Tea is not just a drink

This cartoon is actually a joke between me and my boyfriend. Since I started to learn Chinese tea this year, I get into it very quickly and always try to share those interesting knowledge I learnt with him. One day, I was telling him that as a tea connoirsseur, you need to bring your own tea cup to a tea house. So he asked me seriously: so do you need your own cone for a green tea ice cream?

Well, of course I am not THAT crazy! Actually one year ago, I am totally a coffee drinker. Tea, for me, is just a drink. It’s more like a subsitute for coffee in the afternoon. This year, I happened to visit several really cool tea houses in Beijing and fall in love with Chinese tea quickly. I gradually realize tea is not just a drink, it’s a culture. It has a lot to do with the Chinese history, geography and philosophy.

A lot of people know Chinese “blue-and-white” porcerlain. But not so many people know it has a close relationship with the Chinese tea. In the Tang Dynasty, people like to tell the tea’s quality by the color of the soup (the hot water you pour inside), so a white-inside tea tool became a perfect choice. However, this trend has been changed in the Song Dynasty, which is another important time period in the Chinese tea history. The emperor at that time, HuiZong, likes to drink tea in crude pottery. So the “blue-and-white” lost its dominant role since then.

Also, tea has a very close relationship with the the propagation of Buddhism in China, both chronologically and geographically. Chinese people started to drink tea at a very early stage. But it is until the Tang Dynasty that tea started to become a nationwide drink. And that is also the time that Buddhism started to become popular in this country. The propagation pathway of Chinese tea is very similiar to Buddhism as well, which is from the Southern part to the Northern part of China. Tea is always considered to be a symbol of peaceful and cool mind which matches the Buddhism philosophy perfectly well.

You can also see ancient Chinese philosophy from tea clearly. For example, a lid cup has three parts that will never get separated: the lid, the cup and the mattress. Chinese people believe that “the universe is a balance between the sky, the earth and the people”. A small tea cup contains a deep meaning: for all the creatures living in the planet (tea in this example), you need the sky as a lid, an earth to stand, and a person to foster.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Well, now I’m really thinking about bringing my cone for the next green tea ice cream.