Chinese tea history in brief

一Tang: the Classic and boiled tea#

The first book devoted to tea is Lu Yu's Chajing 《茶经》, the Classic of Tea, in three juan and ten chapters of about 7,000 characters. Its composition and transmission are not securely reduced to one year; the received editions preserve a complicated textual history. It gives five words for the plant, 茶, 槚, 蔎, 茗 and 荈, and notes that the character was then written in several ways, including 荼; the modern 茶 is only one of them.

The cake-tea method Lu Yu explains is boiled tea, jiancha 煎茶. Lu Yu toasts the cake until it blisters, grinds it, salts the water at the first boil, stirs a whirlpool and adds the powder at the second, checks the boil with reserved water at the third, and shares the froth evenly among the bowls. The book systematizes an influential ideal, while also recording other forms and preparations in chapter 6. It does not mark the invention of tea utensils or concern for water. See Tea classics for the chapter-by-chapter reading and Teaware and water for the vessels.

The state followed the drinkers. The first regular tea tax came in 793, at one tenth of value, and raised about 400,000 strings of cash a year. An attempt in 835 to turn tea into a state monopoly, quecha 榷茶, was soon abandoned, and the tax of 793 restored. Tribute tea 贡茶 was already institutional: the Guzhu tribute workshop near Huzhou is recorded as producing 18,400 jin a year.

二Song: dragon cakes, whisks and contests#

In the Song the centre of fine tea moved to northern Fujian. The imperial gardens of Beiyuan 北苑, near Jian'ou, received dragon and phoenix moulds in 977. Ding Wei presented dragon-and-phoenix cakes 龙凤团茶 around 1000, eight to a jin; Cai Xiang created the small dragon cake in the 1040s, about twenty to a jin. These were tuancha 团茶, finely ground, pressed and often polished; Fujian's premium cakes were also called wax tea 腊茶, for their glossy surface or the milky look of the whisked liquor.

The way of drinking changed with them. Powder was whisked with hot water in the bowl, diancha 点茶, and judged by its froth. Cai Xiang's 《茶录》, presented to the emperor around 1050, and Emperor Huizong's 《大观茶论》 of the Daguan era (1107–1110), describe influential elite standards: dark Jian bowls (jianzhan 建盏) to show the white froth, a heavy mixing spoon in Cai’s account, a bamboo whisk in Huizong’s, and tea contests 斗茶 in which the side whose water line showed first on the bowl lost. Huizong's "white tea" was a rare natural variety, not the modern category.

Tea was also big business for the state. Jianzhou alone was reported in 1084 to produce at least three million jin a year. Cai Jing's reform of 1102 sold merchants short and long tea permits 茶引 for local and distant sale. And from 1074 the court bought tea in Sichuan to exchange for horses on the north-western frontier, the start of an institution, the Tea and Horse Agency 茶马司, that lasted for centuries; see tea-horse trade.

Read Tea classics for the differences between Cai’s toolkit and Huizong’s, and for the courtly setting of their prescriptions.

三Yuan and Ming: from cake to leaf#

The Yuan set up an imperial tea garden 御茶园 at Wuyi to oversee tribute, the first imperial institution in the hills that now make yancha; it declined in the late Ming. (The founding year 1302 is widely repeated but we have not found it in an authoritative source.) The Yuan agricultural writer Wang Zhen already listed leaf tea, powdered tea and wax tea side by side, and leaf steeping was spreading in the south.

An important change in tribute policy came in the ninth month of 1391. The Hongwu emperor stopped the making of dragon cakes as too burdensome on the people and ordered tribute in buds only, under four names, keeping 500 households exempt to supply it. Later writers call this 废团改散, abolishing cakes for loose leaf. The late-Ming writer Shen Defu credited it with founding the habit of steeping fine leaf in a pot; by 1487 Qiu Jun noted that powdered tea survived only in Fujian and Guangdong, and late-Ming tea books describe pan-firing prominently; this was not a simultaneous nationwide disappearance of steaming. Hangzhou people dropped a pinch of leaf into a cup and poured on boiling water, cuopao 撮泡; the loose leaf of the period is sancha 散茶, and the green Songluo 松萝 of Anhui became famous for its firing method.

Steeped leaf needed new vessels, and Yixing pots appear in the 16th century; see Teaware and water. On the frontier the Ming set tea quotas from 1371 and ran tea-horse offices at Qin, Tao, He and Ya, with a merchant permit covering 100 jin of tea.

Xu Cishu’s Chashu provides a close view of one late-Ming tea world, including its distinctive pouring method and preferences among pots; see Tea classics.

四Qing: oolong, black tea and pressed tea for the frontier#

The categories that dominate this site took shape between the late Ming and early Qing. The Wuyishan government dates Wuyi oolong processing to that period and says Zhengshan xiaozhong 小种 black tea was shipped to Europe and America from the 17th century. Wuyi makers are said to have learned pan-firing from monks of Songluo; letting the leaf partly oxidise before firing gave oolong, and full oxidation gave black tea (红茶, "red tea" in Chinese), so both may have been invented in the same hills. The craft is now national intangible heritage; see Roasting yancha.

When the Qing lifted its ban on sea trade in 1684, Xiamen became one of four open ports, and foreign buyers named Wuyi tea Bohea from the Min pronunciation of 武夷. Yunnan tea, meanwhile, was regulated for overland trade: the 《清史稿》 records a rule of 1735 fixing the size of a tong and setting 32 tong to a permit, the origin of the seven-cake bundle (see Pressed tea and pu'er codes). Tea-horse exchange in Gansu was halted again the same year; the censor who had run it was abolished in 1668.

五The export trade#

Two routes carried Chinese tea to the world. By sea, Western trade was confined to Guangzhou from 1757 under the Canton System 一口通商, through licensed merchant houses, the Thirteen Hongs 十三行, which became an official monopoly in 1760. Exports through Canton rose from about 12,745 dan a year in 1719–1725 to about 360,659 dan a year in 1828–1833, by the French historian Louis Dermigny's figures. British demand for tea created a silver deficit that the East India Company met by selling Indian opium; the system ended with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842.

Overland, the Treaty of Kyakhta (concluded in 1727 and ratified in 1728) opened border trade with Russia. The trading settlement of Kyakhta was founded in 1728 and its Chinese twin, Maimaicheng, in 1730; Russian tea imports through it grew from about 11,000–13,000 pud a year in the mid-18th century to about 270,000 pud a year in the 1840s, and Western Europe knew the result as "Russian caravan" tea. Russian calls this route the Great Tea Road; it faded once sea routes and then the Trans-Siberian Railway, finished in 1903, took over.

The trade left words behind. English took Bohea from Wuyi, Congou from 工夫, Souchong from 小种, Hyson from 熙春, Singlo from 松萝, gunpowder for 珠茶 and Pekoe from 白毫. The word for tea itself split: languages that took it by land or through Cantonese Macao say cha (Portuguese chá, Russian чай), while those that took it from the Min-speaking port of Amoy say te (Dutch thee, English tea, German Tee).

Behind the export ports stood a dispersed manufacturing network. Gardella’s study of Qing northern Fujian describes small growers preparing crude tea, specialist workshops reprocessing and packing it, and merchants coordinating credit and sales. His discussion of an 1851 report also identifies seasonal workers from Jiangxi and skilled tea makers from Anxi and Quanzhou. Export growth thus moved labour and expertise as well as leaves: a Wuyi origin did not imply that every worker, financier and processing business was local (Gardella 1994, pp. 43–46). This historical organisation should not be read as a description of every modern Wuyi producer.

六Peak and decline#

Chinese tea exports peaked in the 1880s. A Qing memorial records exports of over 190 million jin in 1882–1883, and one modern account, citing the historian Zhong Weimin, puts 1886 at about 134,100 t, some 80% of world trade. Exports had grown more than 1.4-fold since 1860.

Then came competition from plantation tea. London imported more tea from India than from China for the first time in 1887 by one count (1888 by another), and by 1900, when world trade was about 272,000 t, China's share was under a third. Quality was part of the story: United States import standards from the 1880s rejected much Chinese tea, and Japanese, Indian and Ceylon teas took that market, while China began systematic export inspection only in 1931. These figures come from historians quoted in secondary sources; the customs series themselves were not consulted for this guide.

七The twentieth century and after#

The China Tea Company was approved on 23 November 1949, with the agronomist Wu Juenong as its first general manager, and its red "eight 中" mark of 1951 was the first tea trademark of the People's Republic; see CNNP. Under the planned economy tea was a controlled commodity bought only by the state tea companies, and the export factories in Yunnan were given the recipe codes still printed on pu'er today. After 1978 state, collective and private buyers and processors began to trade side by side. (The 1984 reform usually cited as ending state purchase could not be confirmed for this guide.)

The market that followed has had its bubbles. The pu'er boom that began in 2005 burst in spring 2007: in Guangzhou's Fangcun market a case of Dayi 7542 fell from 22,000–23,000 yuan on 20 April to below 10,000 by June, and Xiaguan tuocha from 400 to 160 yuan per kg; prices were back at 2005 levels by 2008. History itself became a brand: the name Tea Horse Road 茶马古道 was coined in 1990 by six Yunnan University scholars and first printed in 1992, and sections of the road became national key cultural relics in 2013.

On 29 November 2022 UNESCO inscribed China's traditional tea processing techniques and associated social practices on its Representative List, a nomination that groups 44 national heritage items, from Wuyi rock tea and pu'er to Chaozhou gongfu tea.