China Popular Itineraries |
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The Origin and Development of Tea |
China is the native place of tea. Chinese tea culture has a long history. However, in ancient China there wasn't the Chinese word "cha" (tea). There was only the word " Tu", which was a bitter edible plant. The two words were used to refer to the same thing. The word "cha" came into being after the Tang Dynasty.
Originally tea was used as a kind of medicine instead of a drink. It was said that Shen Nong, the legendary ruler in ancient China, once tasted a lot of plants and got poisoned many times. It was tea that cured him of the poison. Later the ancient Chinese got to know more and more about tea. Instead of be-ing regarded as a kind of medicine, it became a drink. Chinese tea culture was formed gradually.
It was recorded that tea was drunk in the Western Han Dynasty. During the period of the Three Kingdoms Period, drinking tea was very popular at least in the southern China.
During the Wei Dynasty, the Jin Dynasty and the Northern and Southern Dynasty, drinking tea already became a fashion for those people with high so-cial status. Some literary writings concerning tea came into being, for exam-ple, in the Jin Dynasty's "Xiangmingfu" was the representative work of the tea literature of that time.
The Tang Dynasty was the mature period of Chinese tea culture. At that time it was customary to drink tea. People were fastidious about not only the tea production place, the picking and making of tea but also the drinking ap-pliance and the way of drinking tea. Lu Yu of the Tang Dynasty was very fond of sampling tea. He lived on the tea mountain of Jiangxi Province and planted tea himself. He was named as himself "Tea God. " He first invented the way to boil tea and wrote the book Tea Canon (3 volumes), describing in detail the shape and properties, production place, picking and making, boiling and drinking of tea. It was the first monograph about tea in China. It is said that after writing Tea Canon Lu Yu went to Yangfen, Sanhe Town, Deqing County, Zhejiang Province by boat in 764 just in order to spread culture of tea planting and tea drinking. Under the influence of Lu Yu, the local people got into the habit of drinking tea and have kept it to the present day.
With the tea culture prevailing in the Tang Dynasty, tea was planted more widely in such provinces as Sichuan, Guangdong, Fujian, Guizhou, Hu-nan, Hubei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Jiangxi and Anhui. Moreover, tea trade be-came one of the main sources of royal government tax revenue. It was record-ed that the law of tea taxation took effect in the Tang Dynasty and ever since tea tax was an important financial income for royal government.
Drinking tea was also very popular in the Song Dynasty and the technique for making tea greatly improved. The book Chalu written by Caixiang was a monograph about tea. It consists of two volumes, one discussing tea and the other discussing tea vessels. There were about ten kinds of famous tea such as "Long, " " Longtuan, " "Feng, " " Yuqian, " " Dafang, " " Shengxue" at that time. There was even tea brick which was also called cake tea.
In the Song Dynasty, the farmers who lived on tea were called tea farm-ers. Ten or fifteen families were regarded as one unit. The tea shops were named in correspondence with each family name. The tea managers must hold the tea licence granted by the local authorities after they paid taxes.
By the Yuan Dynasty, drinking tea was very common in everyday life. Making tea was one of the seven house chores for the poor housewives of that time. Meanwhile the method of drinking tea changed -- no longer adding ad-ditional condiment into tea but pure boiling to make tea.
In the Ming and the Qing dynasties, people drank tea in almost the same way as we do today, except that the method of drinking tea was constantly changing. Zhang Yingwen of the Ming Dynasty wrote an additional volume to Lu Yu's Tea Canon, discussing the development of tea culture since the Tang Dynasty. In the Qing Dynasty Lu Qingcan wrote the Sequel of Tea Canon (3 volumes), discussing the development of tea culture of each dynasty. It fur-ther revised Tea Canon by Lu Yu and became the famous tea monograph of the Ming Dynasty.
Tea seed, together with the technique for planting tea trees, was spread to foreign countries long long ago. In the Tang Dynasty tea was spread to Japan and later the world famous Japanese tea ceremony got to be formed. At the beginning of the 17th century tea was spread to West Europe and became the favourite drink of European people.
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