rs of meditation.

By the fourth and fifth centuries Tea became a favourite beverage among
the inhabitants of the Yangtse-Kiang valley. It was about this time that
modern ideograph Cha was coined, evidently a corruption of the classic
Tou. The poets of the southern dynasties have left some fragments of
their fervent adoration of the "froth of the liquid jade." Then emperors
used to bestow some rare preparation of the leaves on their high
ministers as a reward for eminent services. Yet the method of drinking
tea at this stage was primitive in the extreme. The leaves were steamed,
crushed in a mortar, made into a cake, and boiled together with rice,
ginger, salt, orange peel, spices, milk, and sometimes with onions!
The custom obtains at the present day among the Thibetans and various
Mongolian tribes, who make a curious syrup of these ingredients. The
use of lemon slices by the Russians, who learned to take tea from the
Chinese caravansaries, points to the survival of the ancient method.

It needed the genius of the Tang dynasty to emancipate Tea from its
crude state and lead to its final idealization. With Luwuh in the middle
of the eighth century we have our first apostle of tea. He was born
in an age when Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism were seeking mutual
synthesis. The pantheistic symbolism of the time was urging one to
mirror the Universal in the Particular. Luwuh, a poet, saw in the
Tea-service the same harmony and order which reigned through all things.
In his celebrated work, the "Chaking" (The Holy Scripture of Tea) he
formulated the Code of Tea. He has since been worshipped as the tutelary
god of the Chinese tea merchants.

The "Chaking" consists of three volumes and ten chapters. In the first
chapter Luwuh treats of the nature of the tea-plant, in the second of
the implements for gathering the leaves, in the third of the selection
of the leaves. According to him the best quality of the leaves must have
"creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap
of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam
like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like fine earth
newly swept by rain."

The fourth chapter is devoted to the enumeration and description of
the twenty-four members of the tea-equipage, beginning with the tripod
brazier and ending with the bamboo cabinet for containing all these
utensils. Here we notice Luwuh's predilection for Taoist symbolism.