Tea is a kind of natural beverage, which is used to correct the existing state-to arouse the spirit and stimulate thinking, while maintaining internal rationality, in sharp contrast with the function of wine. As the antithesis of Dionysus, the exquisite figure of Tea God first appeared in the hinterland of Chinese civilization. According to the Eastern Jin Dynasty Changqu's Huayang National Records Eight Records, Zhou Wuwang (? ~ BC 1043), we got fish, salt, copper, iron, Dan, lacquer, tea, honey and other tributes from Bashu. Another record in the article also said that in those plantations, tender cattails and fragrant teas grew ("there are fragrant teas in the garden"). It is said that this is the first record of artificial cultivation of tea trees. The tea god has a serene face and has since entered the daily life of people in the Far East.
The overall prosperity of tea in China may come from the development of Buddhist temples. The popularization of Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty led to the large-scale expansion of the monk class. Tea is highly praised by Zen Buddhism and becomes a tool to talk about metaphysics all night. At first, it was just a nerve-stimulating drug, which made monks' philosophical thinking and dialogue exciting. Later, it was injected into the noble taste of literati and sublimated into a symbol of literati spirit. The poet Jiao Ran described its function in the poem "Song of Drinking Tea": "Drink it, and your feelings will be bright; Drink my god again, and suddenly it is like flying rain and sprinkling light dust; After three drinks, you will get the Tao. Why bother? " This is the discourse evidence that drinking tea changes the state of existence. Temple bells and tea incense repeatedly repair the souls of monks, officials and scribes and guide them into a state of peace and harmony.
In the Ming dynasty, the tea god was completely integrated into the soul of literati, and then became the embodiment of reclusive personality. Tea ceremony is becoming more and more mature and has become an independent sub-religion. The spirit of the tea god radiates unprecedented brilliance, and there are dozens of tea classics written by literati. From the aspects of making and storing tea, the choice of water, the function of utensils, the way of boiling, the repair of teahouses, the taste of tea, etc., the road of tea is carefully constructed. Tea ceremony is the highest form of food religion in China.
The tea god is introverted and implicit, which means a kind of introverted transcendence; Above the clean porcelain lamp, she exhaled the faint fragrance of rational existence. Xu Wei praised in "Pottery Cooking Tea": "I have never been idle when I am awake. Everyone calls me Zhang Dian. Anneng buys picturesque scenery and cooks the moon with green trees and red flowers. " This is a wonderful spiritual mirror, and we can see a bright and clear picture: the process of making tea is unfolding leisurely among green trees and red flowers. Poetry and literature, drunkenness and wakefulness, madness and reason, all these opposing elements are unified in the territory of tea. Xu Wei revealed a cultural fact: the tea-wine rotation system is the biggest secret of China's beverage culture. Scholars drink these two drinks alternately, swinging and fluctuating between sobriety and madness. This is a dissipative structure, starting from the opposite poles, which skillfully regulates the minds of China people.
The essence of the spirit of Tea God is loneliness. Based on the belief of scholar-officials, she always adhered to her purity and refused to commit adultery with other substances. This chastity is the characteristic of the tea god, and it is also the basic point to maintain all his interests and beliefs. Busy taxi drivers have an insight into this property of tea, which should be maintained from the aspects of water quality, containers and operating procedures. This is a spiritual battle of tea gods, which restricts the impulse of street class to invent milk tea and eventually evolves into the ultimate concern of orientals.
Portrait of Queen Victoria: Britain's acceptance and dependence on tea is a milestone.
Europeans know nothing about this. They are not interested in green tea and group tea, but discovered the charm of black tea in the19th century. Due to the court demonstration of Princess Catherine of Portugal, the compatibility of black tea was revealed: it can be allied with milk and sugar to form fragrant milk tea. Previously, as early as13rd century or even earlier, Tatars had discovered the charm of this mixture of animal and plant raw materials. In the era of Queen Victoria, the aroma of tea and milk was more impudently permeated between the court and aristocratic salons, becoming a symbol of luxury life, and then spread to the afternoon tea carnival of civilians. It is also a new tea ceremony under the enlightened autocracy of the British Empire, which quickly sublimated into a grand ceremony about education and optimized the daily behavior of imperial subjects.
Britain's acceptance and dependence on tea is a milestone, which has changed the silk nature of China's export trade and achieved a leap in the trinity of tea, porcelain and silk with tea as the core. In that frenzied unilateral trade, the value of porcelain was also revalued-it is the best container for storing and tasting tea. But unlike Zheng He's time, it is no longer a lonely container, but the closest companion of tea.
Porcelain is a mature pottery style. It keeps the plastic appearance like pottery, but it has a thinner and smoother skin than pottery. These glaze layers undergo kiln transformation at high temperature, resulting in strange textures and colors. Porcelain is a drastic change in all utensils, from soft soil to hard and beautiful things. In the long years, it has always been a special container for gluttonous people, used to hold those inexhaustible nectar and delicious food.
There are only a few kinds of tea sets in the Han Dynasty, such as charcoal stove, carbon samarium, tea stone spoon, pestle, tea cake, pottery jar and pottery bowl. But in the Ming Dynasty, at the moment of the Big Bang, it completed the process of self-reproduction. In Gao Lian's book "Eight Chapters of Respect for Life", there are as many as 23 kinds of tea sets listed, which have reached a complicated level, but the core devices are only two kinds of tea cups and teapots.
In the Ming Dynasty, the teacup changed from black glaze to white porcelain, and it had the nickname of "sweet white", which revealed that its porcelain tended to be white and delicate, thus forming a three-legged pattern with Jingdezhen blue and white and Yixing purple sand. But on the map of international trade, white porcelain finally gave way to blue and white. The hue and changeable shape of blue stripes on a white background are not only loved by northern Manchu hunters, but also won the favor of European monarchs.
Yongle blue-and-white waves bound branches, Hunlian Shuangfeng, Chaoyang Shuangping: vivid expression of Far East painting style.
Since Judy's time, blue and white porcelain has become the mainstream of Jingdezhen porcelain production. After Zheng He's voyage to the West, the cobalt material "Ma Su Li Qing" brought back by Zheng He can show the color of sapphire blue when fired, forming halo and black iron crystal spots on the pattern. At first, it was a typical process defect, but in the end it turned into a unique aesthetic imprint.
This defect in the field of ancient porcelain science has intensified our doubts: blue and white may be a decorative pattern deliberately exaggerated in aesthetics. Due to the need of trade, its value has been elevated to offside. Compared with modern British and Japanese bone porcelain, blue-and-white porcelain has a rough shape, but it is the first porcelain to paint on white porcelain, which clearly expresses the style of painting art in the Far East. Those hyped happy life scenes were sintered on white porcelain tires, emitting blue and moist brilliance, which provided evidence for Europeans to expand their eastern imagination.
The tea soup is steaming under the blue and white porcelain lamp. The tea god stands inside, just like an invisible goddess. In this way, blue and white porcelain and tea have formed a wonderful interactive relationship. They confirmed each other as if it were a natural marriage. Cyan symbolizes the origin of black tea-it is not only the color of nature, but also the birthmark of the Chinese empire, just like the "Mongolian green" on the baby's ass in China. Europeans later invented tin cans and tin boxes for storing tea, which were light and easy to carry, but it was difficult to restore the aura of oriental utensils.
The great alliance between tea and blue and white porcelain was supported by the ancient silk system. In the global trade system of Ming and Qing Dynasties, silk continued to play an elegant role for thousands of years. It is the raw material for making clothes, tablecloths and tea towels, and it is integrated into the luxurious tea drinking system to form an integrated oriental effect. This is actually the trinity of "porcelain-tea-silk". Porcelain is the container of tea, and silk is its soft clothing, just like a dream composed of arc and S line, which provides extraordinary inspiration for rocaille style. Porcelain-tea-silk, in addition, should also include Ming dynasty furniture and pavilions, which are the core vocabulary for Europeans to expand their eastern imagination.
British Black Tea: Great Cooperation between Two Civilizations
But the British finally transformed the blue and white with their own aesthetics. As we can see, on the delicate surface of royal bone China, there are images of British cyan plants. British blue-and-white porcelain, sterling silver teapot, teaspoon and lace tablecloth form a new set of utensils, which enter the Victorian-style tea room and surround the whispering gentlemen and ladies, verifying their elegant taste. This has a certain internal echo with the tea-drinking etiquette of Confucian scholars in China. The British proudly claim that this is a great cooperation between the two civilizations.
Tea, like tobacco, makes drinkers deeply dependent. But tea addiction is a tender kidnapping, soft as silk, but it is brewing a serious market crisis. For a long time, the west has been buying silk and spices containing precious metals. From the middle of18th century to the end of 2008, Britain and the United States became the largest tea buyers in the world. From 1700 to 1753, British merchant ships alone transported 22 million taels of silver to the Qing Empire, and all the silver in the world flowed into China due to the tea trade. A serious silver crisis broke out in Europe.
184 1 Opium War: Pushing the crumbling Chinese Empire to the brink of collapse.
This is the beginning of the global tea chain effect. On the periphery of the peaceful nature of tea, violence began to appear on a large scale. In order to defend the silver reserve, the British introduced the trade model of exchanging opium for tea. However, the large-scale import of opium led to the economic crisis and health crisis in China. Under the pressure of gentry and civil servants, Daoguang ordered resistance in an attempt to end this absurd trade, while the British Empire sent warships to attack and pushed the crumbling Chinese Empire to the brink of collapse.
Before this, tea has already triggered another trade war. The British forcibly imported tea to the North American colonies and charged a high silver tax, which met with fierce resistance from the local people. Boston immigrants dumped tea from British merchant ships into the sea (Boston Tea Party, 1773), thus igniting the raging fire of the War of Independence. On the one hand, the birth of the new Republic, on the other hand, the decline of the old empire, the tea war launched by the British Empire, led to two completely different endings. This is not only the end of agricultural tool civilization, but also the fulcrum to promote the reflection of tea civilization.