Tea saint Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea Chapter 4 in its original text. (To view the Chinese characters in this blog, you may need to enable character encoding of your web browser to either Unicode or Simplied Chinese.)

In this second part of translating Chapter 4 of Classic of Tea, I am working on items 2 to 9 listed by Lu Yu. As I translate, I cannot help but compare these items to our modern day Gongfu Cha tea set, I feel that the utensils used by Lu Yu is more elaborate but very cleverly constructed.

Lu Yu’s 2nd item, “ju” (筥) is essentially a bamboo basket, possibly with rattan on the outside, which was used for holding coals. Lu Yu’s ju had a height of 1 “chi” (尺. 1 chi is 33.3cm) and 2 “cun” (寸. 2 cun is 6.6cm) and a diameter of 7 cun (23cm). It had a smooth lid made of wood.

The 3rd item is “tan zhua” (炭挝), an hexagonal metal rod for breaking pieces of coal. It was 1 chi in length, and had a sharp pointy end, a thicker middle and a thinner handle end. The handle end might be decorated with various items attached.

“Huo jia” (火筴) is the 4th item listed by Lu Yu. It was a pair of fire tongs fashioned from round iron or copper rods. The two rods, which operated rather like chopsticks, were 1 chi and 3 cun long (43.2cm) and were held together at one end with decorations.

The next item is “fu” (鍑) which is a little, unlidded, cast iron pot. The fu was used to boil water on the feng lu (风炉) (a wind furnace. See Lu Yu: Classic of Tea Chapter 4 (Part I) blog post). Lu Yu says that he had old broken unused farm tools melted down to make the pot. In order to make it, he filled a mould with sandy soil before pouring on the molten iron. When the iron pot was formed in the mould, he would smear the interior of the pot with mud. It made the interior easier to clean and the exterior more heat absorbent when the pot was finished in the oven.

Lu Yu goes on to describe the pot or fu in yet greater detail. It had two square handles, making it look proper and straight. However, it also had a wide opening which would allow any powdery tea leaves to spread out inside the pot. But the pot should have a tall middle (Lu Yu uses the term “long navel”) to allow the water to boil in the middle of the pot. That way, any tea powder would float to the top, adding to the mellowness and sweetness of the tea.

A “ju” (筥) is a bamboo basket used for holding coals.

Lu Yu then says that in “Hong Zhou” (洪州. now in the Nanchang area), people like to use a porcelain pot as a fu while people in “Lai Zhou” (莱州. now the Sandong area) use a stone pot. Lu Yu says that both are considered refined crockery rather than durable or sturdy. A silver pot, he says, is distinctive, refined and clean, but much too extravagant. While not as refined or clean, the cast iron pot is the most durable.

I find it fascinating to read Lu Yu’s account of how cast iron utensils were made in those long gone days. Also to learn little historical details, such as how in those days tea was brewed by simply being boiled. Indeed, this was known as the “boiled” tea era. (The other two eras are the “whipped” tea era and the current “steeped” tea era).

The 6th item is the “jiao chuang” (交床), a foldable, cross-legged table. The table top had a round hole in which one could place a pot of boiling tea. Lu Yu did not say what this table was actually used for, but further research on the matter indicates that, after boiling tea in the feng lu (wind furnace), the fu was put on this table to undergo a “still” boiling process, allowing the tea time basically to cool down.

A “jiao chuang” (交床) is a foldable table with a round hole in which one could place a pot of boiling tea.

“Jia” (夹), a pair of tongs made from green bamboo is Lu Yu’s 7th item. It is 1 chi and 2 cun (40cm) long. About 1 cun from one end is a segment of bamboo from where it is split to the other end. The split ends can then be used to hold a piece of tea cake over an open flame. The natural fragrance of the bamboo is absorbed by the tea cake thereby improving its flavour. Lu Yu says that unless you are roasting tea in the deep forest, it is rather hard to find this kind of green bamboo. Tongs made of iron or wrought copper are more durable.

The 8th item is a “zhi nang” (纸囊). This is paper made from rattan, a famous product from “Shan” (剡) (now called “Sheng” (嵊)) county in the east of Zhejiang province, part of Shaoxing city (where we get the famous Shaoxing cooking wine). It is extremely white, refined yet pliable and good for holding just-roasted pieces of tea cake. Wrapping the tea cakes in this paper serves to prevent their glorious aroma from escaping. This must be the favourite item in Lu Yu’s descriptions, the idea of wrapping pieces of warm toasted tea cakes in handmade paper really shows the tea master’s care for the tea.

“Nian” (碾) is the 9th piece of apparatus in this chapter. Lu Yu says that nian is best made from the wood of the mandarin orange tree. It can also be made from pear wood, mulberry wood, paulownia timber or the Tricuspid Cudrania tree. Nian is rectangular, which makes it stable, but has a curved hollow inside which fits a roller just nicely. The roller has a spindle in the middle. The spindle is 9 cun (30cm) long and 1.7 cun (5.6cm) wide. The roller itself has a diameter of 3.8 cun (12.5cm) and is 1 cun (3.3cm) thick in the middle but only a half cun (1.6cm) thick at the edges. The spindle is rectangular in the middle but more round towards the ends. From Lu Yu’s description, we can infer that a nian is used as a sort of pestle and mortar with the nian being the mortar albeit in a rectangular shape. Unlike the pestle that we know, we have a roller that crushed the tea cakes in the rectangular mortar.

Lu Yu says he uses a feather as a brush to remove any tea powder residue left on the nian, from which we can infer that pieces of tea cake, first toasted slightly on an open flame, would then have been broken into the nian before boiling in the fu to make tea. Any leftover pieces toasted tea cakes would be wrapped in the “zhi nang” paper to kept the wonderful aroma from escaping.

Again, we can notice the influence of ancient,Tang dynasty tea drinking habits on the subsequent Japanese tea culture – notably the fact that, evidently, the idea of drinking of powdered green tea was taken to Japan in precisely this era.

On to the next post where I will be translating the next set of items listed in Chapter 4. In the mean time, have a fabulous August bank holiday weekend!

Warmly, Pei ~~ Serene and fragrant TEA entices with promise of rapture in STORE ~~ tea open house . medTEAtation . @teanamu . FB page

Tea saint Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea Chapter 4 in its original text. (To view the Chinese characters in this blog, you may need to enable character encoding of your web browser to either Unicode or Simplied Chinese.)

Chapter Four of Classic of Tea (Cha Jing 茶经) is the longest chapter in this treatise and is devoted to all the utensils used in the brewing of tea. I guess this makes it the most relevant chapter to most of us today.

Lu Yu lists 25 pieces of utensils in this chapter, which I will translate from the original, ancient Chinese text in several separate blog posts.

Lu Yu starts his list with a “feng lu” (风炉) or draught/wind furnace made by himself. It was made from copper or iron and shaped like an ancient “ding” (鼎) which is a three-legged cooking vessel with 2 handles (it traditionally symbolised power and authority). He does not give the exact measurements for the furnace but he does provide the proportions. He says the furnace walls should be 3 parts thick with an overall width of 9 parts leaving an opening that is 6 parts wide. The open base is sealed with mud, thus creating the vessel.

The feng lu had 3 legs, each having an engraving of 7 characters. One leg bears an inscription involving 3 of the elements of the “ba gua” (八卦). The ba gua is an octagon, incorporating eight geometric shapes, used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality. The ba gua is an essential tool for the study and application of Feng Shui. Each of these shapes consists of three lines, each line either “broken” or “unbroken,” representing yin or yang respectively. Due to their tripartite structure, they are often referred to as “trigrams” in English. Lu Yu position 3 of the trigrams with “kan” (坎) or water sign on top, “li” (离) air/wind sign below and “xun” (巽) fire sign in the middle.

On the second leg, Lu Yu extended from the ba gua and the Taoist concept of “wu xing” (五行) (the five elements i.e. fire, earth, metal, water and wood acting as a ancient mnemonic device for describing the two cycles of life: generating/creating and overcoming/destroying). The engraving tells us that our body is subject to the wu xing and, if we can achieve a balance, a hundred diseases will go away.

The last leg bears the year in which Lu Yu made the feng lu. He does so by citing the year after an incident in which the Tang emperor overcame the rebel Hu people (a Tartar/Mongol ethnic group). This occurred in 763AD and his feng lu was made the year after that.

Lu Yu then describes how in-between the three legs are three little air holes. On each of these holes are 2 characters, making a total of 6 characters. The first 3 characters are “Yi Gong Geng” (伊公羹) and the other 3 characters are “Lu Shi Cha” (陆氏茶). Geng is a thick soup. Yi Gong refers to a prime minister during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1104BC) who was really good at making soups in a ding. “Cha” refers to tea and “Lu Shi” simply means Mr. Lu (i.e. himself). What Lu Yu has cleverly done here is to compare his skill in making tea to the cooking skill of Yi Gong. Both of them use the ding as cooking apparatus. Now, we might be surprised by arrogance of Lu Yu but he was very popular amongst royals, socialising with them and making tea for them. So for him to engrave that on his feng lu suggests to me merely that he is justifiably confident about his tea making skills!

According to Lu Yu, a clay urn “die nie” (墆嵲) is placed inside the feng lu to hold the charcoal. There are 3 perforated shelves inside the die nie. The perforations take the forms of a wild chicken (symbolising fire), a mystical tiger-like animal (symbolising wind) and a fish (symbolising water). Accompanying these animals are their corresponding ba gua trigrams, representing fire, wind and water.

Lu Yu says wind can “flame” a fire and a fire can “boil” the water and that is why these symbols are required. What he is trying to convey is that the boiling tea embodies the natural laws of reality; that, rather than going against these natural laws, we should make use of each element’s attributes for our own benefit.

Then Lu Yu moves on to the external decoration of the feng lu. He says that it can depict flowers, trees, flowing water and other types of pictorial imagery. The body of the feng lu can be made from iron or clay. The feng lu also comes with a “saucer” that has 3 legs and is useful for collecting any ashes.

The feng lu design or an echo of it can be discerned in the stove and kettle design used in the Japanese tea ceremony. So it is likely that along with tea and Buddhism, Japanese monks brought Lu Yu’s design of tea brewing utensils back home with them.

Lu Yu spent wrote quite a lot about this feng lu that he has made himself. One can see from his design that he is well educated in the daoism and lead a life embodying these principles. I will cover the remaining items listed in this chapter in the new few blogs.

Lu Yu made this three-legged draught/wind furnace (“feng lu” 风炉) taking inspirations from the ancient “ding” (鼎) cooking vessel with 2 handles.		“die nie” (墆嵲) is a clay urn that Lu Yu placed inside the “feng lu” to hold charcoal.
Three shelves inside the “die nie” with perforations taking the forms of a wild chicken (symbolising fire), a mystical tiger-like animal (symbolising wind) and a fish (symbolising water). Accompanying these animals are their corresponding “ba gua” trigrams, representing fire, wind and water.

Warmly, Pei ~~ Serene and fragrant TEA entices with promise of rapture in STORE ~~ tea open house . medTEAtation . @teanamu . FB page

Tea saint Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea Chapter 3 in its original text. (To view the Chinese characters in this blog, you may need to enable character encoding of your web browser to either Unicode or Simplied Chinese.)

In Chapter Three of Classic of Tea (Cha Jing 茶经), Lu Yu talks about the making of tea, and we discover that tea in those days came almost exclusively in the form of cakes. Cakes were preferred because they kept their fragrance well and they were easy to transport.

Lu Yu records that tea picking usually occurred during the second to the fourth lunar calendar months (i.e. March through May). He likens the tender tea buds to young bamboo shoots. He beautifully describes the tea plants growing from rich, loose, gravelly soil and producing tender shoots 4 to 5 “cun” (寸. 1 cun is 3.3cm) in length resembling just-sprouting “wei jue” (薇蕨).

Wei jue is a perennial vegetable commonly found in the wild and is often referred to in classical texts which Lu Yu will have read, such as “Xiao Ya” (小雅), the “Minor Odes of the Kingdom” poems, part of the Five Classics – 305 poems and songs some dating back possibly as early as 1000 B.C.

Lu Yu says the best tea buds are the smaller ones, harvested just after dawn when they are still lightly covered in morning dew. The wild tea plants may grow amongst other wild plants and may have 3 to 5 sub-shoots, and one needs to pick the sturdiest and lushest of the shoots.

According to Lu Yu, one needs to look at the sky before harvesting. No harvesting is allowed on rainy days or on cloudy days. Only on sunny days should one pick, steam, crush, roast, skew and seal the tea. This makes sense, because then it’s dry and easier to store. Hence the aphorism “look at the sky to make tea, look at the tea to make tea” (kan tian zuo cha, kan cha zuo cha 看天做茶，看茶做茶). (My tea master Hooi says that the “sky” here refers not just to the weather but also to the terroir.)

There are many forms compressed tea cakes can take. Lu Yu says some look rather like the deeply creased leather boots worn by the Hu (胡) people (a Tartar/Mongol ethnic group) while others resemble the breastbone of wild bulls covered with neat little folds. Some are pellets – like clouds amongst the mountain tops – while others have very light ripples on their surface, as when a light breeze gently rouses the surface of some water.

Some are like prepared clay that is ready for shaping. Some are like a piece of land that has just been ploughed or like earth has been thoroughly washed and uneven after a heavy storm. All these, Lu Yu says, are the ‘best of the best’ teas.

Tea cakes may be shaped like the dried outer layers of bamboo shoots, with tough branches and stems, resembling a bamboo sieve, which makes it very difficult to crush the tea for brewing. Some are like frostbitten mint leaves, all withered and damaged. These are signs that the cakes are made from old tea leaves and are of low quality.

There are 7 processing steps from the picking of the tea leaves to sealing the tea for sale. Lu Yu writes that there are 8 grades of tea, from the tea cakes shaped like creased leather boots to those that look like frostbitten mint leaves.

Lu Yu says the crudest way tea is sometimes assessed is by looking for a black lustre and homogenous texture. An acceptable, less crude method is to look for a yellowish, quite compact, not too even quality. But the best approach to assessing a tea cake is when you can look at it and discern both the good and the bad points.

‘Why?’, asks Lu Yu.

Tea is just like any other kind of plant, says Lu Yu. Its lustre may simply mean that the the tea sap or juice has been squeezed out, not that the tea is of good quality. Compactedness may just mean that the juices are not yet squeezed out but remain in the tea. Blackness can just indicate that the tea has been made overnight. Tea made from leaves that have been picked during the day would look yellowish. Homogeneity can simply be the sign that the tea has been tightly pressed after steaming. Tea cakes that have an uneven surface means that the leaves have not been well pressed but left to retain their natural uneven characteristic.

It is clear that Lu Yu thinks that tea cakes should be made from tender leaves. Good tea cakes should not have lost too much of the precious sap and the only way to achieve that by applying the right amount of pressure to form the tea cake.

Lu Yu ends the chapter by saying that assessing tea cakes has its particular set of rules which can be handed down through a set of mottos and precepts.

I think Lu Yu is trying to dispel myths that may exist in his readers’ minds when they select teas. He teaches us to understand that tea leaves are just like any natural vegetation and, in order to tell the quality of particular teas, one needs to really, intimately understand tea processing techniques and how they affect the leaves.

Even now, it’s still true that there are loads of myths about tea quality. For example, most Chinese people think that green tea leaves such as Dragonwell (Long Jing) are best when they exhibit a fabulous jade green lustre and are homogenous in shape. However, the best quality Dragonwell actually has a dull yellowish hue and is not necessarily homogenous in shape. We are after all looking for a natural item that is never going to be uniform in colour or shape. This is part of what makes it very precious, unlike commercially prepared blended teas made to taste the same regardless of the year or month of harvest.

Warmly, Pei ~~ Serene and fragrant TEA entices with promise of rapture in STORE ~~ tea open house . medTEAtation . @teanamu . FB page