--- title: 'Senchadō: the way of leaf tea' url: 'https://howtotea.me/traditions/japan-and-korea/senchado' markdown: 'https://howtotea.me/traditions/japan-and-korea/senchado.md' lang: en date: '2026-10-25' description: 'Senchadō, the Japanese way of leaf tea: Ōbaku monks and Ingen, Baisao, the Kagetsuan and Ogawa schools, utensils, and how sencha and gyokuro are served.' --- # Senchadō: the way of leaf tea 煎茶道 Editors · October 25, 2026 · 10 min read Senchadō is the Japanese ceremony of leaf tea, brewed in a small pot and poured into tiny cups. Chinese monks set it going in 1654, the first schools formed in the 1820s to 1840s, and dozens exist today. ![A small porcelain teapot and three tiny cups of sencha](https://howtotea.me/images/c/o/v/e/r/cover-a37af58b.webp) Illustration 煎茶道 Senchadō senchadō Name: 煎茶道, "the way of sencha"; a gathering is a senchakai Tea: leaf tea: sencha, gyokuro, bancha Roots: monks of the Ōbaku school, Ingen, 1654 Popularizer: Baisao, 1675–1763 Oldest schools: Kagetsuan (Osaka), Ogawa-ryū (Kyoto) Federation: All Japan Senchadō Federation, since 1956 If [chanoyu](https://howtotea.me/traditions/japan-and-korea/chanoyu) is built around one bowl, senchadō (煎茶道) is built around a pot. The host heats water over charcoal, pours it onto the leaf and fills small cups in turn until every cup holds the same amount at the same strength. Guests drink, eat a sweet, and then get a second infusion. The whole practice is called the "way of sencha." The word "way" came into use in the 18th century, and schools with fixed rules only in the 1820s to 1840s. Today the tradition has a different worry: in a 2019 survey, 78.1 percent of senchadō organizations named their aging membership as the main problem.[1](#fn:1) ## Monks from Mount Huangbo The word "sencha" turns up in Japanese sources as early as 815, when the monk Eichū served Emperor Saga a decoction of tea. That was pressed tea, though, and later senchadō writers treated the episode only as a spiritual precedent. Commoners were already drinking leaf tea in the Muromachi period: a Tōdaiji document of 1403 mentions tea sold at the temple gate. The real beginning lies elsewhere. In 1654 the Chinese monk Ingen (1592–1673), abbot of Wanfusi in Fujian, landed at Nagasaki. In 1661 he founded Manpukuji near Uji, the head monastery of the Ōbaku school. Manpukuji itself counts sencha and vegetarian cuisine among the things Ingen and his monks brought over. The Ōbaku monks drank Chinese leaf of the Ming type, pan-fired in a wok, and in Japan it became known as "Ingen's tea." They made it the way the Ming treatises describe, [steeping the leaf in a vessel](https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/history/ming-paocha) rather than whisking it. Ingen was not the first to drink such tea in Japan. At the Tsukimachi excavations in Nagasaki, archaeologists found a Yixing teapot of purple clay, 11 cm tall, in a fire layer from 1663, so people in Nagasaki drank sencha before the monastery existed. Modern historians also doubt the lineages that trace senchadō back to the poet Ishikawa Jōzan (1583–1672). ## Baisao, the old tea seller It took a former Ōbaku monk, not an abbot, to make leaf tea popular. Baisao, "the old tea seller," was born in 1675 in Hizen province, took vows at 11 and left for Kyoto in 1724. Around the age of 60 he started selling sencha, first from a shop called Tsūsentei with a flag reading "clear breeze" (清風), then by carrying his utensils in bamboo baskets on a shoulder pole to the city's scenic spots. He set no price. Guests dropped whatever they thought fit into a bamboo tube. Sources disagree on the dates: they put the start of his trade between 1734 and 1735 and his age at the time between 57 and 61. The year he returned to lay life varies too, 1742 in the Japanese chronology and 1745 in English Wikipedia. In 1748 Baisao wrote the first Japanese book on sencha, *Baisan shu chafu ryakku* (printed in 1754). He died in 1763, and shortly before, as the story goes, he burned his utensils so they would not become objects of worship and trade. What he left behind was a circle of friends: the painters Ike no Taiga and Itō Jakuchū and the monk Daiten Kenjō. Historians stop short of calling it a following, since the circle was too loose. ## From literati to schools The second book on sencha, and the first to present it as a way, was *Seiwan tawa* (1756) by the Osaka writer Ōeda Ryūhō. The bunjin of Edo and Osaka took it up after him. In 1794 Ueda Akinari advised steeping pan-fired tea and boiling the steamed kind. By 1835 the familiar sequence had been written down: leaf into a warmed small pot, then water, then a wait. Rules came later. The Osaka sake brewer Tanaka Kakuō (1782–1848), a pupil of an Ōbaku monk, started his own practice around the 1820s and in 1838 received an inscription reading "head of the house of sencha" (煎茶家元). He divided the temae into formal, semi-formal and informal, as in chanoyu. His school is known as Kagetsuan. The court physician Ogawa Kashin (1786–1855) gave up medicine at 50 and founded the Ogawa-ryū school in Kyoto on the principle "there is a law, there is no ceremony." In 1862 the painter Tanomura Chokunyū held a huge gathering on the Yodo River in Osaka, the Seiwan Chakai, with 11 halls and about 1,200 participants. Its catalog, printed in 1863, set the pattern for exhibition gatherings over the following decades. During the Meiji era 59 such catalogs were published. A decline followed. After two wars the fashion faded, and by the eve of the 1937 war senchadō had nearly collapsed. It revived around Manpukuji: in 1928 the Kōyūkai society built a Baisao pavilion there, and in January 1956 the All Japan Senchadō Federation was founded. Counts of the schools vary, from 23 federation members in 2026 to 36 to 39 in Japanese Wikipedia and more than 150 active ones by a 2013 estimate. ## Schools and their temae The schools serve the same teas and differ in sequence and emphasis. - **Kagetsuan** (Osaka): the oldest, with temae in three degrees of formality. - **Ogawa-ryū** (Kyoto): about 30 temae for sencha, gyokuro and bancha, chosen to suit the weather and season. - **Ōbaku Baisa-ryū**: follows the tea practice of the Manpukuji monks; today it serves only at tables, and in summer pours gyokuro into a bowl of ice. - **Ogasawara-ryū**: grew out of an etiquette school, puts ceremony first, has more than 50 temae, and treats gyokuro as the main tea. At Ogasawara-ryū gyokuro is brewed with water at about 45°C for about 90 seconds and served twice. At home [sencha and gyokuro](https://howtotea.me/brewing/methods/sencha-gyokuro) are brewed without ceremony, and for gyokuro Shizuoka prefecture recommends 50 to 60°C and 10 g for three cups. Water loses 5 to 10°C with every transfer to another vessel, so the schools cool it on purpose, in a yuzamashi or a second pot. ## Utensils Names vary from school to school: one object may go by three or four names, and the same name can mean different things in different schools. Fire and water. The **bōfura** kettle sits on a white clay brazier, the **ryōro**. Tradition derives the name bōfura from Portuguese "abóbora," pumpkin, and it is the only utensil with a foreign name. A poorly kept unglazed bōfura gives the water a smell. A metal or clay pot is heated on a binkake, a miniature brazier with ash. Only a little charcoal is kept on hand, along with a basket up to 20 cm, a fan, a feather brush and thin tongs. Brewing. The [kyusu](https://howtotea.me/teaware/by-region/japan-and-korea/kyusu) has either a side handle at a right angle to the spout (yokode) or a handle opposite the spout (ushirode, also called chachō). Gyokuro calls for a handleless houhin. The leaf is stored in a chashinko jar, usually tin, and measured out with a bamboo scoop called a sagō. Sencha cups are white inside so the color of the liquor shows; they come in sets of five or ten, smaller for gyokuro. Each cup rests on a chataku saucer of silver, tin, copper or bamboo. A folding paulownia shelf is credited to Baisao himself. On outings the utensils traveled in a box or a woven basket. Pots are Chinese, of red (zhuni) and purple (zini) [Yixing](https://howtotea.me/teaware/brewing-vessels/yixing) clay, or Japanese copies; jars are tin, and cups are blue-and-white porcelain. Antique dealers look at marks, the completeness of the set and the original boxes. Copies are plentiful, and that is nothing new: a book from as early as 1798 notes that the Kyoto potter Kiyomizu Rokubei had made pieces after Baisao's pot. ## Senchadō and its neighbors Senchadō grew out of the Chinese habit of steeping leaf but went its own way. Chinese scholars trace it to southern Fujian [gongfu cha](https://howtotea.me/traditions/china/living-traditions/chaozhou-gongfu): in Peng Weibin's account it came with Ingen and spread through Minnan merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries. Japanese authors see Baisao as the man who revived sencha rather than its founder, and stress its Japanese features: steamed leaf, a side-handle pot, cooled water. Senchadō shares several things with chanoyu: grades of formality, the role of the house head, rooms with a tokonoma. They differ in what is expected of the guest. In chanoyu the guest's attention rests on a single bowl, while 19th-century sencha remained an occasion for talk about poetry and painting. Sencha took root first in Nagasaki and then in Osaka, its center in the 19th century, where utensil makers kept multiplying. In Edo in the 1820s and 1830s it was served in restaurants offering "Chinese" cuisine. Today the federation also holds gatherings abroad: at Expo 1970, five years running in Hawaii, in Seoul and in Taiwan. ## How a gathering goes A large gathering has a waiting hall, a main hall and sometimes extra halls for exhibits, writing tools and calligraphy. The rooms are dressed with scrolls of Chinese verse, brush, ink, inkstone and paper, stones and bonsai. The host performs the temae in an ordinary room; no tea house is needed. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs survey, the sequence runs like this: 1. Tend the charcoal and bring the water to a boil. 2. Wipe the cups, pour boiling water into the pot, then from the pot into the cups, so that pot and cups warm up together. 3. Measure the leaf and add water. For gyokuro, cool the water first. 4. While the tea steeps, wipe the saucers. 5. Pour out every last drop, moving left to right and back, and serve the first round. 6. Guests drink, return the cups and eat a sweet; the host prepares the second infusion, and sometimes the pot is handed to the guests to pour for themselves. 7. Clear the utensils and bow. Water for sencha comes straight from the bōfura; for gyokuro it is cooled. Gyokuro is poured in such small amounts that its taste is described as "a drop on the tongue." ## Common questions How does senchadō differ from chanoyu? In [chanoyu](https://howtotea.me/traditions/japan-and-korea/chanoyu) the host whisks matcha in a bowl for each guest. In senchadō the host steeps leaf in a pot and pours it into several cups with a circular motion. There is no separate tea house; the gathering takes place in an ordinary room with a tokonoma alcove. What tea is served in senchadō? Sencha, gyokuro and bancha, and each school has its own temae for each of them. Gyokuro counts as the main one: it is the most prized Japanese leaf tea and goes to important guests. Its water is cooled first; at Ogasawara-ryū that means about 45°C and a steep of about 90 seconds. Did senchadō arrive from China fully formed? No. Chinese monks brought the practice of steeping leaf, but today's steamed sencha was invented in Japan in 1738, and the temae took shape in the 1820s to 1840s under the influence of chanoyu. Chinese scholars trace senchadō to southern Fujian gongfu cha, while Japanese authors see it as their own. Notes 1. Agency for Cultural Affairs, "The history and present state of senchadō" (煎茶道の歴史と現状), survey report: https://www.bunka.go.jp/tokei\_hakusho\_shuppan/tokeichosa/seikatsubunka\_chosa/pdf/93860001\_03.pdf [↩](#fnref1:1) --- ## Navigation - Parent: [Tea traditions of Japan and Korea](https://howtotea.me/traditions/japan-and-korea.md) - Previous: [Chanoyu: the Japanese way of tea](https://howtotea.me/traditions/japan-and-korea/chanoyu.md) - Next: [Furicha: Japan's folk whisked teas](https://howtotea.me/traditions/japan-and-korea/furicha.md)