Something You Don’t Know About China’s Tea Culture: A Case Study of Hongloumeng Translated by David Hawkes

Abstract

Tea is a favorable drink for most of the people in the world, but for Chinese people, it is more of a medicine and a magical thing. As the origin of tea, China has enjoyed a long history of drinking tea that helped to form its own unique tea culture. By exploring the tea culture revealed in ancient time through the examples taken from David Hawkes’ version of Hongloumeng, we came to discover that Chinese people take the drinking of tea to be a way of improving the health and even gaining an eternal life while offering tea to the dead one is a way to show one’s sincerity, filial piety whereas offering tea as a gift to the living one is a way to symbolize friendship and marriage commitment. For most of the foreign readers, the above-mentioned medical, social and religious functions of tea in ancient China are seldom revealed to them.