Decoding Tea Culture in the Song Dynasty | Hello Tea Cup
The Song dynasty (960-1279) features an amazingly rich tea culture. Tea during this period involves many aspects such as politics, economy, literature and social customs. With the prosperity of the tea industry, everyone – the nobles, scholars, and common people, all had access to tea.
"Every household has seven daily necessities: firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar and tea" Wu Zimu, Song Dynasty Poet
In the Tang dynasty,the production,management and sales of tea or the tea culture research, tea processing skills all had progressed greatly, thus tea was also popularized. However, comparatively speaking, the development of tea culture in the Song dynasty had more changes and innovation than the Tang dynasty. For example, the way of tea drinking, the varieties of tea, the literatures of tea and the supervising organizations had all undergone great breakthroughs in the Song era.
In the Tang Dynasty the habit of drinking tea spread from the imperial court to towns and the countryside; and it was the literati, hermits and Buddhists who played a leading role in the advocacy of tea culture. But things changed in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), when the influence of intellectuals on the culture of tea weakened.Although many famous literati, such as Su Shi, the great writer of the Northern Song, and Li Qingzhao, the celebrated woman poet,and Lu You, a prolific poet of the Southern Song, were fond of tea and wrote some literary pieces on tea, they contributed little to the construction of tea culture. Tea culture at that time was expanded and publicized by two polar strengths - the imperial court and ordinary people.
Tea in China explores the contours of religious and cultural transformation in traditional China from the point of view of an everyday commodity and popular beverage. The work traces the development of tea drinking from its mythical origins to the nineteenth century and examines the changes in aesthetics, ritual, science, health, and knowledge that tea brought with it.
The rise of tea culture in China : the invention of the individual
«This distinctive and enlightening book explores the invention and development of tea drinking in China, using tea culture to explore the profound question of how Chinese have traditionally expressed individuality. Western stereotypes portray a culture that values conformity and denigrates the individual, but Bret Hinsch convincingly explodes this facile myth. He argues that although Chinese embrace a communitarian ethos and assume that the individual can only thrive within a healthy community, they have also long respected people with unique traits and superior achievements. Hinsch traces how emperors, scholars, poets, and merchants all used tea connoisseurship to publicly demonstrate superior discernment, gaining admiration by displaying individuality. Acknowledging central differences with Western norms, Hinsch shows how personal distinction nevertheless constitutes an important aspect of Chinese society. By linking tea to individualism, his deeply researched book makes an original and influential contribution to the history of Chinese culture.»
It has been a long time coming and we’ve received plenty of questions over the years, hence, welcome to our cdramaland FAQ page. This is in no way an exhaustive list and as things change in the ind
qinzi on Twitter: compilation thread of my "pro-tips" for chinese modern life
or what-may-come. feel free to ask questions and i'll happily elaborate. it'll get added to over time. if you've found them useful or enjoyed them, consider : my ko-fi https://t.co/05iDahLrqN"
就 (jìu) is an extremely useful word that is, as far as i can tell, pretty difficult for non-native speakers to use in a way that sounds natural — people put it in a Lot of places and they mean sliiiiightly different things. but i’ve seen a few posts about 就 and all of them have struck me as slightly incorrect. so let’s go over a few uses of 就 (but definitely not all), with some examples!
Poetry is that which is worth translating. For example, this four-line poem, 1200 years old: a mountain, a forest, the setting sun illuminating a patch of moss. It is a scrap of literary Chinese, no longer spoken as its writer spoke it. It is a thing, forever itself, inseparable from its language. And yet something about it has caused it to lead a nomadic life: insinuating itself in the minds of readers, demanding understanding. (but on the reader's own terms), provoking thought, sometimes compelling writing in other languages. Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go. The transformations that take shape in print, that take the formal name of "translation, n become their own beings, set out on their own wanderings. Some live long, and some don't: What kind of creatures are they? What happens when a poem, once Chinese and still Chinese, becomes a piece of English, Spanish, French poetry? Here are 19 incarnations of a small poem by Wang Wei (c. 100-161), who was known in,his lifetime as a wealthy Buddhist painter and calligrapher, and to later generations as a master poet in an age of masters, the Tang Dynasty. The quatrain is from a series of twenty poems on various sights near the Wang River (no relation). The poems were written as par of a massive horizontal landscape scroll, a genre invented by Wang. The painting was copied (translated) for centuries. The original is lost; and the earliest surviving copy comes from the 11th century: Wang's landscape after 1000 years of transformation.
Some thoughts on character naming conventions & cultural significance of name-shortening
I’m noticing a growing trend of people referring to characters from The Untamed by given name only (my theory is this is because of Netflix. Is it because of Netflix?), and while I’m starting to get more used to it and am also actively interrogating my own emotional reactions to it, I do want to provide some of my thoughts on cultural notes regarding naming conventions.
What characters call each other (and themselves) in the Guardian Novel
As a translator, I like to normalise the usage of pinyin honorifics and titles the way Japanese honorifics and titles are normalised in anime/manga. If you’re familiar with anime/manga, I’m sure this list is familiar to you: -san -sama -kun -kaasan -niisan -neesan -sensei -senpai -chan -bucho -shacho. I see no reason at all why we can’t do the same with Chinese honorifics except for the easily translated occupational ones.
Since watching ep 3 for the first time (i.e. january), this has been knocking around in my brain. In ep 3, we see JZXuan waltzing into the same inn as the Yunmeng Trio, booting them, and then rejecting “bad tea”. Ever since, I’ve watched a lot of tea being poured in CQL. It got me thinking, what kind of tea would different sects prefer and what would different characters drink?
a thread on diminutives in Chinese and maybe something on punny nicknames?
I don't think any actual productivity is happening today so why not a thread on diminutives in Chinese and maybe something on punny nicknames? Inspired by friend-Ozzie who lamented that English is the LEAST AFFECTIONATE LANGUAGE EVER OMG WHY IT SUCKS.