History of Tea Exhibit Opens at UCLAs Fowler Museu

[mbhank]

Here is the link to the article in the South Bay Daily Breeze on the new exhibit:

http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_13207094

[Richard Kilgore]

Thanks. Curiously the article says a little about types of tea produced and consumed worldwide, how tea is processed and how to make a pot of tea, but little to say about the art and artifacts in the exhibit.

Have you been to the exhibit? Can you tell us any more about it?

[Wholemeal Crank]

Finally got to the exhibit today. It starts out with samples of a large variety of different teas, including several beautiful puerh disks or bricks and a brick of compressed black tea. Then through the rooms you see artifacts associated with tea in china, starting with the emperor credited with discovering it, in a 19th century scroll painting; a variety of tea implements and teapots including one of the pewter covered ones similar to that recently posted in the teaware thread, and some paintings of tea production in china--one very dark nineteenth century oil painting from china was distinctly grim compared to the more cheerful and idyllic prints painted for export to the west with the tea; moves on to the japanese tea ceremony with a replica of a part of a tea house, several scrolls with poems about tea, and tea cups, and a group of portrayals of daruma, the bodhisattva who cut off his eyelids when he fell asleep during a long meditation (what a great symbol of the effects of caffeine!); and then moves on to both teawares produced in the east for export to the west and western wares locally produced. Among this last group of artifacts, one of the most interesting was a tapestry from 17th century france purporting to show a chinese empress taking tea with her retinue, where the people producing the tapestry had almost certainly never been anywhere close to either china or to someone who'd actually been there--rather surreal. And for unrelated reasons, my favorite single artifact was the small print of a tea merchant in a market in japan selling his teas right next to a cat merchant, with large basket full of cats, who was stuffing one of them into a sack for a purchaser. I find the idea of the cat merchant utterly charming--I'm presuming he was selling them as mousers.

It was not a very large exhibit, but quite nice, and worth more than the hour we were able to devote to it today.

[Wholemeal Crank]

Just found copies of the cat merchant print online.

Seems like a perfect fit--a cup of tea goes down better when there's a cat on my lap.