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There is no direct record of roasting tea in early Ancient Chinese texts. Similar to the meaning of roasted tea are "hot tea" and "roasted tea". The "Tea Classic" written by Tea Saint Lu Yu first mentions hot tea when introducing the operation process of boiling tea. The steps are as follows: "Where the tea is hot, be careful not to burn between the embers, and the flames are like diamonds, so that the heat is uneven." Hold on to the fire, repeatedly turn it over, wait for the cannon to come out of the pei, like a toad's back, and then go to the fire for five inches. Roll and shu, then it is the beginning and the heat. "Processed tea leaves are generally cooked and drunk in time, but the Tea Sutra also mentions that tea leaves that cannot be used for a while can be stored in paper bags, and the essence will not be lost in the short term."
Some scholars believe that the passage quoted above is the earliest description of roasted tea, and further infer that "the roasted tea in Yunnan seems to be the legacy of ancient roasted tea". However, the "Tea Record" written by the great calligrapher Cai Xiang of the Song Dynasty and the "Cluster of Events" compiled from the Southern Song Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty clearly state that the new tea of that year was not handled by this method. In the eyes of the Song people, hot tea is mostly used to deal with old tea or wet tea leaves in the rainy season, and it seems that it is first considered to be a way to get rid of the old taste and enhance the taste. From the quotation in the previous paragraph, it can be seen that the record of hot tea in the "Tea Classic" is not a few strokes, but a rather detailed discussion, which shows that hot tea occupies an important position in the tea art of the Tang people. The new tea of the Tang Dynasty should also be "hot", and the "Bai's Changqing Collection" includes a poem called "North Pavilion Inviting Guests", which has the sentence "Deep furnace knocking fire to burn new tea". Obviously, hot tea was an important step in sencha in the Tang Dynasty, but in the Song Dynasty, it gradually became a means of returning to old tea.
Although the ancients did not pay special attention to aging as they do to Pu'er tea now, it was not easy for people to get tea at that time, and the situation of drinking old tea was more common. The preciousness of ancient new tea is unimaginable to modern people. In the third year (838) of Emperor Wenzong of Tang," because the Huzhou region "did not offer new tea as long as it was normal, special envoys were placed to specialize in it." The essay "On Tea and Wine" in the Dunhuang Testament also mentions that "when the new offering is presented, the time is glorious", which shows that for the imperial court, the procurement of new tea is not a trivial matter. Liu Yuxi clearly said that tea "came from afar and valued the new", which should reflect the general situation at that time.
The natural state of tea is relatively loose, and long-distance transportation is inconvenient, which is at least part of the reason for the popularity of the tea pressing process in the Tang and Song dynasties. At that time, most of the tea leaves were pressed into balls or cakes, and they would appear in the form of "strings", the amount of a single package was relatively large, and the possibility of storage every other year was also very large. After the tea leaves are pressed and dried, they can be stored for a longer period of time. However, the activity of microorganisms can lead to slow fermentation of tea leaves, and their quality and taste will also change.
Different from today's view that Pu'er tea is more expensive with "Chen Yun", ancient consumers preferred to maintain the fresh taste of tea, and by heating it on the fire, making Chen tea taste like the taste of new tea, it was obviously a problem that tea ceremony experts at that time were keen to study. Ancient tea lovers gradually found a set of methods of sealing and preserving and drying tea leaves at low temperatures——— roasting: "to hide it in a long bamboo lacquerware." Don't open the yin, bake it all year round, and the color is always as new. This sentence comes from the "Treatise on The Great View of Tea" written by Emperor Huizong of Song, and even if the tea was new at that time, the king of a country might drink old tea. He deliberately discussed the "roasting" that makes the tea leaves "always as new", and there is also a trend of gradually replacing the "hot".
The roasting process gradually became the mainstream tea making method in Chinese mainland tea producing areas after the Ming Dynasty. Generally speaking, stir-frying can induce the aroma of tea, the so-called "raw tea is first picked, the aroma is not transparent, it will borrow firepower to send out its fragrance." This process actually sublimates the tea aroma with the help of high temperature, but it will also destroy the original structure of the leaves, so it will bring about the problem of shortening the storage time. Correspondingly, the roasting technology of tea in the Ming Dynasty is also very mature: "Therefore, the collection house is wrapped in the roasting with the leaves of the crab leaf, and the fire is used once every two or three days, when it is like human body temperature." According to the opinion of the author Gu Yuanqing, roasted tea must be completed under low-heat conditions, and there is a possibility of overheating if you are not careful, and the high temperature roasting of Yunnan tea in the roasted tea pot and the roasted tea in the Central Plains for preservation purposes at this time have obviously parted ways, and there is an essential difference.
In short, Yunnan roasted tea may inherit a certain legacy of Tang Dynasty hot tea, but it is very different from the roasted tea popular in the Central Plains in later generations, and it is culturally self-contained. This can also be found from the description of Lu Yu's "Tea Classic": the tea tool mentioned by the tea saint is only a clip made of small green bamboo that grows by one foot and two inches, and the so-called hot tea is nothing more than using a clip to hold the tea cake or the tea leaves to burn in the fire, which is completely different from the common use of small clay pots in Yunnan to roast tea.
In fact, another record in the Tea Sutra is more noteworthy: "Guangya Yun: 'Jingbajian picks leaves to make cakes, leaves are old, the cakes are made of rice paste, they want to boil tea and drink, first moxibustion makes them red, they pound the end in porcelain, they are poured with soup, and they are made of shallots, ginger, and oranges, and they drink wine, making people sleepless'." This record does not appear in the guangya book that is now circulating, and some scholars believe that it is an annotation added by later generations. In addition to no longer adding green onions, ginger, and oranges, the tea drinking method recorded above is very close to the steps of making and drinking tea in Yunnan. Yunnan and the Jingchu Bashu region are geographically and ethnically close, and it seems that we can infer that the Yunnan people of the Tang Dynasty were already drinking roasted tea by the latest.
(Angen team excerpted from Zhang Haichao et al.: Yunnan ethnic minorities traditional roasting tea customs discussion)
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