Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A. Benn, and: The Rise of Tea Culture in China: The Invention of the Individual by Bret Hinsch

Reviewed by: Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A. Benn, and: The Rise of Tea Culture in China: The Invention of the Individual by Bret Hinsch John W. Chaffee Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A. Benn. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. Pp. xiii + 288. 65. 00 cloth, 24. 00 paper. The Rise of Tea Culture in China: The Invention of the Individual by Bret Hinsch. Lanham, MD: Rowman jia 檟, which, according to a fourth-century writer, was a small tree whose leaves could be "boiled to make a soup for drinking" (p. 23) ; and especially tu 荼, described in a Han pharmacopeia as "a bitter vegetable" (p. 23), whose morphological similarity to cha (differentiated by a single stroke) makes confusion between the two an ever-present possibility. But when found in early texts, do these terms describe anything that we would recognize as tea? Benn agrees with other scholars that true tea probably came from Si chuan in the southwest, but he also argues that tea as a comestible was a Tang invention (pp. 27, 41). This is arguably an overly conservative conclusion, for Benn cites a number of references from the Han as well as the Northern and Southern Dynasties with references to what may well have been tea, but he persuasively points to the Tang as the period of tea's most important development and popularization. Benn's treatment of tea during the Tang comprises the heart of his book, occupying as it does three of the book's six substantive chapters. How was tea, initially regarded as a "bitter vegetable" used in soups and often for medicinal purposes, elevated into a desirable and prestigious drink? The role of Lu Yu, the subject of chapter 5, was critical. Orphaned at a young age, Lu was raised and educated in a Buddhist End Page 494 monastery located in Tianmen 天門 County in. . .