Lu Yu and the Tea Classic

The hands were still small, and they were always wet.

The old story goes that every morning was the same. Carry water up to the temple. Light the stove, then crouch beside it, keeping the flame from growing too high or dying down. When the water sang, carry it to the side room, where the monks sat in silence. Pour. Step back. Gather the empty cups, rinse them clean, and turn them upside down on the rack to drain. The next day, the very same again.

The boy who did these chores was an orphan, taken in and raised by a monk in the region now called Hubei. He was born in 733, under the Tang dynasty in China. In that small temple, no one thought the little tasks around a pot of water were worth remembering. They were simply work that had to be done, like sweeping the yard.

His name was Lu Yu.

The hands grew up, but the habits stayed. He still looked at tea leaves more closely than anyone else. He knew that leaves picked in one month were different from leaves picked in another. He knew that if the wind blew across the coals while a tea cake was roasting, the whole batch was ruined. He knew that water carried down from the mountain was not like water drawn up from a well. Then one day he did something no one had ever done. He sat down, picked up a brush, and wrote all of it out.

Around the year 760, the book was finished. Three volumes, ten chapters. People had been drinking tea for a very long time before that, but no one had ever written a whole book only about tea. This was the first. He named it The Classic of Tea.

The ten chapters follow the same road that a tea leaf travels. Chapter one says what kind of plant tea is and how it grows. Chapter two describes the tools for making tea, and chapter three tells how the leaves are steamed, pounded, pressed and dried into tea cakes. Chapters four, five and six cover the brewing equipment, the boiling of the water and the drinking. Chapter seven gathers old stories, and chapter eight lists the regions where tea grows. Chapter nine names the things that may be left out. And chapter ten gives a very strange instruction: copy the whole book onto silk and hang it on the wall, so that from anywhere in the room, a single glance shows all of it.

But the chapter people remember most, and the funniest one too, is chapter four.

Chapter four is given over entirely to the equipment for brewing tea. Not just a pot and a few cups. Lu Yu describes a three-legged wind stove, cast like an ancient ritual cauldron, with a tray underneath to catch the ash. Then a basket for charcoal. A mallet for breaking the charcoal into pieces. A pair of fire tongs. A cauldron for boiling. A stand to keep the cauldron from tipping. A pair of tongs for roasting the tea cake. A paper bag, so the freshly roasted cake does not lose its fragrance. A grinder, with a tiny feather brush whose only job is to sweep out the powder left inside it. A sieve, and a box for the sieve. A measuring scoop. A vessel of clean water, a bag for filtering water, a ladle, and a pair of bamboo chopsticks for stirring. A jar of salt, with its own little stick for scooping the salt. A bowl for letting the hot water cool a little. Only then come the drinking cups. Then the hamper, the scrubbing brush, the tub of washing water, the bucket for tea dregs, the cloth for wiping, and the stand that keeps everything neatly in place. And at last, a big basket to hold every one of these things and carry them away.

Now for the most delightful part. When it comes to counting them, no one can agree with anyone else.

If you count the small extra pieces tucked inside each item, like the ash tray of the wind stove or the feather brush of the grinder, the number comes to 28. Count more simply, one item each, and there are 25. And Lu Yu himself, near the end of the book, gives a number all his own. He writes that in the city, at the gates of the great houses, if one of the 24 pieces is missing, the tea is as good as ruined.

All that equipment, for one cup of leaf water.

The man who wrote that list was not joking. To him, each piece had its own task, and leaving one out left a gap in exactly that place. In chapter five, his instructions grow even more careful. When tiny bubbles like fish eyes begin to rise, that is the first boil, and that is exactly when the salt goes in. When beads rise around the edge of the pot like a string of pearls, that is the second boil. When the water rolls up into waves, that is the third. Beyond the third boil, the water has grown old, and he says not to use it anymore. From one such boiling, he pours five cups.

And yet it is chapter nine where he wins the reader's heart.

In that chapter, the very man who listed all that equipment turns around and gives permission to leave it behind. If one can sit on a rock in a pine forest, then there is no need for the display stand. If the water is boiled over dry firewood in an ordinary pot, then the wind stove, the ash tray, the charcoal mallet and the fire tongs can stay at home. If one sits right beside a clear stream, the water vessel and the filter bag can go too, because the clear water is right there. If there are five people or fewer, and the tea is already ground fine, then the sieve and its box are of no use at all.

All that equipment, and a whole chapter written to say that sometimes it is not needed. The boy who once carried water, now grown into a writer of books, still remembered that the most important thing at the stove is not the equipment.

It is pouring for someone else.

The story of tea traveled very far. In 2022, China's traditional handmade tea processing, together with the customs around a cup of tea, was added to UNESCO's list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. What earned that place was not a three-legged wind stove. It was the way people make tea to welcome a guest, to bond with their neighbors, and at a wedding or a family celebration.

In Vietnam, the story of the tea leaf has its own roots, planted deep in the mountains. Up on Suối Giàng, between 1,300 and 1,400 meters above sea level, stands a group of ancient shan tuyết tea trees. There are 400 of them. Their trunks are gnarled and covered in moss, and they are hundreds of years old. In 2016, these trees were recognized as Vietnam Heritage Trees. The pickers have to climb into the branches to reach the young buds, which are covered in white down like snow.

So this morning, when a guest arrives at a family home, the same small things happen.

The pot is rinsed with hot water. The tea leaves go in. The water is poured, and the steam rises in a thin thread, then fades. The little cups are set close together. The grown-ups have not started talking yet, still busy pouring. A child carries the tray out, walking very slowly so nothing spills, sets it on the table, and steps back to watch the steam drift away.

It is the very same task that, as the old story goes, an orphan boy did every morning, in a small temple, more than 1,200 years ago.