More than just a Drink: Tea Consumption, Material Culture, and ‘Sensory Turn’ in Early Modern China (1550-1700)

Abstract

Our contemporary way of tea drinking is deeply influenced by the late-Ming way. However, when examining the development of tea production and consumption within this period, we can find so many changes. This study examines tea consumption in China’s domestic market from the 1550s to the 1700s. During this period, some commodities rose to the top in the market, such as Longjing tea and Yixing teapot, while some of them declined and even disappeared from the market, such as Luojie tea. Some of them survived; however, consumers’ attitudes toward them became different, such as Songluo tea. Late-Ming scholar-official tea connoisseurs, for their part, played active roles in these transformations. They dominated the fashion of tea drinking through establishing a new set of aesthetic principles. These aesthetic principles and a new discourse of tea tasting emphasized the “true flavor” of tea. This dissertation argues that scholar-official tea connoisseurs played crucial roles in the formation of a new way of tea tasting, which significantly influenced the development of tea connoisseurship thereafter.