1, tea and society

Make tea your friend. In the early years of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, a scholar-bureaucrat visited, and Wang Meng, the chief historian of Situ, treated each other with tea. However, some gentry who moved from the north to the south did not understand the taste of tea and felt miserable. They called it "water" and became jokes. After that, treat the guests with tea and fruit to show frugality. After the Tang and Song Dynasties, celebrities invited friends and guests to tea parties and gave each other famous teas to show their friendship. Tea also helps family reunion and can benefit the whole family.

2. Tea and etiquette

As early as the Zhou Dynasty, tea had become a treasure of sacrifice. Buddhist monasteries "specialize in tea and soup and attach importance to etiquette" (see Buddhist monasteries). Looking at Xiubai Zhangqinggui, it is pointed out that when the law requires etiquette, there will be tea ceremonies such as tea worship, tea ordering, tea eating, tea meeting and tea invitation until today. Jiangnan people avoid pouring tea into the cup, and generally only pour it to six or seven minutes. Pour tea and water for the guests in the tasting, which means that you haven't finished drinking tea, drink slowly and talk slowly.

3. Tea and festivals

Tea is widely used in festivals, although it doesn't necessarily have a specific meaning, but it is also a drink that represents good wishes. For example, on New Year's Day, fruit tea and steamed cakes are served to guests at home, and they are left for guests to drink after tea. As the saying goes, "Happy New Year for three minutes"; "Long Summer" worships the kitchen god and the earth god with bud-cereal cakes, drinks soju, sips fresh tea, and eats cherries and green beans. On New Year's Eve, or in the middle of the night, tea, wine, and fruit cakes are sacrificed to the bed god to pray for children to rest in peace (Hangzhou Tongzhi, 1 1).

However, many of these ancient festivals and customs were not used by people, and now there are many tea culture festivals held regularly every year, as well as various forms of tea parties, which are also new applications of tea.

4. Tea and weddings

Lang Ying, an Amin, explained in "Seven Manuscripts": "If you plant tea, you can't transplant it, and if you transplant it, it won't live. So, I hired a woman, a tea drinker. I also hired a person who took tea as a gift to see the meaning of submission. " Tea is not transplantable. It may be due to the limitation of science and technology at that time, or it may be that tea trees are "sparse" in the Book of Tea, so Taoist scholars use tea to represent or symbolize the whole marriage, so as to run through the idea of "conformity". At present, many rural areas in China still call the engagement marriage "tea collection" and "tea eating", the engagement deposit "tea gold" and the bride price "tea gift".