Tea: The Splendid Elixir, Part 3

thoughts confused, beating time to songs when music stops. Living in seclusion, enjoying scholarly pastimes, conversing late at night, studying on a sunny day in the bridal chamber, detaining favored guests, playing host to scholars or pretty girls, visiting friends returned from far away in perfect weather, when skies are overcast, watching boats glide past on the canal, midst trees and bamboos, when flowers bud and birds chat on hot days by

a lotus pond, burning incense in the courtyard after tipsy guests have left, when the youngsters have gone out on visits to secluded temples, when viewing springs and scenic rocks. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. This is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and that

opening up the episode. There, that's the one last key poem. Uh. This one is also collected in a History of t The Life and Times of the World's Favorite Beverage by Laura C. Martin, which is one of my sources for these episodes. This is a poem by Sue see Shoe, which I like it. You know, I guess it's kind of simple format here, but yeah, it's basically saying you can drink tea anytime. Anytime is a great time to drink tea. But here are some specific examples. So yes,

pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening. Yeah. So this is our third and I think this will be our our final for now episode on T. I don't know. It's certainly a topic we could always come back to. It's a topic we could keep doing. But then if we did over to do that, we would be a tea podcast. And we're not exclusively a T podcast, but there are a lot of great looking, exclusively T related podcasts out there. Uh so, certainly feel free to continue

your T journey with other shows. And if there's a particular topic related to T that seems like something we should cover, well we can always come back and do that. But if you didn't listen to the first two episodes on T, I highly recommend you go back and listen to those. We talked about, Oh, the botany of tea. Um, we talked about a lot of the history of tea. We're going to conclude the basic Chinese and Japanese history of te in this episode, with a few other bits

and pieces in there. We also talked about tea mythology in the first episode. Now before we move on and and also get into some of these uh these interesting tangents. I wanted to clarify what we said in the last section about the phases of tea because I think this can get confusing. So you have kind of like the emitive tea level, where it would be tea leaves dropped into boiling water, creating a bitter brew. Then you have

this phase one of tea. This is where you have leaves dried and pressed into bricks, and then when you go to make it, you cut some of that brick off, you put it in water and it ends up being kind of coarse in acidic. But this was kind of like the first phase, the first uh era of tea. Then comes phase two, where the leaves are steam dried and ground into a fine powder whipped into hot water. This is the Mancha style of tea. It's fresher as

a fresher grassy or flavor. And then eventually you get to phase three, where you have steamed, cut, dried, oxidized, and sorted and steeped tea that creates basically most of the modern flavors of tea that we think of today. Now, there there are plenty of examples that kind of blur the line. You can still certainly get brick or cake, etcetera. Tease that are oxidized. Um Mancha teas are still used as well. Uh so it's um then look at this. It's just like a strict evolution of form with past

forms completely falling away. But I think it is a good structure to think of when we think about the evolution of tea. And as far as phase three goes, we will be getting into that later in this episode. Now, Rob, before we do that, you actually inspired me to go on a couple of tangents about teapots in this episode, because while I am not much of a tea drinker, for many years I did have an intimate relationship with a tea kettle that lived on my stovetop, and most

of that relationship was one of strife and agony. I really disliked this tea kettle for a number of reasons, and and one of them, uh, is as follows, Rob, I'm sure you've had this experience a million times, whether it's from a poorly designed or vintage tea pot, or

I guess from any vessel containing liquid. You fill it up and you go to pour it out into a cup or a bowl, but instead of pouring in a steady arc where you aimed it, the liquid coming out of the spout clings to the underside of the teapot spout and then runs down the side of the pot and dribbles all over the table or the floor or your pants. I have certainly encountered this before. Fortunately, our current teapot it doesn't do this, or at least doesn't

do this so much. But I have certainly encountered this before. The one that I'm thinking of had a very kind of wide, round, almost pipe like spout, and uh yeah, it did this all the time. So this is a phenomenon that is well known in physics. It actually has a name. It's called the teapot effect. Though it doesn't just happen in teapots, it occurs when pouring from all

kinds of containers. I think it is probably one of the most common sources of spills and stains around the kitchen when you know, when you're trying to pour out of one container and it just doesn't pour the way you intended. It doesn't arc like you meant it too. Instead it runs down the side mm hmm. Yeah, And I think I have certainly encountered this even more with with other pouring vessels. Uh. And the often it will be something you know, bright and colorful or sticky that

I really don't want to get everywhere. I think I was trying to think about situations where I encounter it the most, and before understanding all of the underlying physics, the things that occurred to me worre that it happens when you're trying to pour a liquid slowly, especially out of a container without a designated pouring lips. So like if you're trying to pour liquid, say out of a saucepan or out of a drinking glass, that's drible. City.

Yeah and yeah, especially this will occur, at least in my experience, where you have to say, like you're gonna pour orange juice out of an orange juice container, and the orange juice container has just been opened, it's super filled up, you know, so you have this impulse to want to pour slowly in order to control the juice which is already almost overflowing. But if you do so, yeah, you're gonna get that dribble more often than not. You've got to commit and really just swash it in there.

But why does the dribbling happen? Well, it turns out the answer is not simple at all, and there have been fluid dynamics and rayology papers. Reology is the study of how matter flows, so the flow of fluids or plastic plastic solids um reyology and fluid dynamics papers on this tricky subject going back at least as far as

the nineteen fifties. UH, there was an investigation of the teapot effect that in fact even one an Ignobel Prize in nine that you can see how that fits with their kind of like a quaint, quirky sense of humor like teapots. But it looks like a fairly definitive paper on the UH. This question came out in one and it was by Bernhard Schickel, Robert I, Bowls and Georgios pass called developed liquid film passing a smooth and wedge shaped trailing edge small scale analysis and the teapot effect

at large Reynolds numbers. This was published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Again, by the way, if you scroll through this paper and check out the diagrams and equations, it's almost hilarious, Like you would be shocked how complicated this looks. I'm not even going to pretend that I could make sense of it. Like I was trying to look and hack through this paper. I'm like, oh, this is hopeless. So instead I found a good article summarizing the results that includes an interview with one of the

lead authors. Uh. The article was by Jennifer Woollett for Ours Technica and UH this paper so it was a collaboration between researchers at the Vienna University of Technology and University College London. And they say that their their paper here is a complete theoretical description of the teapot effect, which has eluded these researchers for decades. Finally they've got all the forces modeled here correctly, so they can fully predict to what what happens with a with a tea

spout of various designs pouring in different ways. And they say the teapot effect has to include inertial viscous and capillary forces. So it turns out one of the major factors influencing whether the liquid dribbles or not is as you and I both intuited from our experience flow rate. Uh two people who have like less experience in the kitchen.

I think this might sound counterintuitive because, as you know, you you were saying rob a lot of times when you're trying to be careful and not spill something, your instinct is to pour slowly because pouring slowly seems like it's the careful option, right. But as matches our experience, at a higher flow rate, when liquid is coming out of the teapot or container faster, this actually makes the

pouring action less likely to end up dribbling. That is how you are more likely to get the arc you're intending. It's actually once you start trying to pour slowly, the dribbling becomes more likely. Uh. So you know, you can imagine all kinds of scenarios here, like if you're trying to pour something out slowly to carefully measure a volume of liquid into another container like a measuring cup, or maybe you're trying to pour something in a slow stream

to whisk and emulsify it. You've seen people doing that. They dribble all the time. Oh yeah, and I'm thinking especially like making cocktails and measuring out the various components. This is why the sides of your bottles are sticky. Yeah, so fast steady pouring dribbles less. Uh. The design of the lip of the teapot or pouring container also matters.

There were some French physicists who wrote a paper on this in two and they suggested that you could fight the teapot effect by making the lip of the spout as thin and as sharp ended as possible, so like round tips are more likely to dribble. And apparently it also helped to coat the end of the spout in water repellent material so that the liquid or water based liquid doesn't want to cling to the underside of the lip. And this seems to be because the dribbling is partially

the result of what the researchers call a hydro capillary effect. Basically, whenever you start to pour water based liquid out of a container, drops will form on the underside of the lip of the edge you're pouring from the like the spout of a teapot. So you know, the water is coming out of the spout, but then on the underside of that spout there's gonna be some droplet formation, and the rate at which you pour determines how big those

drops on the underside of the lip get. A high flow rate keeps them small, but a slow pouring allows the drops on the underside to become larger. And once those drops reach a certain critical size, once they get big enough, they actually start to grab hold of the water or tea or whatever that's coming out of the spout and redirect its flow down the side of the container instead of the arc that you're aiming for. Now,

there was a thing that I was thinking about. This is another design feature that I didn't see mentioned in UH, in this summary, or in any of the papers I was looking at. But it's one that I've seen in some kettle designs, UH, and it's a teapot spout. They can have an upward arcing curve right before the opening of the spout. For example, you see this on some

goose neck kettles. Rob. I've got an example for you to look at here if you scroll down, UH, if you try to picture it, it's kind of a curving swan neck shape. Um, I don't know why I said

swan neck. They're they're literally called goose neck. So that the curving shape where if you imagine it in pouring position and you're you're trying to think how the liquid would have to travel to run down the bottom of the spout, it would literally have to go sort of uphill first before it would be able to run down the spout. And I think this also helps it, uh

not do that. One last thing that I thought was pretty interesting, so they had to model all these forces that determine whether or not liquid dribbles when it's coming out again. Those forces include an inertial, viscous, and capillary forces, but there was actually very little role for gravity. Gravity does not play a major role in causing the teapot effect, meaning that tea pots will still dribble on the Moon or in other low gravity environments. That reminds me I

was looking around for this episode. I briefly looked into drinking tea in orbit, and I didn't find anything that I was really compelled to include here. But I did see some footage of of of an astronaut having their tea with chopsticks, like eating the little floating globs of tea. Oh,

I see out of the atmosphere with with their chopsticks. Yeah, just grabbing like so, I guess with the surface tension, it's like a little blob of tea floating and then you like put the chopsticks in it and it sticks to them. Yeah, yeah, thank thank thank, Okay. So that's the physical teapot tangent. What about the philosophical teapot tangent. Well, I thought it would be interesting to very briefly talk about Russell's teapot, one of the most famous teapots in

the world. It's not a physical artifact. It is a thought experiment used by Bertrand Russell to explain a certain form of skeptical reasoning, specifically, in his case, to support his lack of belief in God, though I think it could be applied to other scenarios. Now, I want to front load a caveat and say that some theistic philosophers think they have good arguments for why Russell's teapot analogy does not or should not apply to beliefs about God.

But even if you're inclined to agree with those critics, I think the teapot is useful to think about for a more general analogy for different types of leafs that we hold and claims that we make. So very very brief biographical background. Bertrand Russell lived from eighteen seventy two to nineteen seventy He was a famous British philosopher and public intellectual who was incredibly influential in a number of

different fields. So he was pre eminent in his academic fields of logic and analytic philosophy, but he was also a big cultural figure in in Britain and an advocate for political causes such as anti imperialism, socialism, and nuclear disarmament. But Russell was also infamous for being non religious. Uh. In nineteen fifty two he was asked to write an essay for a London magazine called Illustrated, which came to

be called Is There a God? And Uh? I think the essay was actually scrapped and not published in the originally intended venue, but Russell expanded upon it later and released it. And in the essay, Russell uses the analogy of a teapot floating in space to explain his doubts about the existence of God. So I'm going to read from his essay here, and then we can uh, we

can analyze a little bit. So Russell says, many Orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas, rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course a mistake. If I were to suggest that between Earth and Mars there is a China teapot revolving around the Sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion, provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to

be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly

be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist. In an enlightened age

or of the inquisitor at an earlier time. Now to take a moment to be fair to Russell's critics, I think they make some I'm not sure what I think about this, some potentially good points about the belief in the teapot not actually being analogous to belief in an omnipotent creator God, because they say, for example, the teapot is an object in the world that could only plausibly have come to orbit the Sun if humans had put it there, which we would probably know about if it

had happened. Meanwhile, God would not be an object in the world, but like the creator of the world or somehow standing outside the world. And therefore, according to these theistic philosophers, the existence of God is like a proposition that is just not analogous to the existence of any physical object or entity that you could search for in

physical space. So I think a good way of phrasing this objection is that they're saying, well, belief in God is not a claim about something that exists in the universe, but rather a claim about the way the universe is. I'm not going to try to adjudicate that particular dispute about whether Russell is right that this is a good analogy for religious beliefs in God, or whether the critics

are right that it is not. But either way, I think it is a useful thought experiment in a more general sense because it reminds us not to be taken in easily by unfalsifiable claims. And uh, there's another thought experiment right along these lines that we've talked about on the show before. You might if you listen for a while, you might remember it. The thought experiment by Carl Sagan, The invisible Dragon in his garage. So Carl Sagan says, hey,

I've got a dragon that lives in my garage. And if you doubt this, you you might say, well, okay, take me to your garage. I want to see it. And then Sagan says, no, no, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. It's an invisible dragon, so you shouldn't expect to be able to see it. I mean,

you can look, but you're not gonna see it. It is there, though, And then you could say, well, okay, then let's walk around in your garage, you know, with our hands out stretched and feel around for it until we finally come upon this dragons invisible scaly back, and once again Sagan can say, no, no, hold on, it is also an incorporeal dragon. It is made of spirit matter, not solid matter, So you shouldn't expect to be able

to touch it. You know that that wouldn't disprove it, that you can't feel it, And then you could go through more stages. I think he says that it's you might suggest, well, what if we use like an infrared heat detector, uh, And then he could say no, no, it is a it's a dragon that does not produce any heat, and so on and so on. You can go moving the goal posts of detection always backwards, so there's no way to really check and see if the

dragon is really there. I think the main point of both of these analogies, Russell's teapot and Carl Sagan's invisible Dragon, is that people can always try to get you to believe things by shifting the obligation of evidence onto you for doubting the existence, rather than assuming that obligation themselves for for claiming the existence. So it's the the attitude of if I say X is true and you can't

disprove it, you must accept it. And this is made doubly dangerous by like the rebuke of all potential investigatory tests. So in the case of Carl Sagan's dragon, that's like, oh no, no, no, it's invisible and you can't touch it. Uh, and it wouldn't show up on infrared. But in the case of Russell's teapot analogy, it's that, well, the teapot is too small to see with any of our telescopes, but but I tell you it is there. And the point of both of these analogies is essentially I say X,

if you can't disprove it, you must accept it. Is not a legitimate way to reason, because that type of argument could be it could be used to force you to believe in a teapot orbiting the sun or an invisible dragon in the garage. Reasonable claims are based on evidence,

and most importantly, they are falsifiable. They entail certain physical predictions, like you should be able to see what I'm talking about if you look here, or you should be able to detect, you know, the heat signature of the dragon if you look here, And if those predictions turn up false,

the belief is probably false. Yeah, And so to your point, like that one of the big applications here, of course, is like conspiracy thinking today, where there are plenty of examples of this where it will be some you know, ultimately kind of ridiculous or outrageous or perhaps supernatural claim and then it's presented as if it is on us to disprove this, when really that that's that's not the

way it goes. And I think you see a more or I tend to see a more rational approach to this with some of the impossible or currently impossible to prove hypotheses so that we've discussed on the show before, like say the bacameral mind hypothesis or the stone ape hypothesis like these are both I think examples of very thought provoking ideas that cannot be proved or disproved, at

least not currently. And I also don't see the major um advocates of these hypotheses demanding that scientists disproved them like they seem to. They they understand how Russell's teapot or the invisible dragon works here, and they know that it's on them to to make the argument and provide

the proof if there is such a thing. Yes, I mean, I think it's fair to play around in speculative territory, but to always be hyper conscious to signal and and remind yourself and remind others that that's what you're doing. We're playing around in speculative territory, rather than getting too attached to like a fun and interesting idea that maybe doesn't have a lot of strong evidence for it and

insisting that people should believe it. Yeah, and with time, who knows, with time and research, perhaps new evidence will come around to support a given hypothesis or idea. But then the reverse there may very well happen as well, or it could be just something again that's completely in the realm of of of of no evidence, where there's never going to be any additional evidence to back this

up one way or the other. But I think one of the points that Russell and um Sagan are making here, and I totally agree with this, is that if you have a good theory, the theory should include within itself ways of checking to know if the theory were wrong. So a theory should entail predictions about the world, and you know, all all our good scientific theories do, and then you could go and check if those theories, if those predictions turn out true, and if it's a good theory,

those predictions will turn out true. And if it's there's something wrong with the theory, those predictions will not turn out true. And if it's a really bad theory, it and in fact will not make predictions at all. It will just be sort of in this unfalsifiable space where it's like, well, there's no way to check if it's true.

I've also found if you were addressing doubters or your enemies within the first couple of paragraphs of laying out a given hypothesis, then that's a that's a real red flag. Oh my god. Yes, that's one of the best. And I've encountered that at least a couple of times. Yeah. One last point I want to emphasize, though this is

also from that Bertrand Russell quote. He goes on to argue that the fact that some beliefs are already held by many people gives those beliefs a superficial appearance of rationality,

even if there is no more evidence underlying them. Then there is for an obviously absurd belief that you can make up on the spot, such as a teapot randomly floating in space, and I think this is a really good point that people should always keep in mind, because even if you are for the most part of skeptical person, you will probably have biases along these lines. And I'll

explain in a second. But according to Russell, it's like, we only notice that the teapot claim is absurd because it is novel, because he just made it up on

the spot. If people went around appearing to sincerely believe in the teapot, I think it truly would start to seem less absurd and it might start to get you know, equal time in the panel discussion on the news, like um, Like one example, why does it seem I would say, even to me, I have no beliefs in the healing powers of crystals, but why does it's just feel more plausible to me that crystals have literal healing properties then

that driftwood has literal healing properties. They're both beautiful natural objects. If you want to fill your house up with them or put them by your bedside and all that, I think that's wonderful, But I don't think they like literally emit vibrations that drive away sickness or something. And I'd have to argue that the crystal proposition feels more plausible somehow, even though I don't believe it. And the reason is that this belief is familiar, and the driftwood belief is not.

People have been saying this about crystals. People seem to believe it, so you just kind there's this feeling in your gut. Then it was like, well, there must be something to it then, But the fact that people say something does not necessarily give it any credence, even though it does have this power of giving it the superficial

appearance of rationality. And you know what, I would say exactly the same thing is true of a lot of conspiracy beliefs, like you were talking about a minute ago, that like, once somebody has said something and appears to sincerely believe it, suddenly you kind of have this feeling in your gut like, oh, well, maybe there's something to that then, Whereas if somebody had said the same thing in the context of a thought experiment where they're obviously

just making up an absurd belief on purpose on the spot, it wouldn't have that feeling. Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean here. Um, the driftwood is a great example because I could imagine it being supported and brought up enough if someone were to champion the healing powers of driftwood, if there were stores that sold healing driftwood, then that that idea would just be out there enough for you

to sort of buy into it. Likewise, even the teapot um, you know, outside of it's it's it's traditional place here um as a symbol of how we should think about outrageous claims. You could imagine a scenario where someone is making an argument like, yeah, we we think there's a teapot out there, like there's a face on Mars and there is a teapot. How they're floating in space and uh, and we need to figure out why it's there. We

have a few theories, you know. Um. So like if you it kind of comes down to the whole situation of the old reality off you say a lie enough times, then people will begin to believe it on some level, Like you've just created the internal reality of the thing enough to where people can't quite get it out of

their mind. I mean, a favorite trick of the political demagogue, it's it's kind of scary how much if you just say something and now this is an idea that has to be discussed and taken seriously, even if there's literally no evidence for it at all. Yeah, if there were a teapot, though, just for the sake of our arguments, do you think it would be a like an ornate historical teapot. Do you think it'd be like a simple like earthenware teapot, or would it be like a space

age teapot from another Why are you even asked? Obviously it would be a novelty Garfield head teapot. Oh, well that's good. Yes, you know what does have healing properties? Is Garfield merchandise? Yes, well, to some people it may have slight um healing properties. Really, there's a whole comparison

there you could probbably make to tea. You know, we we we again are not going to get into the healing powers of tea too much, but outside of any actual properties involved in the tea itself, outside of like what is like actually happening in your body when you drink tea. But by this point, like tea has so many ritualistic um associations, cultural associations, and personal associations that there is a comfort kind of going back to that

that poem. There there are all these circumstances where it is the right time, it is the appropriate time, it is the comforting time to have a cup of tea, and uh and therefore, yeah, I mean to at least some extent, like any cup of tea is going to do you good if you were a t person. Well, this gets back to, yeah, what we were talking about in the previous episode about the uh, the studies on

the health effects of tea. I mean, it looks again there are a lot of persistent methodological problems with studies like this, but it looks on the whole like tea may very well have some positive health benefits. But it's just really hard to study stuff like this because it's not like a new drug that nobody was taking anyway.

It's something that is deeply enmeshed in culture and in people's lives and in all this so it's a lot harder to isolate the like chemical mechanical properties of the molecules that enter your body when you drink tea, and like do these really fight disease? Or when you're studying correlations between t use and other health outcomes, is that a secondary effect of some other correlation Just because it's it's so much a part of human life. It's it's

so much harder to study. This reminds me of a point I may come back to when we talk about the the introduction of tea into Japan. Oh well, on that note, let's let's get back into uh your notes on the history of tea in China and Japan. Now where do we leave off with with the history and development of tea? In the last episode, I believe we pretty much reached the end dynasty. So this was a period when the Mongols ruled China from the early twelve

hundreds through thirteen sixty eight. And as we I believe, as we noted in the last episode, when you when you have a period of outsider rule in China, historically you tend to see a decline in te popularity. And I know, we we talked about this a little bit. You kind of ask, well, you know why, why is that exactly? And I thought, well, this would be a good, good example here. I wanted to go a little deeper

into it. So I looked at a few different sources on this particular scenario, because on one level, it's not to say that the Mongols didn't like tea. They had already been exposed to Chinese tea trade earlier and apparently took to it. They valued it as a digestive aid, among other things. Some of the sources I was looking at pointed out that there were particularities of like the traditional Mongol diet where it was nice to have a big caffeine punch to sort of move things along, you know.

And also we have to remember, like there's there's definitely cultural transference. I mean, this is one of the sort of the famous aspects of of Mongol rule in China is that the this the these new rulers take on a lot of Chinese cultural things and uh, and so that the transference is going to go both ways. But but I've seen this mention of a decline and te popularity during this period noted in multiple sources. Now there is an added wrinkle that I've seen discussed regarding the

Marco Polo account. Uh, And I don't want to get into all the ins and outs of that and arguments about like how his roly accurate. We should consider the Marco Polo account that account barely mentions tea despite his visit supposedly taking place during this time. Um, but we know through other sources that there were plenty of tea

houses still operating during this time period. And I think I've seen it argued as well that, Okay, if we were to take the Marco Polo account it face value, he was ultimately more interested in things that were Mongolian, and he saw tea as this non mongol thing and therefore didn't pay as much attention to it. Mm hm. So you could say maybe he especially because he's interested in trade, he's interested in in dealing with the cultural artifacts of say, the dominant culture at the time, the

politically dominant culture. Yeah, and I think it. It would also line up with some of the things I've read about how the Mongols they didn't like outlock tea or anything, but he became just another beverage during this period, so they valued it, but they didn't ail as they did, uh like we see in UM previous and subsequent dynasties in China. And I was reading about some of this on All the Tea in China from nineteen ninety book by Choo and Cramer. But now another source I was

looking at is by Valerie Sartor. This was published in UM, the American Journal of Chinese Studies. In two thousand and seven is a paper title All the Tea in China The Political Impact of Tea. Again. They're both that the previous book you talked about in this paper both called all the Tea in China It's just irresistible. You gotta

go with it, okay anyway. In in in this paper, Startup points out that the Mongol rule in China again the in dynasty didn't put as much emphasis on Chinese tea culture or pay a lot of attention to traditional tea customs. However, they definitely liked it. They adopted the salting of their tea and mixing it with milk, and at the same time, traditional Chinese tea houses remain popular

hangouts for scholars and poets. In two thousand fives Tea and Chinese Culture by Ling Wang, it's pointed out that the Mongol rule during the End dynasty was not not only ruled by a non Han ethnic minority, it also filled many of its key positions with ethnic minorities as well. Wang points out that while the Mongols during this time really took to tea, they also pushed things towards a

mass produced product for the masses. And pushed away from uh you know, the more like say, exotic animal shaped tea cakes that have been popular in China prior, uh to their coming to power. So uh, you know, again, I think it's a more complicated, seeming historical issue than

one might expect. But but but I wonder if we might think of it as being kind of a cultural shift away from the glamor of tea as opposed to like a you know, an abandonment of tea or or a decline of tea really was still valued culturally among the Chinese as a beverage and a medicine, but it wasn't maintained as a socially elite thing with a kind of trickle down effects of that social elitism, uh that

you would see during this time period. I see. So in these uh, these sort of dormant periods that we were talking about in that that push and pull uh uh pattern in the last episode, Like in this example, it's not that tea really went away or that people stopped drinking tea, but just that it became less significant as a as a political and social elite signifier. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, I bet we can compare this in

a limited sense to to various trends. You know, you'll have, say a particular style of cocktail, and this is would

deal with a much shorter period of time. But like a particular cocktail comes out, it's exciting, but then it just becomes another cocktail, and and and the attention given to it, uh, you know, definitely goes down the the Your average experience of this cocktail is maybe a bit mediocre until such time as someone brings it back and starts pushing the boundaries again and figuring out, like what works about this cocktail, what can I improve upon, what

new twist can I do to it? And in what ways can I go back to the original version of this cocktail? That sort of thing. So but but either way, during the Mongol rule, I think we can generalize and say that tea culture had stagnated a bit. Nobody seemed to have been advancing tea so much or pushing the boundaries of tea. But then you have the establishment of the Ming dynasty in thirteen sixty eight, and it's in

this dynasty we see yet another revival of tea. And it's not to say that it's as simple as the Ming dynasty simply announcing hey te's back on the menu, because again it was never off the menu. Uh And, in fact, according to weighing in uh tea and Chinese culture, the tea loving scholarly class they were somewhat cracked down on during this Initially during this period, as we're various other perceived rats um as the Ming solidified their rule.

Though interestingly enough, one of the founding hung Wu Emperor's sons became a key scholar and proponent of tea during this time. This was an individual by the name of Zoo Kwon, and he wrote a manual on t and much of the Ming tea ceremony culture to follow would be based on the ideas presented in this manual, um kea as this ritualized cleanser of the soul. So on one hand, yes, you have imperial folks pushing tea again, accepting tea, you can get kind of that that trickled

down attraction to the beverage again. But it's also during this period that we interphase three of tea, in which uh tea has picked, withered, dried, rolled, and oxidized. There's the result is dried, loose leaf tea that can then be steeped for a set number of minutes to create a smooth and rich beverage. Um. It was easier to process this way, as Laura C. Martin points out in History of Tea, and it better enables the incorporation of

dried fruits and spices as well as flowers. All these were ingredients that the Chinese tea enthusiasts during this day and tea masters definitely explored, and you see this a lot in tea today as well. Also during this time, the home will Emperor himself proclaims that only this new method of loose leaf tea is going to be acceptable as tribute. Uh so it t tributes made to to

the emperor and his household. They have to be this new phase three t The scholarly class apparently held out a little bit longer, sticking to their older traditions, traditions again that they had they had stuck to through foreign rule. But even they eventually realize, hey, oolong tea is really good and they start drinking new long tea instead. Okay, so they've got the larger process that includes oxidation like we talked about last time. But am I correct that

too long? That's a medium level oxidation tea. Right, it's not as oxidazed as like black tea, but it's more than green tea. Yeah, so I didn't read a whole lot on Oolong or Woolong tea. But but perhaps there was kind of like a meeting of halfway there where they're like, oh, but this one's just a little bit oxidized, you know. Now new types of tea also means okay, we have we we have new methods of brewing it,

so we need new tea paraphernalia. And so it's during this time to come back to the teapot that that historians think that the true teapot was possibly born. Now. Prior to this one would use open pans and wide mouth bowls to brew your tea in. But they discovered now that okay, if you have a small covered container,

this is going to bring out more flavor. But it's at the same time, it's thought that the invention of the teapot was largely more of a repurposing of pre existing wine ewers and and then adapting the design for tea um So, for instance, the handle being placed on the side of the teapot as opposed to on top of the teapot for easier access, though of course we still have a lot of teapots today we have to

handle on top that kind of folds the side. Also smaller pots, because while it might make sense to have a larger pot that you have filled with wine to distribute at a party or something, if you're making tea in it, you don't want to make so much tea in the pot that everything gets oversteeped. Because you oversteep your tea, it's going to take on a bitter and undesirable flavor. Um. I imagine many of you out there

have encountered this before. Perhaps you get a pot of tea at a restaurant and there are not enough of you drinking it, or you're drinking it at such a slow pace that by the end it's pretty strong and maybe a bit bitter. Sorry, this got me thinking about, with the invention of the teapot, if there are any older like of these tea poems, if any of them mentioned the dreaded dribbling like as the teapot effect reference

that far back. I wonder when the first person to notice it in writing was, Oh, this is a great question. We have to come back to this because I bet there's an answer, because these these texts that were coming out on tea culture were so exhaustive about all the dudes and don't there has to be something in there about the I'm surely forbidden don't of dribbling your tea during a high class tea service. Like if it doesn't like cheerly it exists in the in in in Chinese

and or Japanese literature. Yeah, had the instruction must be to poor with confidence. Yes, Now there are other advancements here too. For example, light colored porcelain ceramics became all the rage as they allowed you to show off the natural color of a particular tea better. Blue underglazes were also quite popular. And there's also a special earthenware teapot known as a using that was quite popular as well. This was I think it it basically means like purple earthenware,

but it wasn't necessarily purple. But it was an earthenware teapot that was essentially seasoned by the tea. And they could also be quite beautiful. But there are some mentions in the the old writings about tea that like, oh, we have a nice tea here, but you're serving it out of the wrong pot. You need a properly seasoned pot, otherwise it's just not gonna taste from it. Now, we mentioned oolong tea already, but obviously this is the time

during which black tea is discovered. You know that we could realize that we can have this, this this highly oxidized black or red tea as it's generally referred to in China, and as Mary lou and Robert J. Heyest discussed in the Story of Tea, a Cultural History and drinking guide we came out in two thousand and seven. The discovery of black tea oxidation as a process was originally thought only suitable for barbarians and foreigners. Well, it makes me wonder, as I'm sure you know many UH

food inventions have an origin like this. Was this discovered by accident? Was it like the tea? The tea leaves got bruised up and smashed and then left around for a while, and they turned dark and and all that is it ruined? Oh No, turns out it actually tastes great.

You know. I think I ran across the story or two to that effect, But then I couldn't rEFInd the story when I was finalizing my notes here, but yeah, I feel like there was at least one story about like some discarded tea ship sense that an army came across or something to that effect. Um. But but the other interesting thing about this is that, like the resulting tea would simply keep longer and could therefore be shipped further,

both by land and by sea. And so the brick tea that started reaching Mongolia and Tibet that would be black brick tea. Meanwhile, green tea bricks, uh, those more easily suffered from overheating from freezing and they and it often developed mold in damp environments. So yeah, we get into the situation where the farther out you're sending your tea, the more it makes sense for it to be black tea. And perhaps early on you're just like, well, yeah, send

that black stuff out of here. That's that's going to Mongolia, that's going to Tibet. But then of course over time it catches on, people start experimenting with it, and you get so many splendid black teas as well. But at the same time, black tea of course becomes the tea to catch on in the Western world. And catch on

by storm. Uh. There there's a good great deal of of Martin's a History of Tea that of course just deals with this, like how te reaches uh Europe and how it I mean, because it's so crazy to think about this as well, like modern Britain and not even modern but historically Britain and tea so inseparable. Um, like it is held up as this thoroughly British thing, but of course it is entirely an import one interesting thing. This is something we've we've we've discussed on an older

episode of the show. But like thinking again about black tea being considered this thoroughly British thing and yet at the same time there seems to have been at least a mild panic in Britain in the nineteenth century about green tea making people hallucinate unlike proper black tea. Of course, it's almost like people don't realize they come from the same plant. Yeah, like you're talking about the same botanical

origin here. They're both key but yeah, black tea is h is British, but green tea is something to mistrust and again interious foreign substance that may have the devil inside it. Yeah, and there's a Again, there's an older episode of the show about this, But the scenarios seemed

to have basically involved three factors. Mistrust of a tea scene as foreign or unusual, and I think this was also backed up by a popular ghost story that was written in the time during this time period about the dangers of green tea, also possible contaminants of the tea.

And also there were some uh, sort of bad actors and the tea market here who thought, well, we need to make this color more exciting for Western customers, and so they were throwing in some perhaps um less than healthy substances to try to enhance the coloration of the green tea. Oh. This may be a completely spurious connection, but it also makes me think of the English association between the color green and like the jealousy of the fairies.

Oh yeah, you know, I'm I don't recall there if anybody called out that connection, but I use we see that they're being this sort of color theory, uh and color a version already present in a given culture, and then you have these other that could potentially enhance these other reasons that we're seeing at the time to be suspicious of green tea. Yeah, like a green dress invites curses, what would a green beverage do? Yeah. But the other thing worth keeping in mind too is that there is

an actual possible link between caffeine and hallucination. Uh. And this link is not all that shocking when you consider the relationships between anxiety stimulants and the mind's just natural potential for hallucinations for various reasons. Yeah. But would there be more caffeine and the green teeth than the black tea? I thought it was usually the other way around. Um. Yes, But then also a lot of that comes down to how long you're steeping something, and you know, how how

often you're consuming it. I guess, um, like if you're having enough green tea during the course of a day. I mean. The other part of it is that that an individual's substability to caffeine is going to vary from person to person. Um. But I guess one way to look at it is, Yeah, if caffeine potentially enhance his stress, then this could cause the body to release more cortisol.

And another explanation that I remember from that episode was that people who use caffeine a lot, say three or more cups of coffee per day are simply more prone to mental health associations that cause hallucinations. So you know, they're various various ways to tease it apart, there's nothing special about green tea itself, unless it is, of course, has some sort of horrible substance added to it potentially, uh,

to make it more hallucinogenic. But yeah, it's just kind of interesting in terms of the britishness or foreign nature of tea has perceived in England in the nineteenth century. Alright,

one final area. We again, We're not gonna follow tea all around the world and cover all the various variations and customs on this show, but I think it is important to at least touch on Japanese tea culture in history a bit as well, because uh, like, knowing when and how tea reaches Japan is also important because the because Japanese culture has contributed so much to our global understanding and appreciation of tea. In fact, a number of

the teas that I drink our Chinese teas. But I did make sure that I was drinking a Japanese tea when I was working on this section of the notes. Oh, which one is that is a delightful Karagani tea, which is a green tea. This one's made I think mostly from stems, and like a lot of green teas, you have to be You can't just go Willie Nillion there and start steeping it at any temperature and for any

amount of time. It's not one of the kind of slot I like a good sloppy tea that I can accidentally forget about and come back two and it's it's no worse for a wear. This is when you have to be precise with But if you if you just give it the appropriate amount of time, at the appropriate temperature,

it's thoroughly delightful, very smooth, green tea. So tea culture, as I was reading in most of my main source of this was Martin, but tea culture was originally introduced into Japan via Buddhism during the reign of Prince of Shautaku, who lived five seventy four through six. This is a semi legendary figure, though there's nothing to legendary about the basic premise here. Uh So, this is not a story

that involves the machinations of gods or supernatural deities. Basically, you had scholars traveling to China during this time studying Buddhism and in the process also learning to drink and cultivate tea. Now, this is definitely the Phase one era of tea at this point, So there's the there's that that level of T technology that they have. This is the two level of T technology that they're bringing back

with them. Phase one would have been the brick form. Yeah, the brick form that did not have as enhanced flavor profile as most of the teas we think of today. Okay, and it was a luxury item at first, mostly imported, but it was during the reign of Emperor Shomu, who lived UH seven oh one through seven fifties six uh it was he helped popularize it more by serving it

to monks, particularly. There's a story about him serving it to monks during this day long reading of Buddhist scriptures and they're like, what is this and he's like, drinking It's gonna enhance everything you're doing today, trust me, And supposedly, um they end up embracing it up until the ninth

century when Sino Japanese relations strained somewhat. There is a lot of cultural transference there with tea customs and practices entering into Japan from China, much of it tied to Buddhist practices and the tastes of the Imperial court at that time. In the ninth century, however, diplomatic ties between the country's dried up and tea culture in Japan didn't

really progress for a good three centuries. Its popularity decrease and its use was then limited mostly to monasteries, which is interesting because all this kind of mirrors what we saw during Mongol rule in China. But then during the twelfth century, relations between Japan and China improved, and it's during this period that the Monk as I introduced both the Rinzai Zen Buddhism practice as well as whipped tea

to Japan. So this is phase two once more with the with a si here he's advocating tea as a key tool for Zen Buddhist practitioners as well as a quote divine remedy and supreme gift of heaven. Uh Martin writes that a side proclaimed tea as the cure for loss of appetite, illness is caused by poor drinking water, paralysis, boils, and what we would come to know of as a as a thyamine deficiency. He saw Tea drinking is something that benefited each organ in a different way, as well

as the spiritual aspects of a person as well. Just so that's everywhere it could go to leak into all your organs and into your spiritual structures, and it's just gonna cleanse everything out and make every better. Tea is great, But I love these different moments in history where like somebody discovers tea and then they're like, it does everything, and they you know, they really get on the tea terrain. Yeah.

I do like that. Again, it comes back to something we talked about in the in the last episode about tea being healthier than just normal drinking water that hasn't been brought up to the boiling point. Yeah. So, initially tea was really popular monasteries and among the ruling class, but then it spread to pretty much everyone. It also became highly ritualized during this time. At the time of the samurai, for example, it became part of the bushido code.

So if you were a member of the elite warrior class in Japan, you were yeah, you're expected to be able to kill people with your sword, but you were expected to apply yourself to say poetry and tea customs when you were not fighting or training to fight. By the mid fourteenth century, tea houses were a popular secular hangout as well, and it seems to have taken on a not only a secular air, but kind of a boisterous quality as well. They're apparently a number of tales

of tea drinking exploits. Uh. Some of these exploits were tied to just drinking a whole lot of tea their accounts of like fifty cups a hundred cups. Though I'm I don't think this is necessarily for an individual, but maybe more for like a group or a table, okay, because I mean warning like you can't actually get too much caffeine and be careful there. Yeah yeah, yeah, don't

do not try and drink fifty cups. But I think this would be like a party, like a large group and they're just drinking a lot of tea and they're keeping track about many they were going through. It could be wrong, but I think that's the case. They were also more refined um tea drinking exploits tied to contests that would take place to see if you could identify a tea by the taste or say taste of tea

and determine what region it's from. That sort of thing, and the tea service during this time was also formalized as a part of politics. So really it's like in every level of the socioeconomic structure t ends up finding

a place. Uh T culture would come to impact very levels of design as well, from the physical instruments of tea brewing of course in Japan, but also um this would end up being tied into the the architecture of tea huts that were specially designed to like blend into the natural environment and be part of this sort of

like nature based understanding of tea and tea drinking. Speaking of pouring with confidence to avoid the tea pot effect that I mentioned earlier, I've watched some video of Japanese tea masters from today at work, UH and man I really notice a a pouring with confidence kind of ethic to them, Like it's it's interesting to watch their actions because uh in the ones I've seen, they are of course very precise with their movements, so it's not it's the opposite of sloppy, but it is also very like

forceful and deliberate, confident pouring. It is not uh not delicate, little little anything that would result in dribbling. Yeah. Like I say, I know that some of these tea master is in their works have to have to tackle, uh the avoidance of dribbling and how you avoid dribbling in

these various tea ceremonies. You know, I don't know about you, Joe, but another this is something that comes up for me and I know was just surely avoided by by experts in the field, But in the re steeping of tea bags, one error that that we have to keep looking out for in my house is you you have an already wet tea bag and you're going to do your second or third steep, you put it in there, you have

some new hot water added. If the tea bag is kind of partially hanging over the edge of the of the the tea cup or the mug, then you'll have this kind of wicking effect where the water comes up through the tea bag and then gets all over the countertop. If you ever had this occurtain, yeah, I I didn't

know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, So another great way to make a big mess with tea different kind of capillary action, I would guess, yeah, yeah, yeah, capillary action sounds it sounds like a better explanation, but but yeah, it do make a mess. Well, I've enjoyed this tea journey, Rob, Yeah.

Like I said, this was not an attempt to provide an exhaustive and all inclusive understanding of tea, but hopefully sort of drive home like the basic evolution of tea and and where a lot of the most important movements and tea were taking place, because again, we have such a rich tea global culture out there to appreciate. Now, we didn't even get into like all the various salted and buttered tea traditions. And again we're already at this point.

I don't think we've gotten to share any of these in listening mail yet, but we're already hearing from some folks about some of their favorite ways to prepare tea, things that are either personally or culturally important to them. Uh. So we would love to hear from everyone out there. If there's a particular tea you love, let us know. For my own part and doing this recording especially, I have a bit of a sore throat and a cold cough going on, and I depended heavily on a poert

called Evil Snake King in nor only. I just take it straight, but for this I added a lot of honey to it. So normally I don't put anything into the teeth that I drink, but man, if my throat is a little bit sore, I can add some some honey, maybe even some limon to that and it'll really get me through. Well, May the Evil Snake King breathe all his curses into whatever whatever microbe is infecting your throat

or virus, blast them on out of there. Yeah. Plus, I just bought this piece of driftwood, uh, just just arrived. It's supposed to have a healing properties if you Yeah, I have to swallow it and strap it to my neck. I'm gonna be good. Great, all right, so yeah right in. We'd love to hear from everyone out there about tea and tea culture in your life. If you have, perhaps you have some answers to our questions about the tea dribbling uh advice from the tea masters of old uh.

In the In the meantime, check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind. Our core episodes come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed um days we do those listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact, and on Friday's we satisfied most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks to our audio

producer J. J. Pauseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio with the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows,