Tea among the Uyghurs

Tea reached the Uyghurs as a Chinese good that their envoys bought at the Tang court.^[1] The Tang official Feng Yan, writing in the late eighth century, describes how the custom of drinking tea spread from the heart of China beyond the frontier.^[1] In former years, he adds, the Uyghurs came to court. They drove fine horses there in great numbers, bought tea and went home.^[1] The Xin Tang Shu repeats the note in its life of the tea writer Lu Yu.^[2] The chapters on the Uyghurs in the two Tang histories do not mention tea.^[3]

Feng Yan’s account

Feng Yan’s notes, the Fengshi wenjian ji, open their sixth chapter with tea.^[1] The people of the south, he writes, liked to drink it. The northerners at first drank little.^[1] In the Kaiyuan era, 713 to 741, a Chan master taught meditation at the Lingyan monastery on Mount Tai.^[1] His students were to keep from sleep and to eat nothing in the evening. He allowed them all to drink tea.^[1] People then carried tea with them and brewed it wherever they went. The habit became a custom.^[1] It spread from the prefectures of Zou, Qi, Cang and Di to the capital. In the towns many shops sold brewed tea to anyone who put down his money, layman or monk.^[1] The tea came by boat and cart from the lands of the Yangzi and the Huai.^[1]

Lu Hongjian of Chu, whose personal name the Xin Tang Shu gives as Lu Yu, wrote a treatise on the virtues of tea and on how to brew and roast it. He also made a set of twenty-four implements for it.^[4] Chang Boxiong expanded on the treatise. Then, Feng Yan says, the way of tea spread so widely that there was no prince or official at court who did not drink it.^[1] The people of old had drunk tea too, but not with the passion of his own day, when it was drunk from morning to night.^[1] The custom had begun in the central lands and flowed beyond the frontier.^[1] Then comes the sentence on the Uyghurs.^[1] In former years they came to court, drove fine horses there in great numbers, bought tea and went home: 往年回鶻入朝，大驅名馬市茶而歸.^[1] Feng Yan found this, too, a thing to wonder at.^[1]

Horses for silk

The horses in Feng Yan’s sentence were the good the Uyghurs sold to the Tang. The Jiu Tang Shu says that from the Qianyuan era, 758 to 760, the Uyghurs sent envoys again and again to trade horses for silk.^[5] They came every year and took forty pieces of silk for each horse, often for tens of thousands of horses.^[5] The court suffered under the trade. The Uyghurs never had enough silk, and the horses were of no use.^[5] The Xin Tang Shu adds that the horses were weak and unfit for service.^[6] Silk was the main good the Uyghurs took home. Tea was among the other goods their traders bought.^[7]

Feng Yan ties the horses and the tea to the same visits to court.^[1] He does not say whether the tea was paid for with the price of the horses.^[1]

The note in the Xin Tang Shu

The Xin Tang Shu tells the story of tea in its life of Lu Yu, among the recluses.^[2] It has the same tea masters, Lu Yu and Chang Boxiong. It has the same scene with the censor-in-chief Li Jiqing, who treated Lu Yu with contempt.^[8] Then it says that the love of tea became a fashion. At that time, it says, the Uyghurs came to court and for the first time drove horses there to buy tea.^[2] The order of the anecdotes and the closing note on the Uyghurs follow Feng Yan. Therefore the passage is not a second witness. Where Feng Yan wrote “in former years”, the Xin Tang Shu has “for the first time”.^[8]

The Uyghurs of the khaganate appear in the Chinese record of tea as buyers at the Tang court. The notice is a Chinese official’s remark on how far a Chinese custom had spread. The Chinese sources do not say how the Uyghurs prepared their tea or who among them drank it.^[9]

Tea beyond the frontier

The Uyghurs were not the only neighbours of China who bought tea. The Tibetans took tea from the Tang onward. Tea became the main economic good in the relations of China and Tibet.^[10] For the peoples of western Asia the habit of drinking tea is not recorded before the thirteenth century, as one study finds. The Mongols may have spread it there.^[10] The notice on the Uyghurs therefore stands early in the story of tea beyond China.

Sources

Fengshi Wenjian Ji, juan 6
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 196, 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195

Literature

Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)