Posted on Tuesday the 11th September by James Norwood Pratt
Lu Yu was not China’s first tea lover. The tea plant had already been known for more than three thousand years. At first it was food and medicine, and then a tonic of sorts before becoming a beverage. Tea became a drink only by degrees; therefore, over centuries, and gradually the drink made from the succulent leaf of this camellia, like the plant itself, spread from China’s interior down the length of the Yang-tse River to the Yellow Sea.
Like the farmers, Taoist and Buddhist monasteries throughout this vast stretch of China took up tea cultivation, much the way Roman Catholic monastics planted the wine grape everywhere they went in Europe. In Asian culture we may as well consider tea a sort of Taoist and Buddhist communion: A shared yet wordless transmission of peace; A Mirror of Soul. An orphan raised in a Zen monastery where he obviously did chores in the tea garden, Lu Yu recognized over a thousand years ago that tea— like wine—is one of those agricultural products which at its best becomes a work of art. Tea at its best was what Lu Yu’s Book of Tea was all about— where it’s found and produced, how to recognize and choose it, and—trickiest of all—the best way of preparing it for maximum enjoyment. Lu Yu treated these “country matters” with a poet’s refinement, and his primer of pleasures made him a celebrity, as these things were measured in Tang-dynasty China. Images of him soon appeared in every tea establishment, like statues of a patron saint, and if business was bad the saint’s image might be resentfully doused with boiling water. Mainly business was good, however, as Chinese people increasingly discovered tea not as a soup or salad or tonic but as “pure drinking.”
Within decades the practice grew so popular the emperor was able to tax it and non-Chinese wanted to learn it. Tang emperors began to export tea beyond the Great Wall in exchange for horses. Not too long after Lu Yu’s death, one of the border tribes offered a thousand horses for a copy of The Book of Tea itself, and the Emperor of Japan demanded Japanese subjects present him with incredibly rare “Tribute Teas” such as the Tang Emperor received.
In slow motion, therefore, tea exploded across Asia much the way Gutenburg’s invention of printing was to explode across Europe—and nothing was ever to be the same again. Consider the countless number of times per day print in some form enters our lives. This is exactly how Asian people have experienced tea ever since Lu Yu, and this is why they esteem him a cultural hero, perhaps one of the immortals. Thanks to Lu Yu, simple, healthful tea became one of the arts of civilized living for all Asians, from the village to the palace. And just as wine as a cash crop evolved from antiquity’s terracotta amphorae to the medieval barrel and the Renaissance invention of the bottle, so too tea evolved with time, as ways to process tea leaf and prepare the drink continued to develop and change.
Under the Tang dynasty Lu Yu boiled tea leaf, but Song dynasty tea lovers learned how to powder the leaf and whip it with a bamboo whisk in hot water. You drank the resulting leaf in suspension the way Japanese drink matcha, the powdered tea used in chanoyu—the “Japanese tea ceremony.” This Song-era style of tea was preserved in Japan as if in a time capsule, while the Mongols destroyed Song tea culture utterly in China. By the time the Ming drove out the Mongols in the 1300s, China was producing loose-leaf tea like ours today while Japan persisted in the ancient way of tea manufacture, preparation, and ceremony. Both the teapot and the practice of steeping our familiar loose tea leaf are thus relatively recent Chinese innovations.