Lu Yu and "The Classic of Tea"

 Back around the time I was Laureled (2012), Li Guang Ming and Wu Li Jiang presented me with an English translation of the 8th century "Classic of Tea." ("Cha Ching.") It was an out of print edition from 1974 translated by Francis Ross Carpenter, and it was my introduction to the Tang Dynasty sage and his treatise on the cultivation, processing and brewing of tea. 

At the time, that was it in English. Out of curiosity, I took a spin through Amazon yesterday and discovered that there are some more recent translations, one of which was free to borrow via my Kindle Library. I downloaded it and took a look. This one was part of a 2015 initiative by the city of Tianmen, where Lu Yu came from, in which new translations into English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic would be published worldwide. The English one is a 2019 release from a small press out of San Francisco. All of this information appears in a postscript at the end of the edition with a lot of banner waving about cultural exchange, and promoting Chinese tea culture internationally. 

All side eye at the monolith that is Communist China aside, this is a pretty solid translation, particularly when I'd flip over to compare bits with the Carpenter. Measurements are given with modern equivalents in parentheses, the illustrations are more uniform than the ones in the Carpenter edition AND there are photos of extant tea implements from the Tang dynasty with which to compare them. Lu Yu's treatise is a fairly straightforward account of how tea was being picked, stored, processed, brewed and drunk, as well as sections on the history of tea as he knew it, a list of legends and recorded accounts mentioning tea, a list of regions where tea was being cultivated and whose was worth drinking, even what kind of scrolls this document should be made upon so that they might be displayed in the room where one served tea. 

It should be noted that this treatise is a document about tea culture of a particular time and place. Lu Yu describes tea being ground into a powder and brewed with boiling water. Japan encountered tea through contact with China and adopted the brewing of ground tea powder which is what we now recognize as matcha and Japanese tea ceremony. 

Tea comes from the camelia sinensis plant. The dizzying variety of teas produced from it are the result of factors ranging from local geology to what season the leaves are picked and how they are subsequently processed. 

The tea brewing instructions Jade sent along with her wonderful box of tea samples derives from a style called gong fu cha (kung fu tea), which, as far as my surface scratching of the internet as led, started in Guangdong province around the 18th century. China is not the monolith their government would have one believe - I'm certain there are all kinds of regional variants that existed in different places and may have influenced how Chinese tea tradition has become popularized.

What I'm doing is improvising with what I have in my kitchen, nowhere near the ceremonial level requiring a laundry list of special tea wares, and trying to produce a good cup of tea from the samples I've been gifted with. Lu Yu would probably look at the cobbled together items on my kitchen counters with horror. Hopefully I would win him over with the pure waters of Hetch Hetchy reservoir, the nifty temperature settings on my kettle, and the care I am trying to brew the tea with. ;)

Or not. This is a learning process. I will find teas I like and teas I probably won't bother with again. As long as we're locked down, this is a great time to do it.