The Study Of The Relationship Between Tea And Tang Poetry

As the availability and cumulative experience deepened, drinking tea became a trend in the Tong Dynasty, and Lok Yuen's "theory of tea" played an important role in advocating it. It was so influential that not only the emperors but also the citizens enjoyed drinking tea. There are a lot of extraordinary researches about tea in the Tong Dynasty, including professionalism of tea, history of tea, development of tea set, people and events of tea, and ways of drinking tea. However, the contemporary intellectuals'studies of cultures of tea of Tong Dynasty focused on the holistic field of the society or the thinking of the social culture, not the relationship between the poets and tea. Though there were some works about the relationship between the Tong poets and tea, they were sporadic and not organized in a systematic manner. Therefore, there is a great amount of value to study the relationship of a particular poet and tea. Ba Gon I, whose poems and words were so significant that some of them were embedded with cultures of tea, was one of representatives in Tong's intellectuals. It was his works that made tea and wine become equally important in the poem world. We could observe the development and transaction of tea among the intellectuals when enjoying Ba's works.Even though there were a large number of poets who wrote about tea in their poems, none was similar to Ba, who exquisitely described the process of planting tea, boiling tea and tasting tea. Since Ba's works stressed both on quantity and quality, it made them vitalize and develop a strong bond with him. People could understand much better about the activities concerning drinking tea in Tong Dynasty; also, they could sense the solitary life of the poets. Consequently, I would like to use tea and tea poems of Ba Gon I as the topic of my thesis, hoping to let the readers know more about the life of drinking tea and the connotation of the tea poems as well as the relationships between tea and poets and tea and monks by investigating the background of Ba's poems. In fact, Ba's life was entangled with tea, which made him a better man and delighted him when he felt sad; that is why he liked tea so much. Thus, he not only enjoyed drinking tea but he also planted his own tea yard. The tea poems of Tong Dynasty intervene the philosophy of Confucius, Dao and Si, contributed a profound influence of tea cultures.