Lu Yu and the Classic of Tea (茶经) Explained: The Orphan Who Wrote the First Tea Book

Sometime around 760 CE, a man in his late twenties sat down in the hills south of the Yangtze and wrote roughly seven thousand characters about a leaf.

Nobody had done it before. Not in China, not anywhere. 《茶经》 (Chá Jīng), the Classic of Tea, is the first monograph on tea in world literature (Wikipedia: The Classic of Tea) — and the man who wrote it, 陆羽 (Lù Yǔ), did not come from the class of people who wrote books. He did not come from a class at all. The official Tang history cannot name his parents.

Two things usually get said about him in English that are worth correcting up front. He was not a monk: he was raised in a monastery and refused to take vows. And he did not invent the tea ceremony — the elaborate ritual most Westerners picture is Japanese, developed centuries later, and Lu Yu's own book is closer to a technical specification than a liturgy. What he did was rarer and harder to describe, which is the subject of the second half of this article.

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Parentage unknown

The primary source is the 《新唐书》 (Xīn Táng Shū), the New Book of Tang, which files Lu Yu under 隐逸 — recluses. Its opening on him is startlingly blunt:

不知所生，或言有僧得诸水滨，畜之。 Bù zhī suǒ shēng, huò yán yǒu sēng dé zhū shuǐ bīn, xù zhī. "His origins are unknown. Some say a monk found him by the waterside and raised him." (新唐書 卷196, zh.wikisource)

Note the 或言 — "some say." Even the official history is reporting hearsay. That is the actual evidential floor for everything that follows.

Later tradition fills it in: the monk was 智积 (Zhìjī) of 龙盖寺 (Lónggài Sì) in Jingling, modern Tianmen in Hubei, and the child was found by a river bank, in some tellings shielded by wild geese (Chinese Wikipedia: 陆羽). The geese are folklore and should be read as such — but they are not random folklore, because of what the boy did next.

He named himself

Having no family name, he took one. The New Book of Tang records that he divined with the 《易经》 (Yì Jīng), the Book of Changes, and drew the hexagram 蹇 (Jiǎn) changing into 渐 (Jiàn), "Gradual Advance." The line he landed on reads:

鸿渐于陆，其羽可用为仪。 Hóng jiàn yú lù, qí yǔ kě yòng wéi yí. "The wild goose advances to the high plain; its feathers may be used in the ceremony."

From which he took 陆 (Lù), "high ground," as his surname and 羽 (Yǔ), "feather," as his given name (新唐書 卷196; ZH Wikipedia: 陆羽). A foundling with no lineage opened a book of oracles and gave himself one.

The runaway years

He would not be ordained. The New Book of Tang says the monastery put him to hard labour, and that he taught himself to write by tracing characters with a bamboo stick on the back of an ox. Then: 「亡去，匿为优人，作诙谐数千言」 — he ran away, hid himself among the 优人 (yōurén), the entertainers, and wrote several thousand words of comic material.

He had a stutter, which Chinese sources say made him better at the clowning roles, not worse. It is an unusual CV for the founding figure of Chinese tea: monastery orphan, ox-hide calligrapher, jobbing comedian.

He was pulled out of it by patrons. The prefect 李齐物 (Lǐ Qíwù) gave him books and sent him to study; the official and poet 崔国辅 (Cuī Guófǔ) became a friend and, in effect, his writing coach (新唐書 卷196; Wikipedia: Lu Yu). The An Lushan rebellion pushed him, like much of north China's educated population, south. He settled around 苕溪 (Tiáoxī) in 湖州 (Húzhōu), near the celebrated tea mountain 顾渚山 (Gùzhǔ Shān), and fell in with the poet-monk 皎然 (Jiǎorán) and the circle around the calligrapher 颜真卿 (Yán Zhēnqīng) (ZH Wikipedia: 陆羽).

There, between roughly 760 and 762, he wrote the book. He was around thirty. The idiom 大器晚成 (dà qì wǎn chéng) — "the great vessel is completed late" — consoles people whose recognition arrives slowly, and Lu Yu is its counterexample in every respect except one: the recognition was immediate, but nothing in his background was supposed to produce a book at all.

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The ten chapters

The Classic of Tea is three scrolls in ten chapters, each titled with an ordinal and a single character. The list is worth having in full, because the shape of it is the argument:

	Chapter	Literally	What it covers
1	一之源	"one, on origins"	What the plant is, where it grows, soil, altitude, harvest
2	二之具	"two, on tools"	The implements for picking, steaming, pressing, drying, storing
3	三之造	"three, on making"	Manufacturing the compressed tea cakes
4	四之器	"four, on vessels"	The brewing and drinking equipment
5	五之煮	"five, on boiling"	Water, fire, and the method
6	六之饮	"six, on drinking"	How it is consumed, and the varieties then current
7	七之事	"seven, on affairs"	Every earlier mention of tea he could find, from Shennong onward
8	八之出	"eight, on provenance"	The producing regions, ranked against each other
9	九之略	"nine, on omissions"	What you may leave out, and when
10	十之图	"ten, on the chart"	Copy the whole book onto a scroll and hang it on the wall

(Wikipedia: The Classic of Tea; 茶經, zh.wikisource)

Chapters nine and ten are the ones that give the game away, and we will come back to them.

What it says

Chapter one opens with a definition, and the definition has an adjective in it:

茶者，南方之嘉木也。 Chá zhě, nánfāng zhī jiā mù yě. "Tea is a fine tree of the south."

嘉 (jiā) is not a botanist's word. It means excellent, auspicious, fit for ceremony. The first sentence of the first book about tea has already made a value claim.

The same chapter gives five names then in use — 「其名，一曰茶，二曰槚，三曰蔎，四曰茗，五曰荈」: chá, jiǎ, shè, míng, chuǎn. And it states who tea is for:

最宜精行俭德之人。 Zuì yí jīng xíng jiǎn dé zhī rén. "It suits, above all, a person of disciplined conduct and frugal virtue." (茶經/一之源, zh.wikisource)

That sentence is the hinge of the whole tradition. A manual about a beverage pauses to specify a moral type. Not "tea is healthy" — tea is appropriate to a certain kind of person. Everything later Chinese and Japanese tea culture builds is scaffolding on that line, and it sits next to the sensibility of 淡泊明志 (dàn bó míng zhì), that a plain life clarifies what you are aiming at.

The three boils

Chapter five is where the book becomes recognisably itself. Lu Yu does not say "boil the water." He grades the boil by how it looks and sounds:

• 一沸 (yī fèi), first boil: 「如鱼目，微有声」 — like fish eyes, with a faint sound. Salt goes in here.
• 二沸 (èr fèi), second boil: 「缘边如涌泉连珠」 — at the rim, like a gushing spring, beads strung together. A ladle of water is taken out; the powdered tea goes into the vortex.
• 三沸 (sān fèi), third boil: 「腾波鼓浪」 — leaping waves, drumming surf. The reserved water goes back in to settle it.

Past that the water is "old" and no longer fit (茶經/五之煮, zh.wikisource). Note that the Tang method is nothing like modern steeping: tea was compressed into cakes, roasted, ground to powder, boiled, and salted. If you have drunk Chinese tea, you have not drunk Lu Yu's tea.

The attention involved is 精益求精 (jīng yì qiú jīng) — already fine, and still refining.

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The sentence that turned a drink into a practice

Chapter nine, 九之略, "on omissions," is the most interesting chapter in the book and almost nobody quotes it. It is a list of permissions. Picking tea in a mountain temple in spring? Then seven of the manufacturing tools are unnecessary. Sitting on a rock among pines with a plain iron pot? Drop the brazier, the ash tray, the charcoal mallet, the fire tongs, the stand. Beside a spring? You do not need the water jar, the rinsing basin, the filter bag. Fewer than five people, with tea already finely ground? No sieve or box. Climbing a cliff on vines into a cave, roasting and grinding at the mouth of it? Drop the mill and the brush (茶經/九之略, zh.wikisource).

For eight chapters he has been exacting. In chapter nine he is cheerfully throwing the equipment away. And then he closes it with this:

但城邑之中，王公之门，二十四器阙一，则茶废矣。 Dàn chéng yì zhī zhōng, wáng gōng zhī mén, èrshísì qì quē yī, zé chá fèi yǐ. "But within city walls, at the gates of princes and nobles — if one of the twenty-four vessels is missing, then the tea is void."

Read the two halves together. On a mountain, with almost nothing, you can make tea. In a great house, missing one implement out of twenty-four, you cannot. Not "it will be worse." 废 (fèi) — nullified, off, not happening.

That is not a rule about equipment. It is a rule about seriousness. Lu Yu is saying that when you are in a setting that could supply everything and you supply most of it, you are not doing the thing at all — you are approximating it in front of people. Improvisation on a cliff face is complete because nothing better was available. A near-complete service in a mansion is a performance with a hole in it.

This is the moment tea stops being a drink. A man who was found by a river, who owned nothing, wrote the sentence that made incompleteness in comfortable circumstances disgraceful.

Chapter ten finishes the thought with an instruction that sounds like a joke and is not: copy the entire book out onto silk, in four or six panels, and hang it where you sit, so that the whole of it is visible at once during the drinking. The manual is to be part of the furniture.

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What actually happened next

Tea drinking in the Tang spread largely through Chan Buddhist monasteries, where it kept monks awake through night meditation — English Wikipedia's account, following the Tang miscellany 《封氏闻见记》, describes a Chan master on Mount Tai promoting tea, his monks carrying the habit outward until it reached the capital and then the general population (Wikipedia: History of tea in China). Tea became taxable and state-managed during the Tang, which is the hardest evidence there is that it had become an economy and not a habit. The Tang also exported it: the monks Saichō and Kūkai encountered tea in China and Saichō is credited with the first recorded tea planting in Japan, with the Zen monk Eisai (c. 1141–1215) later bringing tea back from Song China and writing Japan's first tea book.

Lu Yu himself refused to be absorbed. Offered the post of 太子文学 (tàizǐ wénxué), tutor to the heir apparent, and then transferred to 太常寺太祝 (tàichángsì tàizhù), a sacrificial office, he 「不就职」 — did not take up the post (新唐書 卷196). The orphan who had named himself out of the Book of Changes declined to be given a position by the state.

The history's last word on him is the strangest detail of all:

时鬻茶者，至陶羽形置炀突间，祀为茶神。 Shí yù chá zhě, zhì táo yǔ xíng zhì yáng tū jiān, sì wéi chá shén. "Tea sellers of the time went so far as to mould clay figures of Lu Yu, set them by the stove flue, and worship him as the god of tea."

Not posthumously. In his own lifetime, merchants were keeping a pottery Lu Yu next to the fire. He is still called 茶圣 (chá shèng), Sage of Tea, and 茶神 (chá shén), god of tea.

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What we do not know

Being exact about the gaps, since the book is about exactness:

• His dates. Chinese Wikipedia gives 733–803; English Wikipedia gives a death in 804. The birth year is agreed; the death year is not.
• The text. Lu Yu's manuscript is lost. The earliest surviving editions of the Classic of Tea are Ming-dynasty — six hundred years downstream (Wikipedia: The Classic of Tea). Like the Orchid Pavilion Preface, the most famous version of the object is not the object.
• The counts. English Wikipedia's summary tallies fifteen implements in chapter two and twenty-eight in chapter four, while the text's own chapter nine speaks of 二十四器, twenty-four. The figures do not reconcile, and how you count depends on whether nested and paired items count once or twice. Twenty-four is the number the book itself uses.
• The biography. Almost everything charming — the geese, the ox, the stutter that made him funny — reaches us through sources that were already saying 或言, "some say," in the eleventh century.

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Why it still reads

The Classic of Tea survived because it is not really about tea, in the same way a good field guide is not about birds. It is a demonstration of what happens when someone applies total attention to a small thing: name it precisely, chart where it grows, grade the water, listen to the boil, decide who it suits, then say plainly which of your own rules can be dropped and which cannot.

There is an idiom for the aftertaste the book is interested in — 苦尽甘来 (kǔ jìn gān lái), "the bitter exhausts itself and the sweet arrives," which is literally what happens in the mouth after good tea and figuratively what happened to the man who wrote about it. And there is one for the debt: 饮水思源 (yǐn shuǐ sī yuán), when you drink the water, think of the source.

In this case the source is a baby nobody claimed, left by a river, who grew up to write the sentence that decides what counts as tea.

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More classical culture explained: the Orchid Pavilion Gathering and the greatest work of Chinese calligraphy that no longer exists; and Huang Chao's chrysanthemum poem, written — supposedly — by the man who broke the dynasty Lu Yu lived in. Or browse our 1,000+ Chinese idioms with English explanations, starting with Wisdom & Learning.