By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
New York
The tea ceremony is said to be the essence of Japanese aesthetics -- architecture, ceramics, flower arranging, incense, calligraphy, painting, gardening -- packaged in a formalized ritual that dates back to the 16th century. That's when the illustrious tea master Sen no Rikyu perfected cha-do, or the "way of tea." It's a ceremony -- and, some would say, a state of mind -- that has changed very little in nearly half a millennium.
[Sen Sooku] Zina Saunders
Fast-forward 15 generations to a young man in a formal kimono kneeling on the floor of a newly constructed tea room at the Koichi Yanagi Oriental Fine Arts Gallery on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Sen So-oku, 33 years old, is the heir to the Mushakoji school of tea, one of the trio of competing schools founded by Sen no Rikyu's three great-grandsons. One day he will succeed his father as grand tea master. For now, he's spending a year in the U.S. as a representative of the Japanese Ministry of Culture and teaching art at Columbia University.
Mr. Sen wants to bring the tea ceremony into the 21st century. The first clue comes as I remove my shoes and step into the tea room that has been designed to his personal specifications. It's a what's-wrong-with-this-picture moment. The floor is covered with the usual straw mats, the kettle is warming on a brazier in the middle of the room, and the traditional tea-ceremony implements are laid out in the proper order near Mr. Sen. But wait -- what's that open trench that runs along one side of the room?
Call it a tea bleacher. Mr. Sen gestures to us to take our seats -- but not in the cramp-inducing, sit-on-your-knees posture that can make the tea ceremony a torturous experience for modern-day participants. Rather, the tea master invites us to sit on the floor and lower our legs into the trench. It's similar to the hole-in-the-floor seating arrangements at many Japanese restaurants outside Japan.
"This type of architectural structure serves two audiences," Mr. Sen says through an interpreter. "One is the new generation that is not necessarily used to sitting on their knees. The other is for people who have already had a long relationship with tea but are getting older [and] having trouble sitting on their knees." He has also designed a ceremony that can be performed in a room with a table and chairs.
Mr. Sen defends his approach, which traditionalists would call heretical. "Change is always a part of this cultural form," he says. The tea ceremony "changes along with the way life is carried out now." When the tea ceremony was invented, he notes, everyone wore kimonos and was used to living in tatami rooms. Today that's not the case. Four hundred years ago, there was "a very small difference between the concept of carrying out tea and everyday life." Today, he says, "The point is to be able to regain that short distance between life and the tea room."
At the same time, Mr. Sen stresses that "there are certain essential elements . . . of Japanese culture that can only be found in tea." He mentions "seasonality." Traditional Japanese culture, he says, "considers the focus on seasons -- understanding the differences between the seasons -- to be very important. So, for example, in Japan there is the concept of hanami, which is the viewing of the cherry blossoms. Or, for example, in autumn there's the concept of looking out at the moon. Of course, the moon is out all the time, but that's a specific celebration."
He tells the story of one of his students, an office worker in her 30s. "She works in Tokyo, a very cosmopolitan place. . . . In her day-to-day life, she gets up in the morning, takes the subway, gets off at a subway station, takes sort of an underground tunnel to work, gets into the office building, works all day and doesn't see a little bit of sunlight. And then, at the end of the day, she goes back and does the exact same thing" in reverse. For her, the tea ceremony "is really an opportunity to feel the seasonality of Japan."
Mr. Sen has woven several seasonal themes into today's tea ceremony. The flower motif on the incense burner is plum, a symbol of spring. The portrait on the scroll in the alcove is of Sen no Rikyu, the founder of the tea ceremony, the anniversary of whose death occurred a few days earlier.
Then there's the bowl in which Mr. Sen whisks the tea for me to drink. It was made in Kyoto in the 17th century, and Mr. Sen says he selected the bowl for me "because I wanted you to feel the historical lineage between it and the tea that we are experiencing today." It is a rustic, handmade Raku-ware bowl. Raku-ware was the first pottery "that was created specifically for the art and culture of tea," he says. "Before that, ceramics from China, as well as the Korean peninsula, were utilized."
The glaze on the bowl "has a very thick surface, but it also has a soft tactile sense," he explains. "As the hot tea permeates the thickness of the tea bowl, it's almost like the tea bowl will take on a sort of bodily temperature. So it's as if the tea bowl and the person drinking it will become one." That effect is further heightened by the bowl's color, he says, which is black. Before electricity, the tea room was much darker. And when someone drank from a Raku-ware bowl, it was as if the "existence of the tea bowl would be removed entirely, and the only thing there was the person drinking the tea, becoming one with the tea itself."
The tea ceremony is closely connected with Zen Buddhism, and Mr. Sen has trained as a monk in a temple in Kyoto. When he meditates, he says, "there is an opportunity for self-reflection, almost as if one sees oneself as well as an objective self viewing the self." This feeling is similar to what he experiences when he is performing the tea ceremony, he says.
"Tea provides an opportunity for self-reflection," Mr. Sen says, "for deepening human relationships. It's also an escape from the everyday." Which brings us to the readers of The Wall Street Journal. "You have a readership of important business people," he says, "who are very busy, who spend a lot of time at work." The first devotees of the tea ceremony were daimyo, or feudal lords, he says, who used the tea room to strike business deals and plot political moves. The modern-day analogue for business people is golf, he says.
But why not the tea ceremony? Tea is actually a "very simple pleasure," he says. Yes, it has a philosophical background, but at essence it is an "opportunity for people to experience good company, good food, good drink and good conversation." This, the master says, is the "charm of tea."
Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Puer Bubble Bursts
MENGHAI, China — Saudi Arabia has its oil. South Africa has its diamonds. And here in China’s temperate southwest, prosperity has come from the scrubby green tea trees that blanket the mountains of fabled Menghai County.
Over the past decade, as the nation went wild for the region’s brand of tea, known as Pu’er, farmers bought minivans, manufacturers became millionaires and Chinese citizens plowed their savings into black bricks of compacted Pu’er.
But that was before the collapse of the tea market turned thousands of farmers and dealers into paupers and provided the nation with a very pungent lesson about gullibility, greed and the perils of the speculative bubble. “Most of us are ruined,” said Fu Wei, 43, one of the few tea traders to survive the implosion of the Pu’er market. “A lot of people behaved like idiots.”
A pleasantly aromatic beverage that promoters claim reduces cholesterol and cures hangovers, Pu’er became the darling of the sipping classes in recent years as this nation’s nouveaux riches embraced a distinctly Chinese way to display their wealth, and invest their savings. From 1999 to 2007, the price of Pu’er, a fermented brew invented by Tang Dynasty traders, increased tenfold, to a high of $150 a pound for the finest aged Pu’er, before tumbling far below its preboom levels.
For tens of thousands of wholesalers, farmers and other Chinese citizens who poured their money into compressed disks of tea leaves, the crash of the Pu’er market has been nothing short of disastrous. Many investors were led to believe that Pu’er prices could only go up.
“The saying around here was ‘It’s better to save Pu’er than to save money,’ ” said Wang Ruoyu, a longtime dealer in Xishuangbanna, the lush, tea-growing region of Yunnan Province that abuts the Burmese border. “Everyone thought they were going to get rich.”
Fermented tea was hardly the only caffeinated investment frenzy that swept China during its boom years. The urban middle class speculated mainly in stock and real estate, pushing prices to stratospheric levels before exports slumped, growth slowed and hundreds of billions of dollars in paper profits disappeared over the past year.
In the mountainous Pu’er belt of Yunnan, a cabal of manipulative buyers cornered the tea market and drove prices to record levels, giving some farmers and county traders a taste of the country’s bubble — and its bitter aftermath.
At least a third of the 3,000 tea manufacturers and merchants have called it quits in recent months. Farmers have begun replacing newly planted tea trees with more nourishing — and now, more lucrative — staples like corn and rice. Here in Menghai, the newly opened six-story emporium built to house hundreds of buyers and bundlers is a very lonely place.
“Very few of us survived,” said Mr. Fu, 43, among the few tea traders brave enough to open a business in the complex, which is nearly empty. He sat in the concrete hull of his shop, which he cannot afford to complete, and cobwebs covered his shelf of treasured Pu’er cakes.
All around him, sitting on unsold sacks of tea, were idled farmers and merchants who bided their time playing cards, chain smoking and, of course, drinking endless cups of tea.
The rise and fall of Pu’er partly reflects the lack of investment opportunities and government oversight in rural Yunnan, as well as the abundance of cash among connoisseurs in the big cities.
Wu Xiduan, secretary general of the China Tea Marketing Association, said many naïve investors had been taken in by the frenzied atmosphere, largely whipped up by out-of-town wholesalers who promoted Pu’er as drinkable gold and then bought up as much as they could, sometimes paying up to 30 percent more than in the previous year.
He said that as farmers planted more tea, production doubled from 2006 to 2007, to 100,000 tons. In the final free-for-all months, some producers shipped their tea to Yunnan from other provinces, labeled it Pu’er, and then enjoyed huge markups.
When values hit absurd levels last spring, the buyers unloaded their stocks and disappeared.
“The market was sensationalized on purpose,” Mr. Wu said, speaking in a telephone interview from Beijing.slide show:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/16/world/asia/20090116-tea-audio/index.html
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