Tea (7 page)

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.

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
770
s, 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 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.

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 CARVAN 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.