The spread of the Chinese tea

Abstract

Different from the global circulation of modern standardized products, the spreading of Chinese tea since ancient times has never been a simple matter of transportation and logistics. Material carriers, spreading routes, local integration, change of times... The interweaving of many factors leads to spontaneous balance between tea's commodity attributes and cultural labels. This paper focuses on the longitudinal spreading of tea, i.e., the morphological changes in the long history of China, and the horizontal spreading. The geographically horizontal spreading is focused on the Japanese tea ceremony and the Tea-horse Ancient Road as examples to illustrate the relevant issues.