The *Chajing* was written by Lu Yu (733?–804) of Tang China and is the oldest specialist book on tea in the world, treating in three volumes and ten chapters the origins, cultivation, picking, processing, utensils, preparation, drinking, and history of tea. It is a foundational source for East Asian tea culture as a whole and is still referenced constantly in tea scholarship.
Composition
Lu Yu was placed in a temple as a child and is said to have devoted his life to the study of tea, later being called the Sage of Tea. The *Chajing* gathers what he learned travelling, and describes the Tang method of boiling powdered compressed tea — a different practice from later matcha preparation, though its outlook carried forward.
Relation to Japanese practice
The procedures it describes are Tang boiling methods and do not govern modern Japanese practice directly. Its importance is that it establishes tea as a subject worth systematic attention, and that later Japanese texts are written in awareness of it.
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