What is the tea ceremony? Tea ceremony is a highly formal way to prepare tea for guests, and experience life from the form of drinking tea, that's all. Japanese tea ceremony originated in China, but it took a different road from Master. It seems that all tea ceremony and ceramics can find another way without exception, which may be the terrible thing about this Japanese apprentice.

The origin of Japanese tea ceremony can be traced back to the sixteenth century, but the introduction of tea was completed by the envoys of the Tang Dynasty. In ancient Japan, there were no native tea trees and there was no habit of drinking tea. Tea has taken root and sprouted in Japan since the envoys of Nara era brought it back to Japan.

The tea party in the Tang Dynasty was like this: a set of tea set, including a copper basin, a kettle, a water tank, a waste water bowl, a basin-type bracket with a bamboo spoon, a pair of clips for holding charcoal and a round bracket for putting the lid of the kettle. Tea is made of tea through frying, fermentation and extrusion. Put the broken tea into a teapot, add water to boil, and then put it into a ceramic teacup. This is the easiest way to eat tea.

In the early days of heian period, the most famous Japanese monk in the Tang Dynasty (767-822 AD, the ancestor of Tiantai Sect in Japan) brought China's tea trees back to Japan and began to plant them in Sakamoto, Feng Jingen. It is said that this is the beginning of tea planting in Japan. During the Kamakura period, the Zen monk Rong studied the processing method of tea in China and brought high-quality tea seeds back to Japan for dissemination. 12 1 1 year, he wrote the first Japanese tea-drinking monograph, Eating Tea for Health.

Tea culture in China comes from the daily customs of ordinary people, while in Japan, on the contrary, tea drinking culture takes a top-down road, just like the capitalist reform in Meiji period. When tea was first introduced to Japan, it was completely a luxury, and only the royal family, nobles and a few senior monks could enjoy it. Tea ceremony is regarded as an elegant and advanced culture limited to the royal family, and its content and form were strongly imitated by the Tang Dynasty. Since the Kamakura era, it has become more and more common to regard tea as a panacea under the influence of eating tea for health preservation. The rapid development of tea planting has also created favorable conditions for tea to enter civilian families. During this period, tea drinking activities began to spread to the people centered on temples.

Different from China's method of fermenting tea, Japanese tea is to dry steamed tea naturally, and the tea ground into powder is called "matcha" (final tea). In Muromachi era, tea farmers in Guinea held tea tasting parties to classify tea, which developed into entertainment for many people to taste tea and developed primitive tea ceremony etiquette. During this period, "fighting tea" with the samurai class as the protagonist became the mainstream of tea culture, with entertainment as the main feature. In the13rd century, the emerging samurai class, with abundant financial resources, often held tea fights to gamble by tasting tea from all over the world, which was extremely luxurious to show off their wealth and expand their contacts. Later, the third generation general of Muromachi shogunate, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, refined the fighting tea, which prepared the conditions for the transition to religious "academy tea". Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the eighth generation general, built a "Tongren Zhai" in Dongshan, Kyoto, where he lived in seclusion. The floor was covered with tatami, one * * *, and four and a half sheets were used. This architectural design in which the whole room is covered with tatami has been used for reference by later generations, forming various "tea rooms". In the past, the tea party was held in a large space, noisy and not polite; Tongren Zhai narrowed and closed the open and unfixed space, creating a stable indoor space for the formation of tea ceremony. This kind of room is called academy-style building, and the tea party held in it is called "academy tea". "Academy Tea" requires absolute silence in the teahouse and concise questions and answers between the host and the guest, thus sweeping away the messy wind of the tea bucket. Academy tea has completed the task of combining foreign Tang culture with Japanese culture, and basically established the current tea ordering procedure of Japanese tea ceremony. In short, by the end of Muromachi era, the birth of tea ceremony was a matter of time.