribute tea demanded by the emperor paralleled the rise of tea’s popularity. Not only did he require vast amounts of tea to be sent to court, he also specified how the tea should be picked.
At the beginning of the Song dynasty, most of the tea used for tribute came from Fujian Province on China’s southeastern coast. The finest of this tea was thought to come from Pei-Yuan, one of forty-six tea gardens in the region. The leaves of this superior tea were gathered in the “time of the Excited Insects” (March), and the court rules for harvesting, or “plucking,” were detailed and strict. The leaves had to be picked while still covered with dew, meaning early morning. Only young girls were allowed to pluck the leaves, and their fingernails had to be kept just the right length, because the leaves were plucked with the nails, not the fingers. This kept the leaves from being contaminated with sweat and body heat. The picked leaves were then placed in a basket that the girls carried on their backs.
The emperor himself, Hui Tsung, who ruled from 1101 to 1125, greatly contributed to the popularity of tea, as he spent much of his fortune and almost all of his time in writing about, tasting, and searching for the best teas available. This Son of Heaven (which is what the Chinese called their emperors) lived in isolation and wrote a book on tea, called Ta Kuan Ch’a Lun (also seen as Guan Ch’a Lun), which was well respected by the tea masters of the age. It became the essential guide for tea during his lifetime.
He wrote that it was important to learn to determine the values of different teas, which “vary as much in appearance as do the faces of men.” In this book he stipulated—taking the demands of earlier emperors one step further—that tea for the emperor should be picked by young virgins wearing gloves. He dictated that only the bud and the first leaf should be picked. These were put on a golden platter to dry in the sun before being processed to make the emperor’s tea. Even the diet of the young girls who plucked the leaves was restricted. They were forbidden certain kinds of meats and fish so that impurities in their breath would not affect the fragrance of the tea.
What constituted the finest tea? It was a matter of choice, but like wine that is universally appreciated, some teas exhibit characteristics, such as color, clarity, and sweet fragrance, that are considered superior by all. During this period, tea leaves were classified according to their size and age—the youngest leaves being the new buds, the oldest being the larger leaves. The smallest buds were thought to be priceless, while the larger, older leaves were used to make a low-grade tea drunk by the peasants and lower classes.
White Tea
White tea was considered one of the rarest of all the twenty kinds of tea discussed in the Ta Kuan Ch’a Lun. According to this twelfth-century book, white tea comes from tea trees with widely spreading branches that grow on forested mountainsides. The emperor suggested that the best leaves were those “whitish in color shaped like sparrows’ tongues.” So rare was this tea that it was only found in three or four different tea gardens, and a total of only two to three bags full of the leaves were collected each year. (White tea remains relatively rare and quite expensive, even today. It is classified as “white” because of the way the leaves are processed.)
Of course, only the buds and smallest leaves were processed to make tea for the emperor. One tea, called “Small-Leaf Dragon,” was made with the freshest buds, which were crushed and molded into a cake that weighed only one and a half ounces, but sold for two ounces of gold! At this point, some tea was literally more valuable, ounce for ounce, than gold. In contrast, large, low-grade tea leaves were molded into bricks and cakes and used for trade and export, but no matter how coarse and bitter the tea, there was a steady demand for tea from China.
THE TEA AND HORSE CARAVAN ROAD
During the Song dynasty, tea became more and more important as an item of trade with tribes living on the fringe of the empire. People throughout the empire and beyond its borders wanted tea. The Mongol, the Tatar, the Turk, and the Tibetan all wanted processed tea leaves that they could brew into a drink that was not only good for them but that, increasingly, tasted good as well. Mongolians traded horses, wool, and musk for tea, but their thirst for tea became nearly insatiable. The Chinese court realized what power they held with their control of tea, and they began to manipulate these far-off tribes with the ebb and flow of tea. If Mongolian tribes were considered troublesome to the imperial court, tea was simply withheld from them until they became more cooperative.
