When a Local Invented Tradition Becomes Heritage Culture for All of China: The Paradox of Taiwan’s Tea Art

This lecture will analyze how a local, not to say parochial, tea practice popular in southern China was developed by the Taiwanese tea community into modern-day “tea art.” Taiwan’s tea art has been accepted as a “traditional” tea culture across China since the 2010s. Deliberately choosing the term chayi (tea art) instead of the more formal chadao (the tea way) to brand the practice’s easy-going nature and everydayness, Taiwanese have, since the 1980s, developed the original Chaozhou gongfu tea ritual into a form of cultural performance and an art genre. Diverging from traditional Chinese tea practices and the Japanese chadao legacy, chayi has been described as an “invented tradition” by various scholars. This lecture will trace contemporary tea-art culture from Taiwan’s failure to continue tea exports to the rise of the so-called tea-art salons, the KMT government’s “Revive Chinese Traditional Culture Movement,” and efforts of teahouse owners to counter the stigma of associations with the Japanese legacy. All these efforts made way for a new art form and tea practice that has been eagerly taken up by mainland Chinese tea communities that embrace it as an area of traditional culture lost during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This phenomenon once again proves that Taiwan, supposedly on the cultural periphery, plays an important role in influencing the Chinese cultural core. It also brings to our attention the fact that while Taiwanese tea-persons use tea art to construct a distinctly Taiwanese cultural identity, they nonetheless must claim that it is also part of Chinese heritage when they travel across the Taiwan Strait to teach it to mainland tea communities. These paradoxes signify the complicated nature of cultural exchanges between the two sides.