Chajing and Lu Yu

The Chajing, the Classic of Tea, is the earliest surviving book devoted wholly to tea, and its author, Lu Yu, belongs to the Tang dynasty of the eighth century. He is associated with the middle Yangtze, with Hubei, and with the tea-growing hills of Zhejiang and the lower river, where the plant, Camellia sinensis, was already cultivated and traded. The book stands at the point where tea passed from a regional drink and a medicine of the south into the common beverage of the empire, and it is cited as the founding text of Chinese tea writing.

The Chajing is a short work divided into ten sections. It treats the origin of the tea plant, the tools for picking and processing the leaf, the utensils for making and drinking the infusion, the method of preparation, the manner of drinking, and the places in the empire where tea grew, ranked by the quality of what they produced. Lu Yu writes as a systematiser. He sets out the equipment of the tea table in order, from the brazier and the iron cauldron to the cups, and he treats the choice of water and the control of the fire as matters of judgement rather than habit. The tea he describes is not the loose leaf steeped in a pot that the modern drinker knows. In the Tang manner the leaf was steamed, pounded and pressed into cakes, which were then roasted, ground and boiled in a cauldron. Lu Yu gives close attention to the stages of the boil, comparing the bubbles in the water to the eyes of fish and to pearls rolling, and he counsels the careful use of salt. He is, on the evidence of his own text, wary of the habit of adding onion, ginger, orange peel and other flavourings, which he regards as turning tea into a kind of ordinary broth. The weight of the book lies in this insistence that a drink may be a subject of connoisseurship. Water, vessel, fire and leaf are each ranked and each affect the result, and the cup becomes an object of attention in its own right. Later writers on tea, through the Song and after, build on the vocabulary and the habit of mind that the Chajing established, even as the powdered whisked tea of the Song and then the infused leaf tea of the Ming replaced the boiled cake of Lu Yu's day. Dunlop, in Invitation to a Banquet, places tea within the wider Chinese table, as a drink that accompanies and closes a meal and as a subject of the same cultivated discrimination applied to food. The Chajing is the earliest authority in this book for that attitude: that the pleasures of the table reward study, and that restraint in seasoning and precision in method are signs of cultivation rather than limitation.

At the table, tea is served as the Chinese meal's companion, taken in the teahouse with small dishes and at the banquet's close, and chosen for the occasion. Lu Yu's preference for tea made plainly, without the onion, ginger and orange peel of the older habit, anticipates the later Chinese taste for the clean flavour of the leaf itself, whether a green tea of the Yangtze or a roasted oolong, drunk to refresh the palate between rich dishes.