The table, the leaf, the water

Every tea in this house comes from one plant, Camellia sinensis, a kind of evergreen shrub. Botanists place its first home in the hills where southwest China meets Myanmar and northeast India. Wild tea trees still grow there. For a long time the leaves stayed on the mountain. Then people learned to put them in water.

Chinese legend tells of Shennong 神农, a mythical ruler said to have tasted every plant to learn which could heal. One day, as his water heated, a leaf fell from a tree into the pot. He drank, and his head cleared. It is a story, with no date or document behind it. People still tell it because it starts tea where every cup starts, with a leaf in hot water.

The earliest Chinese writings treat tea as a medicine or a food. People boiled the leaves into a bitter soup, sometimes with ginger, onion or salt. Over several centuries tea became a drink taken for its own taste. By the Tang dynasty (618–907), it was drunk across China, among poets, monks and officials alike.

Around 760 to 780, a writer named Lu Yu 陆羽 wrote the Cha Jing 茶经, the Classic of Tea. It was the first book dedicated wholly to tea.

The book is short: three small volumes in ten chapters. It describes the tea plant and where it grows, how leaves were picked and pressed into cakes, and the tools for fire and water. It even ranks water. Mountain springs come first, then river water, then well water.

Much of Lu Yu’s life comes to us through later tellings. Tradition says he was an orphan raised in a Buddhist monastery in Hubei, a province in central China. Later writers added more wonders to his story. The book itself has survived, and it is the part of his story we can trust.

After Lu Yu, tea came with standards: which water, how hot, which bowl. Chinese tea writing has started from his book ever since.

In the Song dynasty (960–1279), fine tea was ground to a powder. Hot water went in, and the tea was whisked in a dark bowl until a pale foam rose. In 1391, early in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the first Ming emperor ordered that tea sent to the court should be loose leaf instead of pressed cakes. Loose leaves steeped in a pot became the usual way to drink tea in China, and they still are today.

On China’s southeast coast, in Chaozhou, a city in Guangdong province, and in southern Fujian, people made tea in a very small pot with tiny cups. They used plenty of leaf and steeped it many times, a few seconds at a time. This is gongfu cha 工夫茶, “tea made with skill and time.” Written descriptions survive from around 1800. The house brews this way. The steps and times are on the Brewing page.

The same leaf can become very different teas. The difference lies in what the maker does after picking, above all in how much the leaf is allowed to oxidize, or darken in the air, the way a cut apple browns. Chinese tea has six families: green, white, yellow, oolong (wulong 乌龙), hongcha 红茶 (called black tea in English) and dark tea, which includes pu-erh. The tea scholar Chen Chuan 陈椽 set out this six-family scheme in 1979. The shelves of this house follow it.

In the Song dynasty (960–1279), China’s army needed horses, and the country bred few of its own. In 1074 the government opened an office at Chengdu, in Sichuan province, to trade tea for horses with the peoples of the Tibetan plateau. The tea was pressed into hard bricks so it could make the journey. Mules and porters carried it up the mountain paths. Today those paths are called the Tea Horse Road 茶马古道. The name was given only in the twentieth century.

Once people steeped loose leaves, they needed a new kind of pot. Potters at Yixing 宜兴, a town in Jiangsu province west of Lake Tai, made these pots from zisha 紫砂, which means “purple sand.” It is a clay fired bare, its own matte surface left showing. The potter Shi Dabin 时大彬 worked there around 1573 to 1620 and made his pots small enough to brew tea for one person. In the 1640s the writer Zhou Gaoqi 周高起 recorded the names of the Yixing potters. Some of Shi Dabin’s pots survive in museums today.

Chinese has two common words for tea. Along the coast of Fujian province, people say te. In most other places, they say cha. Around 1610, Dutch ships began carrying tea to Europe, bought from Fujian traders. The Dutch called it thee, and English followed with tea. Portuguese traders at Macau, and the overland caravans to Russia and Persia, carried the word cha. That is why Portuguese says chá and Russian says chai. In 1757 the Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial house, required Western merchants to trade at a single port, Guangzhou 广州, which English speakers then called Canton. For eighty-five years, the tea Europe bought from China left from that one river port.

Into the 1800s, China was the world’s main source of tea, and Britain wanted to grow its own. In 1848 the East India Company, the British trading company that ruled much of India, sent the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune into China’s tea country to collect plants and seeds. He shipped them to the Himalayan foothills of India in Wardian cases. These were small sealed glass boxes that kept plants alive at sea. In 1851 he also brought Chinese tea workers to teach the making. The first tea gardens of Darjeeling grew from these plants. The craft left China in a box of glass.

Across the Taiwan Strait from Fujian, farmers on the island of Taiwan began planting oolong high in the mountains in the later twentieth century. Cool mist and altitude slow the leaf’s growth. Most of these teas are lightly oxidized, so they stay green and floral. Far to the southwest, in Yunnan province, pu-erh is often pressed into round cakes and stored for years. Its taste keeps changing as it ages. Most teas are finished when they leave the maker. Pu-erh keeps going.

Every tea we sell has its roots in this history. The Origins page maps where they grow today. Peruse the Collection to enjoy a cup.