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Chinese Legendary Origins of Tea

Confucius

The literature of tea, both ancient and modern, has an accumulation of errors and unfortunately many people accept these erroneous “facts” as absolute. The Confucian Tea Reference, as it is called, is just another example of one of these erroneous absolute “facts.”

The tale goes something like this: The Book of Odes or The shih ching is a book which was edited by Confucius about the year 550 B.C.E. The allusion to tea is in Ode Ten, “The Lament of a Discarded Wife,” in Part Three of the Odes of Pei, and reads as follows: “Who says that t’u is bitter? It is sweet as the tsi.” T'u, of course, is one of the original names (phonetic) for tea. However, most Chinese historians (in and out of China) are now agreed that no reference to tea was ever intended. One long dead scholar over a century ago translated t'u as “sow thistle” and tsi as “shepherd’s purse”. The translation would then read:

“Who says the sow thistle is bitter?
It is sweet as the shepherd’s purse.”

In the Ch’a Ching, C. 780 C.E., the first recognized book on tea, Lu Yu, its author, has the Confucian reference read, “Who says that t’u is bitter?”. Another passage in Lu Yu’s work reads, “Chin and t’u are as sweet as treacle.” Lu Yu is quick to point out that the character t’u in the Confucian quotation indicates that a vegetable was meant pointing out that the “grass” not the “tree” radical was used in the original work.

A corrupted (and, again, often quoted version) form of the Confucian quotation has also appeared many times in print. It is this: “Who was it asserted that ch’a bitter?” The word ch’a was not in use prior to 750 C.E. and therefore that quote could never have been used justifiably.

About 50 B.C.E. one written reference has appeared and it may be that this one obscure sentence does establish the drinking of tea in that time period. A Chinese land owner, Wang Piu, in his Contract with a Servant, speaks of buying t’u from WuTu and of boiling it. It is quite possible that this may be a dependable early reference to tea. WuTu is a mountain located in Szechwan, a province now acknowledged as being the birth place of tea and the tea industry. The inference that tea was grown there in the days of Wang Piu is certainly not unreasonable.

The Tea Man

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