Lu Yu writes the Classic of Tea
The first book about tea, and the moment tea acquires a literature. It is a manual — soil, tools, picking, making, water, vessels — and the aesthetic reputation it now carries was largely built by later readers.
c. 760–780 CE
A process, not a moment. This happened over a period rather than on a date, and the span is the honest answer.
Documented. Attested in the historical record, and sourced to it.
The version that circulates
That the Cha Jing describes tea drinking as a meditative or spiritual practice, or that it describes anything resembling later Chinese or Japanese ceremony.
What the evidence carries. That it is overwhelmingly practical. It ranks water sources, specifies twenty-four utensils and tells the reader what a correctly boiled surface looks like. The contemplative reading is a later accretion, and a substantial one.
What happened
Lu Yu compiled a three-part treatise covering the plant, the equipment, the making, the boiling, the drinking, and a survey of where tea came from. The preparation it describes is a boiled one: cake tea roasted, ground, and boiled with salt, in a codified sequence with named stages of the boil.
Why it matters
Two things at once. It fixes a preparation in writing, which is what allows later changes to be seen as changes. And it establishes tea as a subject with standards, which is the beginning of the entire connoisseurship tradition — the vocabulary, the water rankings and the attention to vessels all start here.
Who was involved
Lu Yu
personAuthor of the Cha Jing
Connected events
- From before the written record to roughly the eighth century CE — Tea eaten and boiled before it was infused
- Roughly the tenth to thirteenth centuries — Whisked powdered tea and the Song tea competitions
What this touches
Producing countries
Culture and history
Compiled from published sources by people who are not historians of this region or period. Where accounts conflict the disagreement is reported rather than settled.