The folk proverb says: "Seven things to open the door, chai, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, tea", which shows the importance of tea, the "emperor of oriental drinks" in the day.
Drinking tea has a long history, and tea house culture is an important part of tea culture, a small field, but it contains the chaotic timing of the world, but after the traditional tea house faded into the public living space of the people, the tea house rarely entered people's vision.
In the past, teahouse culture met the needs of Chinese urban life for a long time. The environment and atmosphere are leisurely, relaxed and peaceful, and people are in a state of freedom, kindness and quietness between people.
Today, how hot the milk tea shop as a public space is, how lonely the traditional tea house is.
When saying goodbye to this way of life, it seems to say goodbye to the acquaintance society and a certain quality of life.
Life magazine reporter C. Maddens photographed a hometown teahouse in Longquanyi, Sichuan, 1941
The regionality of the teahouse
Ancient tea drinking is mostly enjoyed by the upper class.
With the growth and development of the citizen class, the gradual popularization of public tea houses, tea drinking has gradually become popular and universal, becoming a way of public leisure and entertainment.
And the tea house in the folk just like the rice dumplings have a "south sweet and northern salty" dispute, there is also a distinction between the north and the south.
Teahouses are more developed in the south, and the descriptions of ancient Chinese tea houses in works such as "Ru Lin Wai Shi" and "Mengliang Lu" are almost all concentrated in the south, and the memories of modern works such as Shu Xincheng, Huang Yanpei, Zhang Hexhui, He Manzi, Huang Pei and others about tea houses are almost all southern cities.
In Shanghai, where gender restrictions were less, in the 19th century, more and more Shanghai women entered teahouses, theaters and other public places, and young women also liked to date in teahouses.
Women began to enter tea houses to watch plays after the Xinhai Revolution, but there were also some restrictions, and mixing men and women was explicitly prohibited by the police.
Guangdong is generally known as the tea house, are relatively tall multi-storey buildings, appear grand and luxurious, tea guests come here not only to meet the needs of food, but to enjoy a kind of whole-hearted entertainment and leisure. Go to the Guangdong tea house more is to have assets, do not need to have a fixed occupation, life leisure and social entertainment based on the class.
"There is tea in Dongting Mountain, and the one who produces Biluo Peak is especially good, and the name is 'BiluoChun'". The famous Biluochun is not produced on the banks of Dongting Lake in Hunan, but from Dongting Mountain in Taihu Lake, Wu County, Suzhou. In Suzhou, from literati and gentlemen to coachmen and peddlers, there are teahouses where they gather, which are self-contained and will never go to the wrong door.
Yangzhou's teahouses and public bathhouses often merge into one, selling tea in the morning and becoming bathhouses in the afternoon.
The teahouse in Nanjing could not guess how long the citizens got up and went, Zhang Hexhui stayed in Nanjing for a short time, in his memory, "No matter how early you go, this tea house is already crowded up and down, and the high-ranking friends are full of people." I arrived probably before eight o'clock, and after seven o'clock, the first and second classes of tea eaters had already passed away. ”
The writer Huang Bao has written about the tea house in Suzhou, saying that it is almost full of hand-held bird cages, tea guests wearing melon skin hats, and such characters often appear in Mr. Feng Zikai's cartoons.
Few are as closely associated with teahouses as The people of Chengdu are.
Historian, microhistory and new culture researcher Wang Di, through reading a large number of historical materials, field investigations and personal experience, found that in Chengdu from 1900 to 1950, chengdu people had a close relationship with tea shops and tea houses: buying "fresh boiled water", listening to stories, adjudicating disputes, finding jobs, meeting friends, chatting, watching plays, listening to commentaries, playing chess, talking about business, etc. As with cafes, hotels and bars in early modern Europe and the United States, the social function of Chengdu tea shops goes far beyond the mere meaning of being a place for leisure.
Wang Di said: "No place's teahouse can play so many and so many functions in the lives of ordinary people like Chengdu.
According to the "Chengdu Overview", in 1909, Chengdu had 514 streets and alleys and 454 teahouses. According to the statistics of "New New News" in September 1935, there are 667 streets and lanes in Chengdu, and 599 tea houses. Old tea customers who come to the tea house every day account for one-fifth of the total population of Chengdu.
"One to two or three miles, four or five teahouses", the writer Xiao Jun came to Chengdu in 1938, surprised by the number of teahouses, and directly sighed: "Jiangnan ten steps of willow, Chengdu ten steps of teahouse."
Many elderly people in Chengdu get up first thing to go to the tea house, and the Sichuan writer Sha Ting vividly and details the people who drink morning tea in his work: "As soon as they crawled out of the bedding nest, they did not button it, put on their clothes, boarded their shoes, coughed all the way, and went to the tea house." ”
Once the conversation is painful, the drink is comfortable, the seat is comfortable, and I don't even want to go home to eat. Some tea customers also bring housework to the tea house to do, so that tea drinking, entertainment, and housework are not delayed.
An open-air teahouse during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, 1943-1946
In the middle of the night, it is not necessary that everyone is willing to go home and sleep, and the newspapers and periodicals at that time used the description of "pouring in like a tide, and on the other side like a flying spring, it poured out uninterruptedly".
Drinking tea in a tea house is free enough to raise your voice to talk freely, whether it is homely or tight talk, you can not worry about others.
Although it is a public place, there seems to be no etiquette to talk about in the teahouse, such as the heat of the summer, and customers who like to play shirtless just strip naked, and even much freer than at home. Shave your hair, or just trim your face, and dander splashes into someone else's tea bowl without getting in the way. It is even possible to take off the shoes and socks and let the pedicure trim the feet, which is harmless, this is a matter under the table.
Writer Li Jieren joked in "Before the Storm" about the hygiene of the tea house: "Although the new term 'hygiene' has been entered, everyone is only used as a material for teasing." ”
Even though it is considered to be idle by many, Chengdu residents themselves enjoy this atmosphere of life.
In chengdu in the past, going to a teahouse alone was like getting news from newspapers, radios, and television today. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, when the situation was unstable, the tea house gave people a very urgent desire to go to the tea shop to get information.
In "The Tea Shop on the Corner of the Street", Wang Di observed the class and gender problems from the tea shop, and could also understand the tea house from the perspective of operation.
In the book, you can also see the deeper issues of gender conflict, various social relations, and national and local politics displayed in the tea shop. How the tea shop was used as a public mouth and dock for the Pao Brothers, secretly organizing the activities there. Tea shops play an important role in community autonomy as a "civil court" for maintaining social stability, where people resolve disputes and conflicts.
Teahouse and teahouse life is more important to southerners than northerners, and it is recognized that "drinking tea in the north is not as developed as in the south".
Compared with drinking tea, northerners have a higher call for drinking boiled water, and some elderly people or local gentry go to tea houses to drink tea. Henan, Hebei, Anhui, Shaanxi, and northeast China are places where it is difficult to see teahouses. In Tianjin, people will choose to buy boiling water at the "tiger stove" to go home and brew, rather than stay in the tea house.
In the north, the places where there are many drinking tea should be counted as old Beijing, which has a wide variety of varieties and rich cultural connotations, and spreads throughout the capital and beyond. All kinds of tea houses have different forms and functions, common ones are large tea houses, Clear tea houses, book tea houses, chess tea houses, drama tea houses and wild tea houses, all of which have their own styles. Lao She's "Tea House" depicts the big tea house in old Beijing, with many functions and comprehensive services.
Overall, why are there more teahouses in the South than in the North? Tea leaves are produced in tea houses. The cultivation of tea is undoubtedly to provide sufficient raw materials for the formation of tea houses, so the influence of the natural environment on tea houses is mainly reflected in the cultivation of tea.
The continental climate is warm and there is plenty of precipitation: plateaus, mountains and hills all account for a large proportion, which provides very favorable conditions for the cultivation of tea.
Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Jiangsu and Zhejiang and liangguang areas not only have high tea production, but also good quality, so the distribution of tea houses is also quite large.
Teahouse attack and defender
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the debate over sitting in a teahouse was fierce. Some people demand that tea houses must be banned, and some people defend them to the death, these two forces have been fighting for a long time, and most of the controversy has started around the tea houses in Chengdu.
From the late Qing Dynasty to the early 1930s, criticism of teahouses was only within Chengdu.
The modernized and Westernized elites took pity on the leisurely lifestyle of the common people and felt that the whole morning had been spent cleanly.
In 1924, when the Sichuan army general Yang Sen occupied Chengdu, he expanded Shaocheng Park (now Chengdu People's Park), when there were already several tea houses in that area, Yang Sen believed that making tea houses was not a good habit, he advocated "Shang Wu" and sports, and believed that every day when he made tea houses, strong men would shrink.
But Janssen did not ban teahouses, but built a runway in the park where people could exercise. It's a bit of a level playing field.
It was obvious that it had failed, and the Crane Tea House was still there today.
After the outbreak of the All-out War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, a large number of people from other provinces poured into Chengdu, and the criticism of tea houses and their culture mainly came from other provinces. Feeling that the whole country is in crisis, it is even more important to focus money and energy on saving the nation.
But in fact, different classes and groups have different views on time and money. For the hard-working laborers, small workshop workers, street-walking craftsmen and small traders in public places, the tea shop is a rare leisure time after their hard work. This naturally met with a strong backlash from the locals.
They refute accusations of wasting money and time in teahouses, declaring that tea is the cheapest of all kinds. Admit that the teahouse has many problems, but do not agree with the excessive policy of closure.
The educator Shu Xincheng defended the "leisure" of Chengdu people in "ShuYou Heart Shadow": "The so-called cost of money is really very little. The words 'waste time' are rarely humane here, so why worry about them. ”
In 1949, when a man named Qu Qiang participated in the controversy over tea drinking tea in the "New New News", he put forward his own point of view very clearly: one said that tea houses must be banned, and the other said that it was not necessary to ban them. According to me, both should spank two hundred. If you ask the reason, the former has thousands of tea customers will tell you; the latter, guilty of "wasting lips and tongues". I want to drink tea, I have no reason, you can quit "rice", I can quit "tea". If you want to eat, I'm going to drink tea!
The implication of this is probably that whether or not to drink tea in a tea house is a matter of no need to bother, as long as people want to eat, drinking tea should not be criticized.
Even the meal can be eaten faster, and the tea cannot be sat for a day.
In the autumn of 1937, North China was invaded by the Japanese army, colleges and universities have gone south, compared with the Beijing-Tianjin area where the smoke of war is everywhere, Kunming as the rear of the War of Resistance is relatively safe, becoming the final choice for the migration of Tsinghua, Peking University, and Nankai, and the Southwest United University was established.
According to Wang Zengqi's recollection in "My Days at Southwest United University", due to the war and the shortage of funds, the school's infrastructure is seriously insufficient, and the conditions of the new school building are extremely poor, and the tea house has become the most ideal choice for many poor students.
"Whenever the lights come on, students who can't squeeze into the library or reading room go to the tea houses around the Great West Gate to do their homework and sit until late at night."
Lao She's daily life is inseparable from tea, once he went to Moscow for a meeting, the Soviets knew that Lao She loved to drink tea, but specially prepared a hot water bottle for him. However, Lao She had just brewed a cup of tea, and before he could drink a few sips, the waiter poured it out as soon as he turned around, causing Mr. Lao She to say indignantly: "He doesn't know that Chinese drink tea all day long?" ”
It is no wonder that drinking tea from morning to night may only be the case Chinese.
Westerners also love to drink tea, but they are on "dun", and have the concept of time, such as morning tea, morning tea, morning tea, and evening tea.
The waiter in the Moscow hotel saw half a cup of leftover tea placed there, thought that Mr. Lao She did not want to drink the leftovers, and poured it out. This is a misunderstanding, and it is also a collision of Chinese and Western tea cultures.
Today, when the voices of both the attack and the defenders of the teahouse have faded, the complexity and change of the microscopic world of the teahouse are no longer discussed.
The highly developed division of labor in modern society and the specialization of various industries have separated many functions of teahouses, and cinemas, song and dance theaters, clubs, as well as various bars and dance halls, have diverted a part of the citizens.
At the same time, with the advent of the information age, when the progress of science and technology has created a developed mass media, information has met people's needs, whether it is businessmen or other professionals do not need to run to the tea house to listen to the news.
The function of the teahouse has given way to a variety of high-tech mediums.
In the decades when the tea house disappeared from the urban society, it gradually drifted away from the public life, but the atmosphere and way of life represented by the old tea house is difficult to replace by other institutions or media.
(*Image from the Internet)