The Story of Tea

by Mary Lou Heiss

  Under Song control tea cultivation also surpassed that of the Tang, and systems were established for grading leaf tea and determining quality. The emperor controlled production of all tea in China, and in the Song dynasty only members of a particular class could drink certain teas. As with tea plucked from Mengding Mountain the most precious “tribute grade” teas were gathered from revered mountains and reserved exclusively for the emperor. The first commissioner of tea, Ts’An Hsiang, was appointed to personally supervise the collection and labeling of the tribute teas in the early weeks of spring. Following this, the next picking of tender young leaves from spring teas were reserved for the upper class and the elite, while the larger, coarser leaves from summer pickings became the daily brew of the working class.

  Tea drinking continued to evolve. Tea cakes, to which plum juice was added for sweetness, remained the favorite form of tea for the Song, but finely powdered tea started to replace the coarse leaves in the cakes, which added a refinement of style to the method of preparation. This change heralded the era when tea cake was scraped directly into the bowl and whipped into a lovely green froth. Large-mouthed earthenware ewers (vase-shaped pitchers or jugs) were designed to pour boiled water into a tea bowl in a ritualized motion.

  To complement this new powdered tea, Song emperor Huizong (r. 1101–1125) commanded the royal pottery works to create new tea-drinking cups. Known for his aesthetic tastes, he ushered in the creation of luxurious porcelains characterized by refined elegance, underglaze decorations, subtle etched designs, and sensuous glazes. Song porcelains were mostly monochromatic and the most popular type—Qingbai porcelain—had a bluish-white glaze. These cups not only increased tea-drinking pleasure, but they also encouraged awareness and admiration of the tea liquor itself. It was during this point in the development of tea culture that teawares began to be viewed as objects of desire and value and not just as functional tools. At one time Huizong favored deep chocolate-brown, almost black glazed teacups, streaked with fine, thin tan lines. Known as “rabbit hair glaze,” this style became very popular as it was said that the black glaze pleasingly offset the color of the froth of the whisked tea. These dark glazed cups were favorites in Song tea competitions. In these contests, the winner would be the person who could whip a cup of tea that was the greenest in color and the frothiest in style. These dark cups added to the presentation and showed off the tea to an advantage. At one point Song tea drinkers used a zhan, a shallow saucerlike bowl that accentuated the color of the whipped tea by barely containing the precious liquid. This imperial desire for strong but thin vessels that could endure near-boiling liquid was the beginning of the Chinese porcelain trade that would, centuries later, influence the course of ceramics manufacturing throughout Japan and Europe.

  Huxin Ting Tea House in the Yu Yuan Garden (Shanghai, China).

  Teahouses sprang up during this time, providing regular citizens the opportunity to drink tea in public rather than in the seclusion of their own circle of family and friends. Selections of tea were accompanied by light snacks, and teahouses quickly became important places to socialize, conduct business, play board games, listen to poetry and stories, flaunt oneself, and gossip. For the eloquent Song people life had little concern but for pleasurable moments. Toward the end of their reign, the Song began experimenting with drinking tea brewed from loose leaves. Although most people did not give up their cake tea entirely, this new way of drinking tea offered an easier way to measure the tea, but the trade-off was an unsatisfactory flavor.

  Tea Arrives in Japan

  At the midpoint of the Tang dynasty and into the middle of the Song dynasty in China, Japan was in its Heian era (794–1185), a period when Chinese influence was at its height and the samurai class was beginning to rise to power. Arts and intellectual pursuits flourished in Japan, and of particular note was the introduction of tea drinking to Emperor Saga. During this time many Japanese monks traveled to China for study in the great Buddhist monasteries and temples. Tea drinking was among the intellectual Chinese pursuits that the monks observed and came to enjoy themselves.

  Around 1191 a Zen priest named Myoan Eisai (the founder of the Rinsai sect of Zen Buddhism) brought tea seeds and bushes back to Japan from China and planted some of them on the southernmost island of Kyushu. He shared seeds with a friend, who in turn planted them in the Uji hills outside of modern-day Kyoto, an area that is still revered today for its high-quality and expensive tea. Eisai is credited with popularizing tea drinking in Japan during the Kamakura period (1185–1333). After many visits to China he used his experiences growing and drinking tea in China to write the book Kissa Yōjōki in 1214 (roughly translated as “Drinking Tea for Health”). Eisai is to Japan what Lu Yu is to China in terms of advocating tea. While Lu Yu proposed rules for proper tea cultivation, brewing, and drinking, Eisai weaved medicinal and healthful benefits with religious ideology without much concern for aesthetics.

  The Japanese monk Kūkai (774–835) was the first to return from China and write of his experience drinking tea. Many Japanese poets lauded the ethereal character of tea and connected it with the importance of seasonality and the changing natural landscape. The sages and scholars found meaning and clarity in the experience of drinking tea. Both Tang and Song tea-drinking rituals were revered by the Japanese, who adapted them into elevated and studied composed forms of beauty and high art. The Japanese court and the aristocratic class grasped the same meaning from tea drinking that the Tang and Song poets and literati had earlier: it allowed them to remove themselves from the details of daily life and experience a pure and untainted sagelike experience of otherworldly peace.

  Tea Drinking during China’s Yuan and Ming Dynasties

  As the Song concentrated on perfecting the art of whipped tea and contemplated how to incorporate loose-leaf tea into their tea rituals, storm clouds gathered over their glorious court. Fierce Mongol hordes, long held at bay in their harsh lands outside of China’s borders, swept down into the more temperate and lush lands of the Chinese empire. For the next eighty-eight years Kublai Khan’s Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) controlled the Middle Kingdom. Tea drinking was reduced to a functional act and was no longer cultivated in court as an aesthetic pleasure. The Mongol rulers, reared on dark and pungent brick tea that was laced with fermented mare’s milk, found the Song’s loose-leaf tea somewhat satisfactory but had no liking for the frothy whipped tea.

  Intrigued by the leaf tea, the Yuan Mongols developed a new technique for drying and roasting fresh tea leaves. Called chaoqing, this process resulted in leaves that were less parched and burned, perhaps taking a step closer to discovering the techniques for making green tea. But it would not be until the Ming dynasty (some 275 years later) that tea-leaf manufacture would advance beyond these first steps taken by the Mongols. Thus the elaborate tea rituals of the Song dynasty came to a swift and unfortunate halt at the very moment when the accomplishments of China’s tea culture were cresting.

  Aesthetic tea pursuits were thus terminated under Mongol rule. Had the Song stayed in power, or had the coarse Mongols not been their predecessors, China most likely would have seen their evolving tea culture culminate into a glorious, formal, stylized tea ceremony. Instead, the Japanese pursued the development of tea culture when the Chinese no longer could. By this time the Japanese had left behind their adoration and imitation of Chinese arts and culture, and they were able to imbue the rituals of the tea ceremony with purely Japanese aesthetics, Japanese utensils, and a precise, practiced formality based on Japanese principles.

  In time the rise of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) ushered the Mongol rulers out and back to their harsh, barren lands to the north. Zhu Yuanzhang, a rebel leader who had protested Mongol rule, became the first Ming emperor, and adopted the name Hongwu, which meant Vast Military Power. He reestablished China’s former imperial customs and traditions to their former glory, including elaborate Han tea customs from the Song era. Under Hongwu’s reign many topics and policies regarding tea cu
ltivation, production, grading, storage, and transportation were established and codified, providing a framework for China’s tea industry that is still in use today.

  During this time the secrets of oxidation (the process by which fresh tea leaf is turned into black tea) were discovered. This was not a style of tea preferred by the Chinese, who perceived black tea as something only fit for the barbarian foreigners. But they recognized the importance of the discovery and the potential value that oxidization had for improving the condition of tea that would be traveling long distances over land and sea. Now, brick tea exported to the border regions of Tibet and Mongolia could be sent as black tea, which would allow the tea to arrive at its final destination in better shape. Previously, crude green tea bricks suffered from overheating and near freezing in the changing weather conditions and often developed mold when exposed to rain and damp environments.

  In a traditional Chinese tea-house, tea may be served in a gaiwan along with a small snack such as hard-boiled quail eggs (Shanghai, China).

  Ming emperors continued the tradition of commissioning fine tableware. The porcelain kilns at Jingdezhen switched from producing Qingbai wares and pure white Shufu wares to producing underglaze blue and white wares. Known as mei-ping, these blue and white wares gained the title of China’s porcelain. The Jingdezhen kilns became famous for creating sophisticated and delicate porcelain tableware items. European traders would later marvel at these splendid objects, which at the time had no equal in Europe. Small, handle-less porcelain teacups acquired a lid and a deep saucer for the cup to fit down into. Called a gaiwan, this new design helped to prevent spills from this style of cup, which was too hot to hold, and provided the drinker with an easy way to push aside the tea leaves floating in the cup. Practical and elegantly designed gaiwan are still the cup of choice today in Chinese teahouses.

  The first porcelain teapots also appeared under Ming rule. Tea was still costly, so these teapots were intentionally made small. This allowed the tea leaves in the teapot to be reinfused several times by successively adding more water, a method of tea brewing still followed in China for green and oolong tea. Small zisha clay teapots also began to appear at this time, and they became the favorites of the tea literati (see “Artistic Yixing Teapots”).

  An assortment of Yixing tasting pots is often used for sampling tea (Fujian Province, China).

  The Ming also developed an obsession for flowers and aromatic blossoms, and their love of richly perfumed fragrances resulted in their perfecting the art of scenting tea with fresh flower petals. The creation of flower-scented teas such as jasmine, osmanthus, and rose is considered to be the Song’s most significant contribution to China’s tea culture, even more important than their eventual switch from cake to powdered tea. The Tang dynasty had added sweetness and aroma to tea with the addition of plum juice, fruits, and spices, but the development of splendid flower-scented teas was an achievement that would forever forward belong to China alone.

  Chanoyu: Japan’s Way of Tea

  While the Ming perfected their culture of the steeped tea leaf, Japanese priests and monks continued to embrace the whipped, powdered tea of the Song dynasty. Zen Buddhist monks incorporated powdered tea drinking into their rituals of prayer and meditation, and they entwined tea drinking with religious and philosophical ideals. By the sixteenth century the ultimate artistic exercise in tea drinking was born in Chanoyu, or “the way of tea.” Chanoyu was distilled from all of the previous approaches to tea drinking, and it is an artful practice that embodies harmony, respect, tranquility, humility, purity, mystery, beauty, artful appreciation, symmetry, and total attention to the art of tea brewing. Chanoyu is based on Zen qualities that are different from but not in opposition to the Song’s more temporal concepts of connoisseurship and tea appreciation.

  Tea master Sen Rikyu (1521–1591) revised the rules of Chanoyu, focusing more on the philosophical virtues of harmony, reverence, purity, and calm rather than on religious principles. Sen Rikyu gravitated away from the smooth, shiny Tenmoku tea bowls that were made in eastern China and had become popular in Japan among tea drinkers. Sen Rikyu ushered in a new style of Japanese stoneware tea bowl that was based on the fifteenth-century Ido-style earthernwares of Korea. These simple bowls introduced a natural, somewhat imperfect and humble appearance that reflected his preference for naturalistic, earth-toned teawares, imperfect in shape but pleasing in appearance and possessing a confident, tactile touch in the user’s hand.

  Tea Drinking during the Qing Dynasty

  Yet another change was in the wind for the Celestial Empire. With the death of the last Ming emperor, tribal banners fluttered over China as Manchu tribesmen claimed power and announced the beginning of their Qing dynasty (1644–1911), also known as the Manchu dynasty. The non-Chinese Manchu rulers, like the Mongol rulers before them, drank coarse dark tea made from black tea and added fermented mare’s milk to it. They brought this style of tea drinking with them to the imperial court, but the Han Chinese never converted to drinking tea with milk nor developed a taste for black tea. Tea was important to the Manchus, and they declared that it was as important to people as “salt, rice, vinegar, soy sauce, oil, and firewood” were. At the Qing imperial palace, located in the Forbidden City, the imperial kitchen operated two tea kitchens—one for the preparation of Manchu milk tea and another for Han green or “clear” tea.

  The first Manchu emperor, Kangxi (1661–1722), forged a peace treaty with Russia that quelled Tartar rumblings on China’s northern border with Siberia. The treaty reinstated an exchange of goods and materials that flowed between China, Siberia, and Mongolia by camel caravan. Border tea, China’s major export to these other regions of the Far East, was still being compressed into a dense tea brick of poor quality leaf and twigs, which could also be scored and broken for use as currency by these outsiders. These long and arduous treks across Central Asia took as long as eighteen months to reach their destination, and consisted of two hundred to three hundred animals traveling across the desert, each carrying approximately six hundred pounds of tea.

  The West Comes in Search of China’s Teas

  The Manchus were in power when trade with Europe turned China into the most important trading country in the world. Although the Portuguese were the first traders to enter the Far East, and the first to bring tea, spices, and porcelains back to Portugal, it was Dutch traders who first created the habit of drinking tea in the West in the early seventeenth century. The Dutch established a trading center at Batavia (known today as Jakarta) on the island of Java and from there consolidated their purchases from Indonesia and China for the long trip home. Chinese tea men faced the challenge of producing tea for the Dutch that would endure the long voyage back to Holland without rotting or spoiling in the damp conditions aboard the ships. In their trial and error, the Chinese hit on the notion that for this purpose tea needed to be allowed to darken, then fired and bake-dried in a way that green tea was not.

  Over time the Chinese refined and perfected the production of black tea, and for many years these teas were produced in the Wuyi mountains of northern Fujian Province. From here, the tea was sent downriver to the trading port of Canton. In 1610 the first shipment of Chinese tea reached The Hague, and wealthy patrons were dazzled by it. The Dutch embraced tea with a fervent passion, and they laced it heavily with milk based on reports from Dutch traders that this was how the Chinese emperor took his tea. Because the emperor at the time was the Manchu emperor, these reports were based on information that was only true for him; Han Chinese emperors never did nor never would add milk to their tea. Nevertheless, Dutch physicians lauded tea as a curative and necessary medicine.

  The Dutch also purchased such fine and delicate Chinese goods as lacquer objects, porcelains, spices, and silks, while continuing to send home greater quantities of tea. Soon they had enough tea to ship quantities of this invigorating beverage from Holland to their colony of New Amsterdam (New York) in North America. The first record of Dutch tea in
the Massachusetts colony appeared in 1670, when Benjamin Harris and Daniel Vernon advertised the availability of black tea. In 1674 New Amsterdam passed from Dutch hands to English rule and was renamed New York. By 1682 tea had been introduced to the city of Philadelphia by the Quaker William Penn.

  After the Dutch adopted the tea habit, members of the French upper class began to drink tea as well. In Paris the Marquise de Sevigné, a cultured woman of letters, extolled the way that her friend Mme. de la Sablière drank “tea à la Chinoise” (or tea with milk). Tea reached Germany about 1650, and was first mentioned to have appeared in Scandinavia in 1723. But it was not until 1658 that the first public sale of Dutch-traded Chinese tea commenced in London at Garraway’s Coffee House. Like their fellow explorers, the English went mad for tea, which was touted as a healthful curative. Tea became fashionable in the coffeehouses, and the drink joined coffee and hot chocolate as one of the new temperance beverages that appealed to the privileged class of professional men and “literati.”

  When in 1662 Charles II wed Princess Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess and tea drinker, tea became the fashionable beverage for English ladies. This opened the way for the rapid rise of the social traditions of “teatime.” Like the Dutch, the English added milk to their tea. They also added lumps of sugar, which England imported in vast quantities from the West Indies. Sugar added another boost to the energizing effects of tea, and a cup of black tea with cream and sugar defined the English style of twice-daily tea drinking.