Tea, a way of Chinese life

Contestants, onlookers and judges would all be present. It was like a major sporting event. Tea testing competitions, which originated during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), reached their height in the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

Even rulers and academics would take part in the competition. The contest between Su Shi (1037-1101) a poet and Cai Xiang (1012-67) was one of the most notable.

Cai brought high-quality leaves and chose the most esteemed Mount Huishan well water from Wuxi of East China's Jiangsu Province to make his concoction. In previous tea contests, this great calligrapher and author of "Record of Tea" (Cha Lu) had never lost.

But to everyone's surprise, Su Shi used water boiled in burned bamboo (a kind of traditional Chinese medicine) to finally win the competition.  This is just one of the interesting stories that Liu Tong told in his book "Chinese Tea," the English version of which was published by the China Intercontinental Press recently.

Long history

The discovery and usage of tea has had a long history of some 4,000 or 5,000 years in China. Tea enjoyed real popularity in the Tang Dynasty, when people invented a steaming method to get rid of the grass flavour in the tea-leaves. They picked tea-leaves and then steamed them. They were then ground and made into cakes, dried and then sealed for storage.

It was also in the Tang Dynasty that teahouses in their real sense came into being. And what is more important, the first definitive commentary on tea "The Book of Tea" appeared during the Tang Dynasty.

In the Song Dynasty, tea drinking became a ceremonial activity. Academics would frequently hold tea parties and compete in their skills of making tea. But how could you possibly decipher the best tea? In those days the colour of tea and the froth were the deciding factors.

Since people used tea-cakes to make tea in the Song Dynasty, the tea took on a whitish colour. Pure white would indicate the leaves were fresh, tender and finely processed. The best-loved concoction ware was the black-glazed Rabbit-Hair Cup (Tuhao Zhan) made in Jianyao Kiln of Jianyang city of East China's Fujian Province. The concoction's oily blackness created rabbit-hair-like veins in a foil on top of the water, helping prevent the froth from dispersing. Since making tea-cake is time consuming, the practice was abandoned in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming, decreed that only loose tea leaves should be used to make tea.