Driving to Westmead Station yesterday, I gave up resistance and began listening to a ten-part history of tea on The China History Podcast. I had been putting this off for some time since I wasn't sure if this topic was going to be, ahem, my cup of tea.

Wrong again. Laszlo has a way of making the most arcane information interesting - maybe it's his unbridled enthusiasm - and so the first two parts of this ancient story passed the time nicely. Having attended tea ceremonies in Japan and been initiated into many of the practices in that country through friends and other immersions, I realized that I still had considerable ignorance and a deficit that needed to be made up. After all, I drink a few cups of tea a day and can't imagine waking up to anything other than a pot of tea.

I was especially taken by a famous poem by the Tang dynasty poet Lu T'ung, who, upon receiving a particularly auspicious present of tea from the Imperial estates, wrote a song of praise. Here is an extract from The Song of Tea, as it has become known. With each bowl, the poet moves closer to something like heaven on earth, an epiphany of the soul.

The first bowl moistens my lips and throat.
The second bowl banishes my loneliness and melancholy.
The third bowl penetrates my withered entrails,
finding nothing except a literary core of five thousand scrolls.
The fourth bowl raises a light perspiration,
casting life’s inequities out through my pores.
The fifth bowl purifies my flesh and bones.
The sixth bowl makes me one with the immortal, feathered spirits.
The seventh bowl I need not drink,
feeling only a pure wind rushing beneath my wings.

Anyone who loves tea will understand at least some of the heightened sentiments of Lu T'ung, who sat gently sipping in in his mountain hermitage on Mt Sung, in deep reflection, 1200 years ago.



Above. Detail from a hanging scroll from the 13th Century showing Lu T'ung brewing tea.