Tea Culture

Chinese gongfu brewing and the Japanese tea ceremony share a root and then diverged. What each one actually does, and where the comparison goes wrong.

The Tea Horse Road carried Yunnan tea to Tibet in exchange for horses. The routes, the dates that hold up, and where the romantic version departs from it.

The origin of tea separated from legend: Han dynasty records, Lu Yu's Cha Jing, the Ming shift to loose leaf, and how tea reached Europe and South Asia.

What Chinese tea culture is made of: philosophy, poetry, etiquette, the gongfu method, and the few dates in its history that can actually be checked.