Tea, Incense, and Superfluous Things: One Day of a Chinese Scholar in the 17th Century

Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, around 1625. A look at how a man with an education, a family fortune, and — the rarest luxury — free time, spent his days.

The scholar's studio — 书斋 (shūzhāi) — is still dark, but its master is already awake. Zhang Dai (张岱) — essayist, tea obsessive, connoisseur of beautiful objects — opens his eyes without urgency. There is nowhere he needs to be. The imperial examinations, he never passed. A government post, he never took. Instead, he has this morning.

The room is small. Along the wall, shelves hold books and a few objects selected with the same care others apply to words. On a stand sits a stone — gnarled, irregular, pulled from a mountain stream. Above it, a scroll: mountains in mist, not one unnecessary line. In the corner, resting on its own low stand, lies a 古琴 (gǔqín) — a seven-string zither. The room smells of old wood and something faintly sweet left over from yesterday's incense.

First: water

The first task of the morning is not washing, and not prayer. It is the water for tea.

Zhang Dai is convinced: water is half the tea — possibly more. The servant fetched it the previous evening from a spring near Mount Keqiao. The city well will not do. River water is out of the question. There are people who find this excessive. These people drink bad tea.

His teapot is small, made of unglazed purple clay — 紫砂 (zǐshā), from the city of Yixing. It does not shine. It carries no decoration. That is precisely its virtue: porous clay breathes, absorbs the memory of every brew, until the vessel itself becomes part of the tea. A good Yixing pot is years of shared life with the leaf.

Into it goes his own blend: 兰雪茶 (Lánxuě Chá), Orchid Snow Tea. Zhang Dai devised it himself — a mountain green tea processed by a particular method he developed, with orchid petals, brewed with water collected from mountain snow. The result is something no merchant carries a name for. A celebrated tea master, tasting it blind, told him: "In seventy years I have never met a second connoisseur like you." Zhang Dai has not forgotten those words.

The water is heated — not to a full boil. Green tea does not tolerate it. The first pour washes the leaf. The second is the tea itself.

品茶 (pǐn chá) — "to appreciate tea" — is not quite the same as drinking it. It means noticing how the colour shifts in the cup. Catching how the fragrance opens first in the heat, then differently again as it cools — two distinct aromas from the same bowl. Feeling how the taste continues long after the sip is swallowed.

This requires silence. An hour, sometimes longer.

Smoke

When the tea is finished, it is time for incense.

Not a religious ritual, and not hygiene. What educated men of late Ming China called 焚香 (fén xiāng) — "burning fragrance" — was a practice in its own right: 香道 (xiāng dào), the Way of Incense, akin to the way of tea, but quieter.

From his selection Zhang Dai chooses 沉香 (chénxiāng) — agarwood. A resin that forms inside a tree after injury or disease — the tree's response to suffering. Its fragrance is deep and resinous, with a note of bitterness and a thin sweetness underneath. Good chénxiāng is expensive. Poor chénxiāng is not worth burning at all.

The burner is a 宣德炉 (Xuāndé lú) — a bronze censer from the reign of the Xuande Emperor (1426–1435). Nearly two hundred years ago, cast from Thai copper gifted to the imperial court. The walls are thick, warm to the touch; the metal has taken on the colour of old bronze with a faint green tinge. Objects like this are not bought from a shopkeeper — they are inherited, or traded among people who know.

Today he does not place a piece of wood directly in the coals. He takes a 香篆 (xiāng zhuàn) — a thin wooden template with a fine pattern — and presses powdered incense through it onto the hot ash. He lifts the template. A thread of fragrance remains in the shape of the pattern. He lights one end. The smoke rises in a fine line — almost straight, almost still.

It passes the gnarled stone. It passes the scroll of mountains.

Zhang Dai watches the smoke. He does nothing else.

Superfluous things

After midday comes time for what Zhang Dai's contemporary Wen Zhenheng (文震亨) called 长物 (zhāngwù): "superfluous things." Wen wrote a whole treatise about them — 长物志 (Zhāngwù Zhì), Notes on the Superfluous — a guide to taste: what furniture belongs in a good room, how to arrange stones, which scroll is appropriate to the season, how to choose an inkstone. The book became a code of taste for men of their circle.

Ming literati had settled on a list of the "four elegant pursuits" — 四般雅事 (sì bān yǎ shì): tea, incense, flower arrangement (插花, chā huā), and hanging scrolls (挂画, guà huà). All four are already in the room. Not by rule, but by habit.

Beside the qin lie the 文房四宝 (wén fáng sì bǎo) — the "four treasures of the scholar's studio": brush, ink, paper, inkstone. Perhaps Zhang Dai will write a few lines today. Perhaps not. The important thing is that they are there.

Toward evening, a friend sometimes arrives. They sit down, brew more tea, study the scroll together, talk of inconsequential things. This is called 雅集 (yǎ jí) — an "elegant gathering." It sounds ceremonious. In practice, it is simply an evening well spent.

Dusk

The incense has burned out. The tea is long cold. The last light lies across the floor in narrow bands.

Chinese has a word for this state: 闲情 (xiánqíng), "leisured feeling." Not laziness, and not boredom — the art of being free. Not free from obligations, but from urgency; from the need to hurry somewhere, prove something, earn someone else's approval.

In his old age, after the fall of the Ming dynasty and the loss of everything he owned, Zhang Dai wrote his memoirs from a mountain hiding place. Those days — the orchid tea, the smoke of agarwood, the quiet evening with a friend — appeared to him then as a dream. "The life of a man is eighty years," he begins one of his essays, "and half of it is sleep."

Perhaps it was a dream. But some things begin small: a modest teapot, a few grams of good tea, five minutes without a screen. At 又一家茶店 there is somewhere to start — browse our teas.