{"id":555,"date":"2016-08-30T17:15:09","date_gmt":"2016-08-30T17:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/china\/?p=555"},"modified":"2016-11-08T21:06:51","modified_gmt":"2016-11-08T21:06:51","slug":"creating-tea-aesthetic-tang-dynasty-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/china\/news\/creating-tea-aesthetic-tang-dynasty-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating a tea aesthetic in Tang dynasty poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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James A. Benn<\/p>\n

McMaster University<\/p>\n

Friday October 7, 2016 Thomson Hall 317 11:30am<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The values associated with tea today\u2014 that it is natural, health- giving, detoxifying, spiritual, stimulating, refreshing, and so on\u2014 are not new ideas, but ones shaped in Tang times, by poets. Only a handful of poems were written about tea prior to the Tang dynasty (618-907), but as tea drinking spread rapidly in the seventh and eighth centuries, there was a veritable flood of verse on the topic composed by poets both famous and obscure. In tea poetry we can catch a glimpse of the cultural synergy created by literati, poets, and Buddhist monks gathering to share and construct new standards of connoisseurship and creativity, as well as to develop new themes and imagery. Questions about how tea was to be drunk, how it was to be appreciated, and its range of symbolic meanings were o en worked out or elaborated on in verse. Surviving poems describe the color, aroma, and taste of the beverage; methods for preparing tea; the shape of teaware; settings for drinking tea; appreciation of the various aesthetic, medicinal, and psychoactive qualities of the beverage; as well as\u2014 to a lesser extent\u2014 the world of tea growing, pick- ing, and preparation. Poets, as the cultural engineers of Tang times, had to invent a new world for tea to inhabit. Rather than create just a single cultural space, they made many, all of them interconnected to some degree. In this lecture, Professor Benn introduced\u00a0a few representative examples of Tang dynasty verse on tea and placed them in conversation with surviving artworks and artifacts from the history of Chinese tea.<\/p>\n

Professor James A. Benn was trained primarily as a scholar of medieval Chinese religions (Buddhism and Taoism). His cur- rent research is aimed at understanding the practices and world views of medieval men and women, both religious and lay,through the close reading of primary sources in literary Chinese\u2014the lingua franca of East Asian religions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James A. Benn McMaster University Friday October 7, 2016 Thomson Hall 317 11:30am The values associated with tea today\u2014 that it is natural, health- giving, detoxifying, spiritual, stimulating, refreshing, and so on\u2014 are not new ideas, but ones shaped in Tang times, by poets. Only a handful of poems were written about tea prior to<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":468,"featured_media":556,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-china-colloquium"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCreating a tea aesthetic in Tang dynasty poetry - China Studies Program<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/china\/news\/creating-tea-aesthetic-tang-dynasty-poetry\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Creating a tea aesthetic in Tang dynasty poetry - China Studies Program\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"James A. 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