Authors: Jeff Koehler
Tea’s actual history predates Bodhidharma. It goes back at least twenty-five hundred years to the mountains around Yunnan, in southwestern China,
1
where it was initially blended with herbs, seeds, and forest leaves.
2
During the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256
B.C.
), tea leaves began to be boiled and drunk without the addition of other herbs—that is, drunk as
tea
rather than a medicinal brew.
3
As China gradually unified into a single state, and techniques for processing and brewing the leaves were refined, tea drinking became imbued with artistic, religious, and
cultural notes. In the Tang Dynasty (
A.D.
618–907), the apogee of ancient Chinese prosperity and refinement, the drink garnered ritual, etiquette, and specific utensils.
During this period of unparalleled splendor, merchants commissioned the gifted Lu Yü (733–804) to write the first book dedicated solely to tea,
Ch’a Ching
(
The Classic of Tea
). Biographical sketches generally tell a Moses-like story of an abandoned infant found beside a river in a basket by the abbot of the Dragon Cloud Monastery.
4
Raised by monks who grew and processed tea, Lu Yü eventually rebelled against monastic life, left before being ordained, and joined a theatrical troupe, becoming a popular circus clown and playwright.
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He then worked as a government official before settling into life as a scholar, poet, and tea expert.
Around 780, he penned his brief but comprehensive masterpiece on tea. It contains such precise details on tea’s origins, cultivation, processing, and preparation that a thousand years later the British drew upon it when they started producing tea themselves. Yet it is not written in the language of a technical manual, but with a poet’s imagery and inventive use of metaphor, as this celebrated passage on something as elementary as boiling water for tea reveals:
When the water is boiling, it must look like fishes’ eyes and give off but the hint of a sound. When at the edges it chatters like a bubbling spring and looks like pearls innumerable strung together, it has reached the second stage. When it leaps like breakers majestic and resounds like a swelling wave, it is at its peak. Any more and the water will be boiled out and should not be used.
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Throughout, he infused the practical with the spiritual and emphasized the ritualized details of tea making. Tea drinking should be treated with reverence and be accompanied by beauty but also restraint: “Moderation is the very essence of tea. Tea does not lend itself to extravagance.”
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In the final decades of his life, Lu Yü, renowned and celebrated, withdrew from society and lived in solitude as a hermit. Upon his death, he metamorphosed into the god of tea. According to a tenth-century encyclopedia, tea merchants worshipped statues of Lu Yü in order to be blessed with good sales.
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But when their tea didn’t sell well, the merchants would pour boiling water over the statue.
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• • •
Tea spread from China outward across eastern Asia, retaining its spiritual ties. This was particularly true in Japan, where a monk named Myoan Eisai (1141–1215) is often considered the father of Japanese tea.
Eisai took two trips to China and introduced the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism to his country. On his second trip, in 1191, he carried back tea seeds, which were planted successfully, including at a temple compound in the forested Uji Hills between Kyoto and Nara. While tea had been planted as far back as the eighth century in Japan, it did not become widespread until after Eisai’s reintroduction.
Its popularity stemmed in part from the healthy, medicinal properties that Eisai lauded in his book
Kissa Yojoki
, which means something like “drinking tea for health.” “Tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one’s life more full and complete,” Eisai boldly asserted in the first line of the book.
That included spiritual health, too. Tea, Alan Watts noted in
The Way of Zen
, “so clarifies and invigorates the mind that it has been said, ‘The taste of Zen [
ch’an
] and the taste of tea [
ch’a
] are the same.’”
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Zen monks used tea as a mediation stimulant,
11
and the drink became paramount in aiding long periods of deep concentration. “If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee,” Watts wrote, “Buddhism is most certainly tea.”
12
“Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage,” opens Kakuzo Okakura’s
The Book of Tea
(1906). “In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism—Teaism.”
13
The influential art critic and scholar wrote his book in English in order to celebrate the oriental uniqueness of Japan. He used tea as a symbol and, in doing so, introduced the Japanese tea ceremony to the West. The cult of teaism celebrates, Okakura wrote, “the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence” and “inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order.”
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From the formalities of Zen came the highly ritualized tea ceremony know as
cha-no-yu
(literally “tea hot water”). Okakura’s in-depth descriptions of the three elements of the tea room—tea, pot, and place—are heightened by moments of poetic flight that Lu Yü would have appreciated. The author liberally quotes his Chinese predecessor on boiling water and even takes a brave, lyrical stab at describing it himself: “The singing
kettle, as it boils over the brazier, sounds like some cicada pouring forth his woes to departing summer.”
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And elsewhere:
The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on some faraway hill.
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During these ceremonies, Japanese tea masters were not infusing standard rolled tea leaves, but rather
matcha
, tea that had been steamed, dried, and crushed into a fine powder, which was then whipped with a delicate brush of split bamboo in exquisite teacups. The ancient poets of the southern Chinese dynasties, Okakura wrote, referred to the luminous green brew as the “froth of the liquid jade.”
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Tea arrived in Europe in 1580 when a Portuguese trader brought a chest of it along with other Chinese luxury goods—silks, spices, porcelain, lacquered objects. The Dutch and British followed, with the first tea reaching The Hague in 1610 and London about the same time. By 1635 it was fashionable in the Dutch court and soon after the French one. Garway’s Coffee House in London was serving it alongside coffee, drinking chocolate, and sherbet—as well as sherry, punch, and ale—in 1657.
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Two years later, the great and gossipy observer of people Samuel Pepys recorded his first “Cupp of Tee” in his diary. Within a decade, it had reached the American colonies.
“There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation,” Okakura noted of its widespread appeal. “It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.”
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Nor, in England, initially at least, refinement.
Generally ill-packaged for the humid, months-long sea journey from China, and carried in a ship’s hull among stinking cargo, tea, in those early London days, was taxed in liquid form. That meant coffeehouses brewed a big batch in the morning, stored it in wooden kegs like ale until the tax inspector assessed it, then served the tea, reheating it as needed throughout the day. It’s not hard to imagine the woody, tongue-coating tannins of the drink by midafternoon, or even midday. The taste drastically
improved once the Crown started taxing it in dried-leaf form and tea was brewed on demand.
But even then, few early references appear saying that the drink tasted delicious or good or even, quite simply, fine. Certainly, it was bitter.
*
And if it was bitter, then it had to be healthy. At the beginning of Europe’s affair with tea, references accent the drink’s medicinal benefits. The first known mention of tea in Europe is found in the second volume of the Venetian writer and geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s collection of travel narratives,
Navigationi et Viaggi
(1559). Along with accounts of Marco Polo’s journeys, it included a firsthand report by an Arab traveler to China that refers to an “herb, whether dry or fresh” that the Chinese “boil well in water” and then drink.
One or two cups of this decoction taken on an empty stomach removes fever, headache, stomachache, pain in the side or in the joints, and it should be taken as hot as you can bear it. He said, besides, that it was good for no end of other ailments which he could not remember, but gout was one of them. And if it happens that one feels incommoded in the stomach from having eaten too much, one has but to take a little of this decoction, and in a short time all will be digested.
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A year later, the Dominican missionary Father Gaspar da Cruz, the first to preach the Catholic doctrine in China, returned to Portugal and wrote that when guests “come to any man’s house of quality,” they are offered “a kind of drinke called
ch’a
, which is somewhat bitter, red, and medicinall, which they are wont to make with a certayne concoction of herbes.”
21
In an early reference by the German Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo (1616–44) European merchants in the Mughal port of Surat in India partake: “At our ordinary meetings every day, we took only
Thé
, which is commonly used all over the Indies, not only among those of the country, but also among the Dutch and English, who take it as a drug that cleanses
the stomach, and digests the superfluous humours, by a temperate heat particular thereto.”
22
Salesmen and admen were quick to pick up on such travelers’ reports. Tea’s first advertisement in England ran in the broadsheet
Mercurius Politicus
in September 1658: “That excellent, and by all Physitians approved,
China
Drink, called by the Chineans
Tcha
, by other Nations
Tay
alias
Tee
, is sold at the Sultaness-head, a Cophee-house in Sweetings Rents by the Royal Exchange, London.”
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In 1660, coffeehouse proprietor Thomas Garway ran a much lengthier ad—some thirteen hundred words long—that took this physicians’ endorsement significantly further. It extolled tea’s virtues in a list of dozens of disparate benefits from stimulating the appetite (“particularly for Men of a Corpulent Body, and such as are great eaters of Flesh”) to “removeth the Obstructions of the Spleen” and “cleareth the Sight.” Not surprisingly, it also took aim at that ultimate advertising target, man’s virility, claiming in the very first line of the ad that tea “maketh the Body active and lusty.” (Lust gained a certain uplift, no doubt, by tea’s ability to “cleanseth and purifyeth adult Humours and hot Liver.”)
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Tea was, moreover, nonalcoholic, a not inconsequential point at a time when ale was being drunk for breakfast. The eighteenth-century poet William Cowper called tea “the cups, / That cheer but not inebriate,”
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an ideal slogan for the temperance movement that rose to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century.
But such virtues didn’t necessarily make it immediately fashionable among the society ladies and upper classes in England, nor did its exclusivity from the prohibitively high price. It became chic with Charles II’s marriage to the Portuguese princess and tea addict Catherine of Braganza in 1662. Along with the ports of Bombay and Tangier and the free right to trade in Brazil and the East Indies, her dowry included a chest of tea.
The drink was new to the country, and so, too, to the English language. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, the first use of the word
tea
—or rather, its early variant,
chaa
—dates back to the 1598 translation of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s
Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies
, which referred to the drink as being “made with the powder of a certaine hearbe called Chaa.”
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The spelling quickly ran through various forms—tay, tey, té, thé, the, teee, thea—before finally landing on its more familiar form, tea. Much of Western Europe derived their word from the term for tea in Amoy (now Xiamen) following the Dutch (
thee
), who traded it to them from their early base of Bantam, Java:
thee
(German),
te
(Danish and Swedish),
té
(Spanish),
tè
(Italian), and
thé
(French).
The Hindi and Bengali terms for tea (
chai
and
cha
, respectively) derive from the second source for the word, the Cantonese
ch’a
(pronounced
chah
). So does Japanese (
cha
), Arabic (
shai
or
chai
), Persian (
chay
), and Russian (
chai
). Portugal (
chá
) is a Western European exception, but then they first obtained tea from Canton (today called Guangzhou).
The modern English pronunciation of tea took longer to catch up. When coffeehouse habitué Alexander Pope wrote
The Rape of the Lock
in 1714, he rhymed
tea
with
away
and
obey
. Fifty years later, the vowel had tightened, and the rake, rebel, and poet Charles Churchill wrote this sprightly couplet about reading tea leaves:
Matrons, who toss the cup, and see
The grounds of fate in grounds of tea
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By the time Churchill penned his verse, the price of tea had dropped from the dearly unaffordable to the merely expensive, and soon the drink moved from being a luxury of the aristocracy and upper class to a necessity of the working class. The British were enjoying a two- (or three- or four-) cups-a-day habit. Samuel Johnson declared himself “a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.”
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