Session 10—Mon, Sep 19: Pre-Tang China ②: Up through Han dynasty

Topics

❖ Early contacts with Chinese (Han) culture—Very early Chinese tea culture

Thoughts—read before class, revisit for tests

The Contract for a Youth is an important document to us. It will be used as our one certain early date. Please don't skip it, and remember it.

Required—to be completed for today's session

✓ Read: Chinese National Tea Museum, English page on history [internet link] (pre-Tang portions only, and you can skip the opening about Shen Nong. The "Bashu states" mentioned on this site were collectively in the Sichuan area. See this map.)
✓ Read: Very Early Encounters [bSpace, PPT]
✓ Read: Contract for a Youth [bSpace, PDF]
✓ Read: Chinese Tea Culture (Wang Ling, 2000) Chpt 1 [bSpace, PDF] (right-pointing arrow means start reading, left-pointing arrow means stop reading)
✓ Read up through the Han dynasty: Tea in China (Evans, 1992) Chpt 4 [bSpace, PDF]

*Both Wang Ling and John C. Evans need to be read skeptically. Also, they are OCRed and have quite a few spelling errors, missing words, etc. in them. If you need to check something, use the JPEG version found in the "PDFs from JPEGs" folder.

Multimedia notes

◊ I present in class on this day some very brief clips of tea preparation and presentation found in "Battle at Red Cliff" (John Woo, 2008). Historical accuracy to Han Dynasty tea drinking is marginal, but I list it here anyway, if you want to review what I showed in class. Regardless of historical accuracy, it does support the theme of tea's current place within culture (how it is depicted in modern films):

• Scene One (starting around 9:45, shows a glimpses of a woman toasting the tea leaf perhaps and boiling the water, but the main focus is on the music playing)
• Scene One, cont. (this is the continuation of part 5, and shows a woman ladling the tea and serving it)
• Scene Two (starts at time 9:00, a woman serves tea)

Links

⇢ None other than those mentioned above.

Other

None.

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