Tea Drinking And The Tang-Song: The Cultural Identity

The cultural identity of this group of tea drinkers was built on the ground of their common interests in the Tang-Song-style tea drinking and their nostalgia of their Tang-and-Song tea connoisseurs. However, the cultural identity of the scholar-official class could be simply built on the basis of tea drinking and its aesthetic principle in general. In a discussion on the relationship between tea consumption and the scholar-official class, Wu Zhihe argues that tea drinking played a significant role during the scholar-official gatherings, in which tea drinking could create an environment and support all other elegant activities, such as writing poems, discussing about meditation, and spending time at sites of natural beauty. Furthermore,