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measurements for each of the implements used, including an “all-in-one” basket “one foot five inches high, two feet four inches long and two feet wide,” used to hold the implements needed to prepare tea.
    The eighteenth implement that Lu Yu discusses is the china cup. He suggests that those from Yueh Chou are best, clearly preferring the beautiful blue celadon glaze that characterizes cups made in the North. He suggests that these give the beverage a beneficial greenish cast. White cups, he goes on to say, give the tea a pinkish cast that he considers distasteful.

    Such attention to details may seem excessive to Westerners today, but Lu Yu lived during a time when Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism were all prevalent. Each of these paths was rich in symbolism and involved a deep spiritual practice. As Kakuzo Okakura, Japanese scholar and curator of Japanese art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, put it in his 1906 work, The Book of Tea , “The pantheistic symbolism of the time was urging one to mirror the Universal in the Particular.” It was one of Lu Yu’s greatest gifts that he found the means of expressing universal harmony and order within the particulars of preparing and serving a bowl of tea.
    After Lu Yu had published the Ch’a Ching , he enjoyed enormous popularity, attracting attention both from peasants, who had heard stories of his mastery, and from the royal court. He and Emperor Taisung ( 763-779 ) eventually became friends. In spite of his popularity, however, Lu Yu remained restless and dissatisfied. Ironically, toward the end of his life, he sought out an almost monastic lifestyle that provided solitude, quiet, and time for contemplation and meditation.
    Inevitably, Lu Yu had his own followers. Perhaps the most famous of his disciples was a poet by the name of Lu Tung (also seen as Lo Tung), who lived during the late T’ang dynasty and wrote at length of tea. One of his poems declares that the first cup merely moistened his lips and throat, but the second cup broke his loneliness, and by the fifth cup he was purified. The “sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The seventh cup—ah, but I could take no more.” Perhaps his most famous line is, “I am in no way interested in immortality, but only in the taste of tea,” a quote that is used frequently and enthusiastically by tea merchants even today.
    THE IMPERIAL TEA TRIBUTE
    Lu Yu’s work created a surge in the popularity of tea that resulted in more successful methods of tea cultivation and processing in many regions of T’ang dynasty China.
    During this period, the finest tea grew in Yang-Hsien, a mountainous region near present-day Shanghai. In the late 770 s, an envoy from the emperor was sent there to determine just why this mountainous region produced such superior tea. While there, he was given a bowl of tea, which he considered the finest he had ever tasted. The envoy immediately sent 28 , 000 grams ( 1 , 000 ounces) of this tea back to court. As soon as he tasted it, the emperor demanded that he be sent some of this tea every year. The demand for tribute paid with tea, which had actually begun in the fifth century, was to have tremendously beneficial results for the imperial Chinese economy over the years—and devastating results for the farmers and peasants.
    During harvest time, usually in April, girls were sent to the mountainsides to pick the leaves. Picking ceased at noon. During the afternoons, the entire village worked to cook, powder, and press the tea into a paste that was then baked into cakes.
    Even though the tea-making period only lasted a month in this mountainous region, it coincided with the time when the rice fields needed to be planted. Because the peasants were forced to neglect their own fields at this critical time, the rice and vegetable harvest was always severely depleted. The result was real hunger, and even famine later in the year.
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