Tea and its customs

In Chinese, 茶 chá is the name of the shrub as well as its leaves and the drink made from them. You drink it, 喝茶 hē chá, but above all you prepare it, 泡茶 pào chá, literally “to soak the tea”, and that is where a whole culture begins. The character is readily broken down into a plant 艹, a man 人 and a tree 木: man among the plants. It is a good mnemonic, but it is not an etymology. 茶 comes from 荼 tú, a bitter plant of the Classic of Poetry, from which a stroke is said to have been removed around the Tang period, to tell tea apart from other herbs. Exactly when, specialists are still debating. Other old names survive in the written language, such as 茗 míng, which you find in the 品茗杯 pǐnmíngbēi, the small tasting cup.

The first book devoted to tea is the 茶经 Chájīng, The Classic of Tea, written in the second half of the 8th century by 陆羽 Lù Yǔ, whom tradition calls the 茶圣 cháshèng, “the saint of tea”. It opens with sentence 25 of the list: 茶者，南方之嘉木也, “tea is a fine tree of the South”. Careful, though: Lu Yu’s tea was nothing like ours. It was pressed into cakes, which were roasted, ground, then boiled with a pinch of salt. Lu Yu was happy with that. On the other hand, those who added spring onion, ginger, jujubes, orange peel or mint were, in his view, drinking “water fit to be thrown in the ditch”. He did not mince his words.

Under the Song, the fashion turned to powdered tea, whisked with a bamboo brush in black bowls: this is 点茶 diǎnchá. Scholars competed in 斗茶 dòuchá, the tea contest, won by the whitest and most lasting froth. A Japanese monk, Eisai, took this whisked tea back to Japan at the end of the 12th century; it is still there, under the name matcha, our 抹茶 mǒchá. In China, on the other hand, it disappeared. In 1391, the founder of the Ming abolished the tribute of tea cakes in favour of whole leaves, to spare the peasants’ labour, or so the story goes, and people began to steep tea in teapots. This is when the 紫砂壶 zǐshāhú of Yixing were born. The word 茶道 chádào, “the way of tea”, has indeed existed in Chinese since the Tang, but today it calls Japan to mind: people prefer 茶艺 cháyì, “the art of tea”, a word launched in Taiwan in the late 1970s, if I am not mistaken, precisely to set itself apart.

The Chinese sort tea into 六大茶类 liù dà chálèi, six great families, according to how the leaf is processed after picking: 绿茶 lǜchá green, 白茶 báichá white, 黄茶 huángchá yellow, 乌龙茶 wūlóngchá oolong (the “black dragon”), 红茶 hóngchá and 黑茶 hēichá. Watch out for the trap: 红茶, “red tea” in Chinese, is what we call black tea. The Chinese look at the colour of the infusion, we look at the colour of the leaf. And 黑茶, the Chinese “black tea”, is something else entirely: a dark tea, pressed into bricks or cakes, which ages for years, like the 普洱茶 pǔ'ěrchá of Yunnan. The word used for all these families is 发酵 fājiào, “fermentation”. In reality, it is an oxidation of the leaf; only 黑茶 truly ferments.

The great teas bear names out of poems. The 龙井 Lóngjǐng of Hangzhou is “the dragon’s well”, and the best is 明前茶 míngqiánchá, picked before the Qingming festival, in early April. 铁观音 Tiěguānyīn is the “Iron Guanyin”, and 大红袍 Dàhóngpáo “the big red robe”: each has its legend, often several, and none of them can be checked. 碧螺春 Bìluóchūn, “the jade spiral of spring”, was supposedly first called 吓煞人香 xiàshārénxiāng, “the scent that frightens you to death”, until the Kangxi emperor, passing by Lake Tai, found the name a little vulgar and renamed it. It is a lovely story. As for lapsang souchong, 正山小种 Zhèngshān xiǎozhǒng, “souchong” is the Fujianese pronunciation of 小种, “small variety”; as for “lapsang”, nobody agrees.

Tea, by the way, travelled with two pronunciations. Where it left by sea, from the ports of Fujian, it kept the local pronunciation te, carried by the Dutch: hence our tea, the German Tee and the French thé. Where it left by land, or through Macao, it kept cha: the Portuguese chá, the Russian чай, the Turkish çay, the Arabic shāy. The rest of the world is split roughly between these two families. You can guess the road tea took just by listening to its name. As for the 茶马古道 chámǎ gǔdào, the ancient tea horse road, it climbed from Yunnan and Sichuan up to Tibet, where bricks of tea were traded for horses.

The most careful preparation is the 功夫茶 gōngfuchá of Fujian and the Chaozhou region. The 功夫 is the same as in kung fu (see our page Kung fu): the time, the patience and the mastery you put into something. It is also written 工夫茶, and both spellings have their supporters. You scald the cups, 温杯 wēn bēi, rinse the leaves, 洗茶 xǐ chá (the first infusion is not drunk), then make one very short infusion after another in a small teapot or a 盖碗 gàiwǎn. The infusion then goes into a 公道杯 gōngdàobēi, literally “the cup of fairness”: without it, the last cup poured would be stronger than the first. A good oolong is 耐泡 nàipào: it stands up to seven or eight infusions.

Tea is first of all a gesture of welcome: 客来敬茶, “when a guest comes, you offer him tea”. To thank the person pouring for you, you tap the table with two bent fingers, the 叩指礼 kòuzhǐlǐ. The story goes that the Qianlong emperor, travelling incognito, poured tea for his servants; since they could not kowtow without giving him away, they imitated the kowtow with their fingers. It is a pretty story. Nothing proves it is true. Among the Qing mandarins, on the contrary, raising your cup without drinking meant the audience was over: this is 端茶送客 duān chá sòng kè. And when you do not drink alcohol, you toast 以茶代酒 yǐ chá dài jiǔ, “with tea in place of alcohol”. The expression goes back to the Three Kingdoms, to a scholar who could not hold his wine and whose sovereign had tea discreetly served to him instead.

Tea also has its place in marriage. In the past, betrothal gifts were called 茶礼 chálǐ, because a tea bush, it was said, cannot be transplanted: the bride would never change family again. Botanists might disagree, but the symbol has held. Even today, the bride serves tea to her parents-in-law. And the monks have their share: to the Chan master 赵州 Zhàozhōu, who asked every visitor whether he had been there before, people answered yes or no, and he told them all the same thing: 吃茶去 chī chá qù, “go and drink tea!” An impatient brush-off, or an invitation to live in the present moment? Commentators have been arguing about it for a thousand years.

In everyday life, tea is everywhere. There are the 茶馆 cháguǎn of Chengdu, where people play cards or mahjong all day long, and Lao She’s play of that name, Teahouse; the 茶楼 chálóu of Canton and their 早茶 (see The cuisines of China and the world); at the office, the 茶水间 cháshuǐjiān, the kitchenette, and at conferences, the 茶歇 cháxiē, the break. 下午茶 xiàwǔchá, afternoon tea, came back from England. And there is the 保温杯 bǎowēnbēi, the insulated flask full of leaves that every Chinese person over forty carries around (people make fun of it online, but I am not sure I can blame them). Watch out, on the other hand, for Cantonese 凉茶: it is not tea, it is a decoction of medicinal herbs (see Getting treatment).

The language has kept expressions from it. Tea is one of the 开门七件事 kāimén qī jiàn shì, the seven things you must have when you open your door in the morning: 柴米油盐酱醋茶, firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar and tea (see From rice to dessert). To live on 粗茶淡饭 cū chá dàn fàn, “coarse tea and plain rice”, is to live simply. And 人走茶凉 rén zǒu chá liáng, “the person gone, the tea goes cold”, speaks of the forgetting that follows a departure, like that of the retired man nobody comes to see any more. The other drinks, alcohol, coffee and juices, will have the next page.

Sentence 24 is by the poet 卢仝 Lú Tóng, a Tang poet and a friend of Han Yu (see The poetry of the Tang dynasty), who thanks a friend for sending him new tea. He counts the bowls: 一碗喉吻润，两碗破孤闷, “one bowl moistens throat and lips, two bowls drive away loneliness and gloom”. At the fifth, his bones grow light; at the sixth, he communes with the immortals. The seventh he cannot drink: he only feels a breeze rising under his armpits. Stop at the second.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.