Tea Guardian: A Very Brief History of Green Tea

Competition in the Tea Market (detail), by Liu Songnian, around 1190 A.D., Southern Sung Dynasty, China. The picture depicts tea vendors in a competition for the highest quality tea. Demand for quality and tea preparation techniques were so prevalent in daily life that tea competition was popular not only in the tea trade, but also amongst the folks, the literati, the privileged and the imperial court. This had profound influence on the evolution of tea quality and tea consumption habits. Demand for the best available quality by those who can afford them is still a living heritage in Chinese societies.

This picture also illustrates teamaking using grounded green tea tealeaves and how tea was consumed at that time. The spontaneity continued in the Chinese culture but the same materials, including the tea ware, the grounded tealeaf form, and the tea making method, have evolved in Japan to become the much disciplined tea ceremony with emphasize on ritualistic qualities.

household slaves are to buy and prepare tea

Minister Wang in Chengdu (in Sichuan Province) had a big argument with a slave on whether he had the rights to send the latter to buy wine from out of town. The slave, whose scope of duties was defined to the household, was refusing to go out. Wang, on a whim of rage, drafted the much studied “Household Slave Contract (Tong Yue)” in 59 b.c.. Preparing tea for guests and buying tea from 30 km away in the tea region of Wuyang were amongst the duties (1). This was the earliest documentation of the use of tea as a beverage.

from medicine to tea

The use of tealeaves as a medicine has been in existence for three millenniums in China, but it is unclear when it has become a drink until Wang. Further records of it being a hospitality beverage and a grocery item were in various achieves since then. Documentation of the processing technique, however, did not exist until the 8th century in Lu Yu’s “Tea Classics (Cha Jing)”. His description clearly describes the making of what we would classify today as a steamed green tea. To him, the centre for elitist (fine) tea was the area around the borders between Zhejiang and Jiangsu.

Compressed tea (i.e. cake tea, brick tea, etc) was the prevalent form in those days, but the products were made with a much more sophisticated process than those nowadays(2). It continued to develop into the 12th century, involving meticulous cleansing, steaming and rinsing of the leaves, before they were kneaded, rolled and pressed into moulds and than baked(3). This became the model for tea-processing in the early days of the Japanese tea industry.

beggar emperor prefers natural loose leaf tea

All along, however, loose tea, coarse tea, and powdered tea coexisted with the imperially appointed compressed form. By the end of the 14th century, the more naturalistic, original tasting loose leaf form had become the predominant household product and, in line with the frugal and pragmatic culture preferred by the first emperor of Ming, loose tea was officiated for imperial use. Concurrently, new ways of tea processing by baking and wok roasting, together with improved appraoches in steaming, were spreading in all tea areas in the east and southeast.

Much development took place since that time and now most provinces along the course of the Yangtze (Chang Jiang) produce green tea with various techniques. Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan and Sichuan are key production regions for finer green teas. In fact, China is the single most important green tea producer in terms of quality, variety and quantity.

Japan began tea production in the 12th century in the mode of Chinese compressed forms of tea (i.e. "cake tea") that would be grounded to powder form for whipping with water to make tea, a transplant of the elitist continental culture prevalent at that time. This was evolved into Chanoyu (cha-nô-yū), what we understand today as “tea ceremony”, that was meant to be an exclusive activities of the political and military elites.

Detail of a 1904 photgraph showing a group of formally dressed ladies (probably geisha) taking a tea break. The tea utensils employed are clearly similar to those for everyday serving and that are for use with loose leaf tea, rather than those for chanoyu tea ceremony. Sencha had quickly become a daily grocery in Japan since its introduction in the 17th century.

japanese excels on an 11th century approach

The more popular “sencha”(steamed tea) material culture began in the 17th century in Uji, a Chinese cultural hub south of Kyoto. Contemporary Ming Dynasty literati culture of the continent, together with the loose tea technique, found roots through the patronage of monks, scholars, and merchants. Since late 19th century, in the spirit of Meiji Modernization, steamed green tea processing had been mechanized with the inventions of a series of mechanical machines in Uji. Today the prefectures of Kyoto, Mie, Kagoshima, and Shizuoka are key production areas in Japan. Although processing have become so mechanized and massive scale, there is still a constant yield of a fine variety, Gyokuro, a grade quality that different producers would want to be prized as Japan’s best.

Other Asian countries, such as Korea, Thailand and Vietnam have also been producing because of early Chinese and Buddhist influence. A few other South Asian and African countries have in recent decades jumped in the green tea trend and are producing chiefly mass quality products or as raw materials for the beverage and other reprocessing industries.

footnotes

1. In a slave contract drafted by Wang Bao in the Han Dynasty in 59 B.C., the slave was required to prepare tea when a guest arrived and to buy tea in the ancient town Wuyang (different from the modern town of the same name), 30 km northwest of present day Chengdu, Sichuan. Reference from Yang Shengmin, Tong Yue Xin Tan, Zhongguoshi Yuanjiu, 1996 v3. (Yang Shengmin, A New Study of the Slave Contract, Studies of Chinese History, 1996 v3)

2. Hsing-tsung Huang, Joseph Needham — Science and Civilization of China V. 6.5 Fermentations and Food Science. 2000, Cambridge University Press

3. Zhao Ruli, Bei Yuan Bie Lu 1186. (Zhao Ruli, An Alternative Documentation of Tea in Bei Yuan, 1186)

related reading

green teas: a (very) brief history

from medicine to tea

beggar emperor prefers natural loose leaf tea

japanese excels on an 11th century approach