Tea Poems for A Marvel in Tang Poems
1 min readInfluenced by the Rebellion of An and Shi, the Tang dynasty gradually declined as it developed to the middle and later period, resulting in the phenomenon that the poets in this period did not have the lofty sentiments and ideals as the ones in the prime time of Tang.
Although many poets still had the ideal of dedicating themselves to the service of the country, the dark reality made them unable to carry out their talents, so they generally were demoralized, giving up the great ambition of benefiting the society and choosing to maintain their own integrity; they just idled and wrote poetries, while depressed and sentimental poems inundated the poetry circles. Under this circumstance, the spiritual connotation of tea and the lonely mentality of the men of letters corresponded to each other very much, thus tea drinking prevailed quickly among the men of letters and became the means for them to express emotions in the late Tang dynasty. Thus, tea poems began to mushroom in a large amount, and became one marvel in Tang poems.
According to the incomplete statistics, there were as many as 500 poems about tea in the Tang dynasty which were written by more than 100 poets, and the famous ones among them included Bai Juyi and Jiaoran etc.
