Spirit of Aloha | Features | January/February 2008

Around the World in a Teacup
By: Sarah Rose


Once a luxury, tea is now a necessity for some and a spiritual need for others

IMAGE PLAN/ CORBIS

A young Japanese woman in full kimono kneels on a tatami mat and dips a bamboo ladle into a pot of boiling water, pre­paring a cup of green tea for her guests.

“Only dip shallow—there might be poison on the bottom,” says the ceremony instructor, a tea master named Suokyo Shimizu.

The student gracefully pours the water, measures the tea, whisks it, re­turns her items to their proper places and stands up to serve the tea. Turning, taking three measured steps, she kneels again in front of the honored guest, placing a plate of sweets before him.

“Never place a plate on the seam of a tatami,” Shimizu in­structs, “because may­be a ninja is underneath. They have swords that could come through.” Ninjas? Poison? What place do they have in a tea ceremony class?

Tea is a simple drink, nothing more than dried leaves in hot water. Yet the rituals surrounding tea are complex and multifaceted, spanning the globe, from the New World to the Old, from Asia to Europe, and every place in between that has ever been visited by tea drinkers. Tea has become a lens through which one can view the culture that worships it.

Shimizu is a woman otherwise known as Kyoko Gasha, a Japa­nese television journalist, based in New York. She re­ports in Japanese for Reuters Television by day; on the weekends she is a tea professor in the Sohan school of tea ceremony, one of six officially recognized tea schools in Japan. Shimizu is her “tea name.”

“Do it more carefully, more gracefully, because this is samurai,” Shimizu chides on details as mundane as removing the lid from a teapot, or cleaning the rim of a teacup. “There are no shortcuts.”

The Sohan style of tea ceremony was founded as a part of the culture of Ja­pan’s great samurai, the military nobility of Imperial Japan. The tea ceremony, like the samurai tradition of scholarship and morality, is highly ritualized. Where the samurai warriors practiced battle moves with precision and scrutiny that made them legends, they were no less exacting in their consumption of tea. The details of the Sohan tea ceremony are so carefully observed that it can be mind-numbing: stand up, turn, walk three steps, kneel, ask for permission to place the cup down, get permission, place the cup down, pick the cup up, drink.

It wasn’t quite as smooth and easy as that.

Minutely observing battle moves makes sense when threatened by ninjas and poison, but tea is a pleasure, a luxury, a commodity—a drink. So why does it get the level of attention of a martial art?

Shimizu explains that, while she is a third-generation tea professor, after her mother and grandmother, her interest in the tea ceremony grew after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when she was reporting in New York City.

“Tea ceremony is social, and it is meditative,” Shimizu says. In such anxious, embattled times, she was drawn to the pastimes of warriors, particularly the ways in which they relaxed.

For Shimizu’s students, mostly young Japanese women with executive jobs, the tea ceremony is a way of articulating a spiritual need—in much the same way today’s yoga practitioners do downward-facing aerobics on the path to mindfulness.

While the Japanese tea ceremony is about simplicity, the ceremonies of China were ornate and elab­orate. China is home to tea; the tea plant evolved in the hills of China, the world’s largest coun­try, and tea is the national drink. But in Imperial China, tea was considered a luxury for the wealthy, served only in gold-plated porcelain, with showy accoutrements. The Japanese tea ceremony developed in reaction to the Chi­nese tea culture of 300 years ago.

The model, perhaps even more than the menu, is what the Lotus is all about. “It’s just so rewarding to see, in these troubled times, there’s a little haven of positive energy directed toward sustainability and restoration,” Reinfeld says. “When other people are blowing themselves up, that’s our little snapshot, that’s what we’re offering.”“The contemporary Japanese tea ceremony brought all the elements of tea drinking back to their most basic: with rough stoneware, rough porcelain, modest teahouses, it is the most basic, simplest form of tea,” says Richard Guzaus­kas, tea master of Tea Forte, a specialty tea company based in San Francisco and found­ed by MoMA de­signer Peter Hewitt.

“Somebody finally said, this isn’t bring­ing tea to the people, only to the wealthy.”

In today’s China, the elaborate tea ceremonies of the past—the gilded por­celain and rich Mandarins—are almost entirely forgotten. A century of revolution, war and communism has reeducated the population away from such bourgeois pastimes as tea ceremonies. Only the region of Hong Kong, the former British colony, retains a bit of the pomp and circumstance of Imperial Chi­nese tea culture.

At the Peninsula Hotel’s Spring Moon restaurant, tea master Teddy Leong uses a small teaspoon to drop a tea named Silver Needle into a small pot of hot water. He swirls the pot and lets the water fall from the spigot into four thimble-size teacups. Then he dumps the water in each one down the drain.

“The first cup of tea is for your enemies,” Leong says with a grin.

Tea is not a pick-and-eat fruit, but is the result of processing, drying and preserving, much of it done on an artisan’s factory floor. Tea is not clean, Leong says. The first cup brings out the tea’s impurities, the dirt and dust from processing; it washes the leaves as they unfurl and rehydrate into the hot stew.

You don’t want to drink the first cup, which is dark and pungent and very strong. The second cup is much milder, softer. With the practiced moves of a Hollywood bartender, Leong pours five or eight cups out of the same tea leaves, each one gentler and less pronounced.

Leong holds a teacup to his eye to inspect the color and uses the words of wine to describe what he sees and smells. The Chinese tea ceremony is not about the ritual of presentation, but about the aesthetics of tea—what you smell and see and even hear as the tea brews.

Leong describes the tea experience in outline form. Every­thing is divided into lists and subcategories. “Flavor takes place in the back of the mouth: The first sip is for the middle of your tongue, the second sip spreads tea to your cheeks. On the third, when the temperature is gone, your tongue finally tastes the tea—this is the smoothest.”

Leong has competed in, and won, tea competitions through­out East Asia. The competitions are all that is left of Im­perial Chinese Mandarin culture, relics of the days when a man’s fate—from who governed the county jail to who became emperor—was determined by government examinations. Nothing is relaxed about today’s tea competitions. Win­ning is everything, very much in keeping with the frenetic pace of today’s China, where there is no stopping or slow­ing down on the path to modernization.

Tea in the East is not the same as it is in the West. For one, the tea itself is different. Asians prefer green, lesser-pro­cessed teas to black fermented teas such as the common English Breakfast or Earl Gray flavors. In England and the U.S., popular taste is largely for black teas, strong and tannic and, unlike green tea, requiring the tempering flavors of milk and sugar.

In London, at the Fortnum & Ma­son department store, afternoon tea is ac­com­panied by a tower of pastries and crustless sandwiches. Patrons sit on deep-piled sofas in a blue-and-silver silk-be­decked tearoom. The tea floor at Lon­don’s most famous purveyor of specialty tea is grandmotherly and opulent. You can order tea with pink champagne and recline with a bellyful of mini éclairs and cucumber sandwiches.

“As tea drinking evolved in Great Britain, the only people who could af­ford it were wealthy,” says Guzauskas of the well-appointed room. “The cost of tea per gram was the same as gold.”

High tea in England still retains the trappings of a glamorous country house. It is a delightful way to spend an afternoon, but it is also a museum piece. Who has time for a three-hour coffee break? Perhaps more than the Japanese or Chinese tea ceremonies, English high tea is like a relic, filling no contemporary need. Perhaps because of high tea’s familiarity from Merchant Ivory movies, it feels entirely Victorian, a dead thing of the past, without any of the electricity of the Chinese ceremony or the studied poetry of the Japanese.

Is high tea the only tea culture available to the West?

“Americans dropped the ritual of tea after the Boston Tea Party,” Guzauskas explains. In 1773, 150 American colonialists dressed as Mohawk Indians threw cases of tea into Boston Harbor as an act of protest against the high taxes of the British Crown. Common wis­dom holds that the U.S. has been a coffee culture ever since.

“Tea is not dead,” says Guzauskas. “Specialty tea is showing double-digit growth. Every supermarket has ready-to-drink [bottled] teas.”

The commodity of tea is making its mark felt in the U.S., even if the attendant ceremonies have not developed here. Guzauskas sees signs that this might change, that we may have a tea culture and a tea ceremony in the pro­c­ess of springing up.

A new tea bar recently opened in California called Cha for Tea, with a variety of specialty tea drinks—hot tea, bubble tea, ice tea, smoothies—all served with Asian food. Cha for Tea is owned by a Taiwanese tea distributor and has become a favorite hangout of the 13- to 17-year-old set, Guzauskas says.

“The drinks are delicious, the space is geared to a younger generation. The cash register never stops ringing,” Gu­zauskas marvels. Kids go to Cha for Tea right after school and stay until supper.

SARAH ROSE is the author of For All the Tea in China, the story of a 19th-century botanist-turned-spy who stole the secrets of tea from Imperial China and brought tea plants to India as an undercover agent for the East India Co. The book is forthcoming from Viking.

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