From Remedy to Ritual

Under the Tang dynasty, tea moved from the healer’s chest into everyday life. People drank it because they wanted to, at home, at work and with guests, and the habit spread from the tea-growing south across the whole empire.

The roads and waterways carried it. The Grand Canal, completed before the Tang, linked the tea country of the south to the cities of the north, and boats and carts brought it up in such quantities that it piled up where it was sold. As transport grew cheaper, so did tea, and a drink once kept for the sick or the wealthy reached ordinary people.

A Tang writer, Feng Yan, recorded how the north took it up. In the Kaiyuan era (713–741), he wrote, a Chan master at the Lingyan temple on Mount Tai allowed his monks to drink tea so they could stay awake through meditation and fast after noon. They carried it everywhere, others copied them, and it became a custom. Soon, he wrote, the towns all the way to the capital had shops that boiled tea and sold it to anyone, monk or layman, who put down the money.

Those shops were the beginning of the tea house: a place you went not to eat or to worship, but to sit over a cup in company. By the ninth century, tea houses were part of town life across China.

The state took notice. Regions famous for their tea sent the best of each year’s harvest to the emperor as tribute. In 793 the government imposed a tax of one tenth on tea, a sign of how much was now being sold. The emperors drank it from the finest utensils of their age: in 1987, archaeologists opening the crypt of the Famen Temple near Xi’an found a gilded silver tea set given by the Tang court in the late ninth century, with a grinder, sieves and spoons.