Chinese tea: Lu Yu, the six types and the word chá

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, tea became an everyday drink in China around the 3rd century CE, and the first published account of how to grow, process and drink it dates from 350 CE. But for a long time tea appeared only in scattered passages of various books.

In the middle of the Tang (唐朝), Lu Yu (陆羽, 733 – 803 or 804, depending on the source) wrote the Classic of Tea (茶经), the first known book devoted entirely to tea. Wikipedia dates it to 760-762; Chinese sources place its writing around 760-780, noting that an autobiography Lu Yu wrote in 761 already mentions it. The book earned him the title "Sage of Tea" (茶圣).

It has three scrolls (卷) and ten chapters, with these titles (in brackets, the literal meaning of the key word):

• scroll 1: 一之源 (source), 二之具 (tools), 三之造 (making);

• scroll 2: 四之器 (utensils);

• scroll 3: 五之煮 (boiling), 六之饮 (drinking), 七之事 (facts), 八之出 (provenance), 九之略 (abridging), 十之图 (picture).

The Classic of Tea sums up what was known up to the mid-Tang about growing, processing and drinking tea, and it raised an everyday drink to the level of an art. Around 800, again according to Britannica, the first tea seeds were taken to Japan.

All these teas come from the same plant, the tea bush (Camellia sinensis). What sets them apart is how the leaves are processed, above all how far they are oxidized. China sorts them into six main types, which UNESCO lists as green, yellow, dark, white, oolong and black. Add reprocessed teas, such as flower-scented teas, and there are more than 2,000 different teas.

Watch out for the colour trap. What English and French call "black tea" is 红茶 (hóngchá) in Chinese, literally "red tea"; Wikipedia explains the name by the reddish colour the leaves take on when oxidized. But Chinese also has a "black tea", 黑茶 (hēichá), and it is a completely different type: post-fermented teas, which go through real fermentation by microorganisms for months or even years. To avoid confusion, it is translated as "dark tea". Pu'er is one of them.

So remember:

• a Western-style black tea is 红茶;

• 黑茶 is dark tea, such as pu'er.

Both 红茶 and 绿茶 ("green tea") are in the HSK 3 vocabulary.

China has a great many famous teas; here are three, from three different types.

• Longjing (龙井, "Dragon Well"): a green tea whose leaves are pan-fired and shaped by hand, which stops oxidation and gives them their flat shape. It traditionally comes from around Longjing village, near West Lake (西湖) in Hangzhou (Zhejiang). The most prized pickings are made in early spring, before the Qingming festival (清明, early April), and are called 明前 ("before Qingming"). Under the Qing it was given the status of imperial tribute tea. Its processing technique is one of the practices included in the 2022 UNESCO inscription.

• Tieguanyin (铁观音, "Iron Guanyin"): an oolong from Anxi (安溪) in Fujian, named after Guanyin (观音), the Buddhist deity of compassion. According to a folk legend, under the Yongzheng emperor (Qing), a devout old tea farmer called Wei Yin dreamt that Guanyin showed him a tea bush growing in a crack in the rocks; he found it where the dream had said and grew it. Today Anxi Tieguanyin is usually lightly oxidized, close to a green tea, with a floral aroma and a golden-yellow liquor.

• Pu'er (普洱茶): a dark tea from Yunnan, made from the large-leaf variety of the tea plant. It is named after Pu'er (普洱), an old tea-trading town in Yunnan. It is often pressed into cakes or bricks and aged, sometimes for decades.

Gongfu tea (工夫茶, also written 功夫茶, gōngfū chá) means "making tea with skill". In the Chaoshan dialect, 工夫 describes a technique that is meticulous, subtle and graceful, and that takes patience and experience. 功夫 is also the Chinese word for kung fu: dictionaries give its first meaning as "skill, art".

The method probably comes from the ways of preparing tea in Fujian and in the Chaoshan area of eastern Guangdong. Some place its birth in the Wuyi mountains of Fujian, where the production of oolong for export began; others in Chaozhou (潮州), which some call the "capital of gongfu tea".

It uses very small teapots and much more leaf for the same amount of water than Western-style brewing. Rather than a ritual ceremony, it is above all a brewing technique. In Chaozhou, offering gongfu tea is still the customary way to welcome a guest.

"Chaozhou gongfu tea" (潮州工夫茶) is one of the customs included in UNESCO's 2022 inscription of Chinese tea.

On 29 November 2022, meeting in Rabat (Morocco) for its 17th session, UNESCO's intangible heritage committee inscribed "Traditional tea processing techniques and associated social practices in China" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The inscription covers the knowledge, skills and practices around looking after tea plantations, picking the leaves, processing them by hand, and drinking and sharing tea. It brings together 44 items of national heritage in 15 provinces and regions: the techniques of the six types of tea and of flower-scented teas, but also customs such as Chaozhou gongfu tea and the Jingshan tea banquet (径山茶宴) of Hangzhou. According to the Xinhua news agency, China then had 43 items on UNESCO's lists, more than any other country.

UNESCO's description stresses the place of tea in everyday life: steeped or boiled, it is served at home, at work, in tea houses (茶馆), restaurants and temples. It is part of social life and of ceremonies such as weddings and sacrifices. Welcoming guests and keeping up ties with family and neighbours over tea is a practice shared by many ethnic groups. The skills are passed on in families and through apprenticeships; among those who carry them on, UNESCO names tea producers, farmers, artists and the makers of the pastries served with tea.

Most words for tea in the world's languages come from Chinese, but the words arrived by different routes, explains the linguist Östen Dahl in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). Most Chinese languages have a form like Mandarin chá (茶); Min Nan, spoken in Fujian, says te.

• By sea, with the Dutch: the main importers of tea into Europe, they traded mostly with Amoy (Xiamen) in Fujian. They took the local word (perhaps through Malay traders in Java, who said teh), which became thee in Dutch and spread across much of Europe: tea in English, thé in French, té in Spanish, Tee in German. The first shipments reached Europe in the early 17th century.

• By sea, but through Macao: the Portuguese, the first Europeans to import tea, in the 16th century, borrowed Cantonese cha around the 1550s; hence Portuguese chá.

• Overland: in Eastern Europe and Asia, countries that got their tea by land tend to use forms like chai. In Hindi, chai simply means "tea", so "chai tea" amounts to "tea tea", as Britannica points out.

So Mandarin chá is a close relative of Portuguese chá and Hindi chai, while English tea goes back to the te of Fujian.