--- title: 'Tang boiled tea: Lu Yu and The Classic of Tea' url: 'https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/history/tang-jiancha' markdown: 'https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/history/tang-jiancha.md' lang: en date: '2026-10-25' description: "How tea was boiled under the Tang: cake, roller, salted cauldron, Lu Yu's three boils, the 24 utensils of The Classic of Tea and the Famen Temple silver." --- # Tang boiled tea: Lu Yu and The Classic of Tea 煎茶 Editors · October 25, 2026 · 9 min read Long before the [gaiwan](https://howtotea.me/teaware/brewing-vessels/gaiwan), tea in China was boiled rather than steeped. Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea and the teaware sealed in Famen Temple in 874 show how it was done. ![Servants boil tea over a brazier and offer a bowl to a monk, after Yan Liben](https://howtotea.me/images/c/o/v/e/r/cover-d4ddaf6c.webp) 煎茶 Tang boiled tea jiān chá Author of the canon: Lu Yu, 733–804 Text: The Classic of Tea, c. 760 Material: pressed cake, steamed and ground Seasoning: salt only Utensils: 24 entries, up to 28 objects Find: Famen Temple set, sealed in 874 **600 ml**, water, one sheng **6 g**, powder, 2021 trial **3–5**, bowls per pot Under the Tang, people drank tea differently from today. They dried a cake of pressed tea over a fire, ground it to powder and dropped it into a cauldron of boiling salted water, then ladled the froth-topped liquor into bowls. The Chinese call this jiancha (煎茶, “tea boiled in water”), and Lu Yu wrote down its rules. ## Lu Yu and his Classic Lu Yu (733–804) came from Jingling, today's Tianmen in Hubei. He wrote The Classic of Tea (茶經, Chajing) around 760, though sources give dates from 758 to 778[1](#fn:1). The manuscript is lost, and the oldest editions date from the Ming. The method itself takes up three chapters: the fourth covers the utensils, the fifth the boiling, the sixth the drinking. His contemporary Feng Yan wrote that Lu Yu composed a discourse on tea, on boiling and toasting it, and made twenty-four utensils, which he stored in one basket. Feng Yan also tells of the censor Li Jiqing. Li received Chang Boxiong, who had expanded Lu Yu's teaching, with honor, but took Lu Yu, dressed in plain clothes, for a servant and had him paid 30 coins as a “tea-boiling master.” Lu Yu answered with a “Discourse Against Tea.” People boiled tea before him. In the third century the dictionary Guangya described toasting a cake “until red,” pounding it, pouring boiling water over it and flavoring it with scallion, ginger and tangerine peel. Lu Yu kept the salt and dropped the rest. He called the popular soup with additives “ditch water,” but admitted the custom would not die. ## The twenty-four utensils The chapter on utensils lists 24 entries. Tucked inside them are an ash pan, a feather brush, a salt spatula and bowl covers, which is why some retellings count 24 objects and others 28. Modern scholars sort the set by stage: preparation, boiling, cleanup. ![A tea cake, a boat-shaped grinder and a celadon bowl, a Tang reconstruction](https://howtotea.me/images/c/h/a/n/i/chanian-26fc7ff6.webp)Illustration Preparation calls for the brazier, the charcoal basket and mallet, the tongs, the water filter, the roller, the sieve, the measure and the salt jar. Lu Yu had the brazier cast in copper or iron “like an ancient tripod.” Inscriptions run down its three legs, and above the vents are the words “Master Yi's soup, Master Lu's tea.” Inside are three compartments bearing the trigrams for fire, wind and water: “wind fans the fire, fire boils the water.” The central object is the cauldron, fu (鍑). It is cast iron, lined with clay inside so it is smooth and easy to wash, and with sand outside so it takes heat better. The base is drawn out like a navel, so the water boils in the center. Porcelain and stone are “elegant but fragile,” silver “too luxurious.” The filter frame should be “raw” copper, because seasoned copper leaves a green taint and iron a taste of rust. The best roller is made of tangerine wood, with a wheel about 11 cm across, and the powder can be swept up with a bird feather. Lu Yu ranks bowls by the color of the liquor in them. The best come from Yuezhou: they are green and “add to the tea.” In a white bowl from Xing the liquor turns reddish, in a yellow one from Shouzhou purple, in a brown one from Hongzhou black. A bowl holds “half a sheng or less.” The later history of these [ceramics](https://howtotea.me/teaware/materials/chinese-ceramics) is a story of its own. Cleanup takes five items: a basket for bowls, a scrubbing brush, cloths, a rack and the common basket. Rinse water and dregs go into two separate vessels. ## How it was boiled: from cake to froth First comes toasting. You hold the cake with tongs close to the fire and turn it often. When the surface puffs up “like a toad's back,” you move it 5 cun (about 15 cm) back from the heat. The hot cake goes straight into a paper bag so the aroma stays in, and you grind it once it cools. Good powder looks like fine rice, poor powder like water chestnut. Lu Yu rejected powder the color of “emerald and pale blue.” Burn charcoal, or failing that hardwood: mulberry, pagoda tree, oak. Greasy charcoal and resinous cypress or juniper spoil the smell. For [water](https://howtotea.me/brewing/basics/water) the order is mountain, then river, then well. Of mountain water, take spring water or water that runs slowly over stones, and avoid waterfalls and rapids. Then come the three boils. - **First.** Fine bubbles like fish eyes and a quiet hum. Salt the water to taste, and pour the tasting water away rather than drinking it. - **Second.** Water bubbles up at the rim of the cauldron like a spring, and the bubbles string like pearls. Now ladle out a dipper of water, stir a whirlpool in the center with the bamboo sticks and drop the measure of powder into it. - **Third.** The water surges in waves, “pounding like surf.” This is when the reserved dipper goes back in: it “stops the boil and nurtures the flowers.” The flowers are the froth. The thin kind is called mo, the thick bo, the light and fine hua. You divide it evenly among the bowls so everyone gets a share. The first ladle, called juanyong (雋永), is the finest. The film “like black mica” that forms at the first boil is skimmed off and thrown away. Good liquor is pale yellow. Drink it hot and without pausing, while “the heavy and cloudy settles and the best floats on top.” Lu Yu gathered the difficulties into the “nine hardships”: making, recognizing, utensils, fire, water, toasting, grinding, boiling and drinking. He also lists what ruins tea: a cauldron that smells of mutton, a bowl that smells of fish, kitchen charcoal, fussy boiling. And one more: drinking tea in summer and dropping it in winter. ## How much tea, how much water Lu Yu used Tang measures, so any conversion is approximate. A chi is about 30 cm, a cun about 3 cm. An everyday sheng is about 600 ml, a “small” sheng 200 ml. The sources do not say which one the author meant. For one sheng of water he advises a measure of powder “a square cun-bi” in size, less for weaker tea, more for stronger. One sheng yields five bowls (three to five), and ten drinkers need two braziers. The fourth and fifth bowls are drunk “only if thirst is severe.” A reconstruction, not Lu Yu's recipe Lu Yu gives no grams or degrees, so the numbers come from modern researchers. A 2021 trial used **6 g of powder and 1.2 g of salt per 600 ml of water**[2](#fn:2). The first boil measured 75–86 °C (167–187 °F), the second 86–94 °C, the third above 94 °C. Another reconstructor put the first boil at 86–88 °C, perhaps because each counted the stages from a different point. The yield is three to five bowls of 100–120 ml. ## What came out of the ground Archaeology shows what a Tang set looked like. In Luoyang, at the residence of Bai Juyi, excavators found tea stands, bowls, a roller and boxes. The Sima family tombs at Gongyi (813 and 832) held sets with a brazier and a cauldron, and a three-color figurine thought to show Lu Yu. A ship that sank off Belitung carried about 60,000 objects, tens of thousands of them Changsha bowls. One bowl is dated 826, so the ship went down no earlier than that. Another was inscribed “tea bowl” before firing. The best find is the underground palace of Famen Temple in Shaanxi, sealed on 15 January 874 and opened on 3 April 1987[3](#fn:3). The emperors Yizong and Xizong gave the temple a gilded silver set: the trough and wheel of a roller, a sieve, a measure, a silver brazier, salt jars, tongs on a chain and thirteen vessels of “secret color” (秘色瓷). The roller trough was made in 869 and weighs 1,168 g, and the wheel and other pieces are scratched with “Wuge,” Xizong's family nickname. The set does not follow Lu Yu to the letter. The roller is silver, though the canon advises wood. The sieve and box are fused into one piece, and the silk on the sieve is woven so densely that it suits a finer grind. Researchers see the set as a bridge between boiling and whisking. ## What came next Under the Song, people whisked the powder in the bowl, a method known as [Song diancha](https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/history/song-diancha), and the cauldron lost its point. Under the Ming, loose leaf replaced the pressed cake and was steeped in a pot ([Ming and Qing](https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/history/ming-paocha)). Modern leaf boiling, [zhu cha](https://howtotea.me/brewing/methods/zhu-cha), has little to do with Lu Yu. The Tang method reached Japan early. According to the chronicle Nihon Koki, on the 22nd day of the 4th month of 815 the monk Eichu, who had spent some 28 to 30 years in China, boiled tea at Bonshakuji and served it to Emperor Saga. Japanese historians call the method sencha-ho (煎茶法). Today's [sencha](https://howtotea.me/brewing/methods/sencha-gyokuro) is written with the same characters, but it is steeped. ## Common questions How does Tang boiled tea differ from Song whisked tea? Under the Tang, powder went into a cauldron of boiling salted water and was ladled into bowls. Under the Song it was beaten with a bamboo whisk right in the bowl, with hot water poured from a kettle. See [Song diancha](https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/history/song-diancha) for more. How do you tell Lu Yu's three boils apart? At the first, fine bubbles like fish eyes rise and the water hums quietly. At the second, water bubbles up at the rim like a spring and the bubbles string together like pearls. At the third it surges in waves. Past that the water is “old” and is not drunk. Can you make tea Lu Yu's way today? Yes, and reenactors do, though nobody sells cake tea of this kind: they press the cakes themselves in the old way. A 2021 trial used 6 g of powder and 1.2 g of salt per 600 ml of water. The sources do not say which modern tea comes closest to the Tang material. Notes 1. Dates of The Classic of Tea: 758–760 (Li Baoping), around 760 (Theobald), 760–762 (Wikipedia), 778 (Gabuev and Dreyzis). Ulrich Theobald, “Chajing 茶經,” ChinaKnowledge, [chinaknowledge.de](http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Science/chajing.html). [↩](#fnref1:1) 2. Zhang Xianlin et al., “陆羽煎茶法茶汤的模拟及品质分析,” Journal of Anhui Agricultural University, 2021, [sciengine.com](https://www.sciengine.com/doi/pdfView/592D8F1CA23B4E96B6142BFA0FB650D9). [↩](#fnref1:2) 3. “Secrets of the Fallen Pagoda,” National Heritage Board of Singapore, [roots.gov.sg](https://www.roots.gov.sg/stories-landing/stories/secrets-of-the-fallen-pagoda-uncovering-a-1000-year-old-treasure-trove/story). [↩](#fnref1:3) --- ## Navigation - Parent: [History of Chinese tea](https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/history.md) - Next: [Song whisked tea: diancha and doucha](https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/history/song-diancha.md)