Song Dynasty, the peak of China's ancient civilization, was praised by western scholars as "the Renaissance of the East". "It shouldn't be tiring to burn incense, order tea, hang paintings and arrange flowers, and intervene in four things." At that time, from dignitaries to ordinary people, Li pursued an elegant and poetic life.
Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival (Song-Zhang Zeduan)
Ordering tea is a concentrated portrayal of the elegant life of Song people. Go to fight tea in groups of three or five. If the tea is good, you will have a lot of face among your friends. It would be even more amazing if you could write poems and draw pictures on tea soup (this is called tea sharing, also called tea hundred plays).
Dream back to the Great Song Dynasty —— Restoring the way of ordering tea in the Song Dynasty
-Tea ordering in the Song Dynasty-
The so-called tea ordering means baking the cake, grinding the tea leaves into powder, sieving the most delicate tea powder with a sieve, putting it into a teacup, that is, making tea with boiling water, and then hitting it quickly with a teapot, so that the tea and water are fully integrated, and a large amount of white tea foam appears in the teacup. Su Shi's poem "Farewell to Nanping Modest Teacher" in the Northern Song Dynasty says: "Taoist priests go out to Nanping Mountain to try tea with three hands", among which "three hands" is said to be a clever master of tea ordering.
Song people used more utensils to order tea, and the steps were more complicated, which will be explained in detail next.
Before talking about some tea, I have to talk about tea cakes in the Song Dynasty.
In the Tang and Song Dynasties, there were not as many kinds of tea as we do now. At that time, the standard of tea tasting paid attention to the word "new" They think that only fresh and tender tea has tea fragrance. The older the tea, the bigger the leaves, the bitter the taste and the less fragrant it is. In order to make tea easy to be preserved and transported to dignitaries in large quantities, the technology of "steaming green" was popularized.
The Making Process of Traditional Steamed Tea Cake Painting in China 20 16 05/ Sima Gonggong
The bitter taste of the steamed broken tea cake is still too heavy, so sometimes agarwood and borneol are added to increase the fragrance of tea, finely mashed, made into cakes with molds, and dried in a string, which became a popular group tea in the Tang and Song Dynasties.
The famous Longfeng tea in Song Dynasty
Big and small dragon teas are made of molds with dragon and phoenix patterns specially presented by Song Taizong. They are called "Dragon and Phoenix Tea" or "Dragon and Phoenix Tea" and are the representatives of Beiyuan tribute tea. By the time of Song Renzong, "Longfeng Tea" was refined into "Little Longfeng Tea", which was praised by countless literati.
According to Zhao Bei Yuan Bie Lu in Song Dynasty, there are six processes in its production: steaming tea, pressing tea, grinding tea, making tea, yellow tea and baking tea. Aft picking tea bud, soaking in water, steaming evenly selecte bud leaves, washing with cold water after steaming, squeezing out a small amount of tea juice, adding water into a casserole, grinding, molding with dragon and phoenix, and drying.
Ouyang Xiu commented: "Its products are absolutely exquisite and can be called a niche. Anyone who weighs twenty cakes a catty is worth two taels of gold, but gold is available and tea is not available. " It is said that Ouyang Xiu, a bachelor of Hanlin and an assistant to the Tang Dynasty, only got a tea cake during his 20 years as an official in the DPRK, and its value is obvious.
When the tea is ready, it's time to start drinking tea. Drinking tea in the Song Dynasty was not like making tea today. At that time, it was complicated, exquisite and interesting. If you can drink a cup of tea you ordered, life will be very leisurely.
The steps are as follows:
Preparation stage:
1. Baking tea: Take out the pickled tea cake, bake it with low fire, remove and drain.
2. Broken tea: The tea cake is wrapped tightly in clean paper and mashed in a wooden tea mortar.
3. Tea grinding: put the broken tea pieces into a grinding tank or a stone mill and grind them into powder quickly and forcefully.
4. Luo tea: put the ground tea powder into a sieve made of rose and sieve it several times until it is "extremely fine"
5. Packing: put the sieved tea powder into a box for storage.
Tea driving map (Song-Liu Songnian-Taibei Palace Museum)
Tea ordering stage:
6. Fill the teacup: burn it to the second boiling point with clean running tap water, rinse the teacup, and dial in the tea powder while the teacup is still hot.
7. Soup injection: inject a small amount of water into the thermos pot, and first adjust the tea powder into a uniform tea cream.
8. Blowing: While injecting water, blow the tea soup with a tea basket to make the tea soup appear stable and lasting foam.
Blowing is the key to ordering tea. Stir the tea soup with teaspoons, tea baskets, tea bran and other tools to make it foam, or even bite a lamp and hang a cup, which can conjure up the phenomena of flowers, plants, insects and fish. The teaspoon should be heavy and the strokes should be strong, but the strokes should be weak and the tea leaves should be weak. Song Huizong thinks that the soup should be injected and blown seven times, each time with different strength and methods, until the concentration is moderate and the milk flowers surge.
9. Setting: After the soup flowers show beautiful colors, put the teacup on the lacquerware or saucer made of the same material.
After ordering tea, but before drinking tea, the literati in the Song Dynasty would invite friends to watch, enjoy tea and write poems together, and the most interesting thing is to fight tea.
Dou cha you Dao
After ordering tea, it will be lonely to enjoy it alone. If you drink it at once, so much effort will be wasted, so the entertainment of "fighting tea" came into being.
Chou Ying's "Dou Cha Tu"
Divide tea into art
The method of ordering tea makes drinking tea very entertaining, and the popularity of fighting tea promotes the continuous innovation of ordering tea skills. At the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, a tea-separating technology was formed, which could form characters and images in tea soup.
Tea sorting, also known as tea varieties, uses the skill of ordering tea to make tea soup present magnificent and changeable words and images in an instant. The master of tea preparation can even make the tea surface present vivid patterns such as animals, cordyceps, flowers, birds, fish and insects, just like the ink painting made by the painter, so it is also called "Shuidanqing".
During the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, tea sharing was occasionally mentioned. But in the Qing Dynasty, this skill completely disappeared on the stage of China tea culture.
As for why this tea-picking technique in its heyday disappeared in the long river of history, some people say that "there is no China after Cliff Mountain". With the demise of the Song Dynasty and the rule of Mongolian minorities in the Yuan Dynasty, most of them did not accept this way of ordering tea. There is a saying that Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant-born Ming Taizu, suspected that the way of ordering tea was extravagant and wasteful, and used loose tea instead of group tea, which withdrew from the historical stage.
Now some people advocate restoring the tea-ordering method in the Song Dynasty and reproducing the skills of that year. Some people think that this ancient law is too complicated to exist.
"In the heyday, when all rivers run into the sea!" Xiao Guan believes that we should not forget the ancient method of making tea, because this is our history, our pride and our roots. However, we should not stick to the ancient law, but should create a tea-making method that can not only adapt to the contemporary era, but also amaze future generations.
Drink tea, seek tea to become immortal.
I'm a tea official.
Listen to me about tea.