Kyoto Journal Issue 71

TEA

Darjeeling is bound to its reputation as the “Champagne of teas.” The 87 Darjeeling tea gardens form the tea equivalent of a French wine appellation. A hectare of Darjeeling bush will yield a mere 500 kilos of tea each year.– Kevin Gascoyne, Darjeeling

“When new monks at Shaolin ask me about the Dharma, I tell them to have a cup of tea. If they still don’t understand, I tell them to taste the tea. The Way is in everything we do. Drinking a cup of tea, eating, shitting, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the Way. You can read all the books you want, but unless you find the Way in your daily life, you’re wasting your time.”– Bill Porter, Tea At Shaolin

For the Chinese understand that without nature, man is inherently insignificant. It is therefore understandable that of all of the thousands of teas in China, none were specifically named after a person, not even after any of the many emperors who were often responsible for naming them. Most individual teas are named after their places of origin, the most common being the mountains where many are found.– Winnie Yu, The Name Game

Contents:

Baisao: The Old Tea Seller – Norman Waddell
Darjeeling – Kevin Gascoyne
Yixing Ware – Terese Tse Bartholomew
Verandah; Installation and story– Hirokazu Kosaka
Tea At Shaolin – Bill Porter
Ming Horses, Tea and the Third Dalai Llama – Martha Avery
Temple of Tea, Temple of Thirst – Jon Oda
Desert meditations at Burning Man
Uji Green – Amanda Mayer Stinchecum
Teatime – Pico Iyer
One Series; Tea ceremony as portable public performance art – Pierre Sernet
Landscape – Chitfu Yu
Lu T’ung and the Song of Tea – Steven D. Owyoung
Masala Chai;Take-out tea with a whole new meaning– Matteo Pistono
Yun Wei – Chongbin Zheng
Pu-er by Wing Chi Ip, Ming Yi Wang, Roy Fong
Sri Lanka Pilgrimage – Matteo Pistono
Cha – Kazuaki Tanahashi
The Name Game – Winnie Yu
Humility – Todd Walton
Teahouse Renaissance in Taipei – Donna Lo
The Gaiwan – Winnie Yu
Adventures in the Tea Trade – tea merchants Winnie Yu and Sebastian Beckwith
29 Moguk, Burma
63 Phoenix Mountain, China; Wuyi, China
76 Treasure Mountain, Anxi, China
77 Darjeeling, India; Tung Ting, Taiwan
78 Taiping, China; Wenshan, Taiwan
79 Phongsali, Laos

Reviews:
Lauren W. Deutsch on Tan Dun’s opera Tea: A Mirror of Soul
Josh Michaell on The Modern Japanese Tea Room, by Michael Freeman, and Contemporary Teahouses in China
Lauren W. Deutsch on Americans Studying the Traditional Japanese Art of the Tea Ceremony: The Internationalizing of a Traditional Art, by Barbara Mori
Josh Michaell on All In This Tea, directed by Les Blank and Gina Liebrecht
Lauren W. Deutsch on The Ancient Tea Horse Road: Travels with the Last of the Himalayan Muleteers, by Jeff Fuchs [Errata: P.54, second column, second par “…Fuchs recalls” should read: “In a distant echo of news from the first caravans, he recalls…” – “he” refers to Jason Rush.]
Josh Michaell on The Time of Tea, by Dominique Pasqualini and Bruno Suet

Fiction:
Hunger – Sushma Joshi

Poetry:
Two Poems in Praise of Enka – Kevin Simmonds
Four Poems by Kim Seung-Hee, Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Lee Hyung-Jin

In Translation:
The Wrong Paradise – Rabindranath Tagore, Translated from Bengali by Srinjay Chakravarti

96pp
published June 20, 2009

 

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