Session 10: Pre-Tang China ②: Up through Han dynasty

Topics

❖ Early contacts with Chinese (Han) culture—Very early Chinese tea culture

Thoughts—read before class, revisit for tests

The Contract for a Youth is an important document to us. It will be used as our one certain early date. Please don't skip it, and remember it.

Required—to be completed for today's session

✓ Read: Chinese National Tea Museum, English page on history [internet link, Link updated Feb 13, 2013, the site itself, too, has been improved] (pre-Tang portions only, and you can skip the opening about Shen Nong. The "Bashu states" mentioned on this site were collectively in the Sichuan area. See this map.)
✓ Read: Very Early Encounters [bSpace, PPT]
✓ Read: Contract for a Youth [bSpace, PDF]
✓ Read: Chinese Tea Culture (Wang Ling, 2000) Chpt 1 [bSpace, PDF] (right-pointing arrow means start reading, left-pointing arrow means stop reading)
✓ Read up through the Han dynasty: Tea in China (Evans, 1992) Chpt 4 [bSpace, PDF]

*Both Wang Ling and John C. Evans need to be read skeptically (Evans in all cases, Wang Ling for the early material). Also, they are OCRed and have quite a few spelling errors, missing words, etc. in them. If you need to check something, use the JPEG version found in the "PDFs from JPEGs" folder.

Multimedia notes

◊ I might present in class on this day some very brief clips of tea preparation and presentation found in "Battle at Red Cliff" (John Woo, 2008). Historical accuracy to Han Dynasty tea drinking is marginal, but I list it here anyway, if you want to review what I showed in class. Regardless of historical accuracy, it does support the theme of tea's current place within culture (how it is depicted in modern films):

• Scene One (starting around 9:45, shows a glimpses of a woman toasting the tea leaf perhaps and boiling the water, but the main focus is on the music playing)
• Scene One, cont. (this is the continuation of part 5, and shows a woman ladling the tea and serving it)
• Scene Two (starts at time 9:00, a woman serves tea)

... (Spring 2013) Unfortunately, the above links are broken. Red Cliff is on Netflix, but I haven't have a chance to mark the time. Tea scenes are scattered throughout, however. This doesn't provide Han dynasty information, but does represent some of the standard cultural symbolic meanings of tea in modern Asia.

Links

⇢ None other than those mentioned above.

Other

None.

Links to each session page

Sun, Sept 1, 2013: I am migrating this site to a new site. It takes time. During this transition, there are two ways to access a particular day's web page. You can start with the new EA109 Fall 2013 Course Guide page, our official top page. It will take you directly to the new pages and redirect to old pages when necessary. Or you can use the below chart. It will take you directly to the day's session page—the new one when it exists, the old one when it has yet to be migrated. Greenhighlight means the new page exists. Sorry for the dust and mess during construction!