The Esthetic Character And Cultural Connotation Of The Chinese Ancient Tea Sets

Tea had become the indispensable consumer goods in ancientChinese daily life. The reason that drinking tea was so popular is not justonly its special taste，but also its beautiful color and good flavor from theview sight of ancients. People could get wonderful enjoyment duringdrinking tea. For this reason, more emphasizes were put on a suitable teaservice and a beautiful environment for a large number of people whenthey were drinking tea. Therefore, tea turn into a life style or a symbolismof culture instead of the original herbal medicine or food gradually in thelong history, and at the meanwhile, tea set also got more and moreattention for the people who had deep love for drinking tea.Tea service, as a physical entity, the design of it is dominated by thepeople’s consciousness; it is the product of people’s thoughts. Because ofthe aesthetic culture that people in the same period have, the tea set in acertain period of human history had the corresponding charactersobviously. The characteristics that the tea set in the same period display,in essence, is not the choice from certain individual, it is the reflex ofpractice from artifacts continuously made by a grope of people wholiving in the same period. As a result of the common social environmentand culture, there is an obvious different characteristic of the standards ofbeauty. The analysis for the esthetic character and cultural connotation ofthe Chinese ancient tea sets is influenced by different aspect directly or indirectly, therefore undoubtedly very complex, even they are complexenough in a specific period of human history. But the complexity islimited in the particular period, so the study for the esthetic character andcultural connotation of the Chinese ancient tea sets should be built on thefoundation of the difficult social and culture environment. Only by doingso can we reveal the essence of the development of the tea set as accurateas possible.Although the book named《Tong Yue》wrote by Wang Bao, whowas a famous poet and writer on Fu in the Xi Han Dynasty, was regardedas the most earliest historical materials that mentioned tea service by thetea culture researchers, It is not sufficient to prove that the tea set separatefrom Catering utensils that were daily necessities in ancients’life. But sofar, there is a book that described the tea and the tea set specially in TangDynasty appeared. So starting from the Tang Dynasty, the typicalcharacteristic of the Chinese ancient tea sets in different times of Chinesehistory has been discussed in this thesis. All in all, the common thread ofthe traditional Chinese aesthetic would be found in the tea service on eachdynasty.