Ordering tea in the Song Dynasty represents a hundred operas of tea: is it more difficult than coffee to pull flowers?

If a beautiful pattern can appear on the drink, it can really make such an ordinary drink very delicious. On weekdays, you can see beautiful patterns on drinks, mostly coffee flowers in cafes. However, have you ever thought that you can draw a beautiful pattern on the surface of a cup of tea?

Han Miming, a graphic designer living in Shanghai, has gone viral on Weibo for painting traditional Chinese paintings on tea. In fact, the graphic designer began to learn painting at an early age and worked as a graphic designer after graduating from the China Academy of Fine Arts. In the early years, he loved to collect porcelain from the Song Dynasty, mostly with tea sets, and because he wanted to know why people in the Song Dynasty liked to drink tea with such objects, he came into contact with the Song Dynasty to order tea.

After grinding different kinds of tea into powder, white tea was selected at last. Ordering tea in the Song Dynasty, from dignitaries to ordinary people, all enjoyed it, and even there was a fight for tea, which lasted longer than whose tea soup (foam cake, that is, the dense layer of foam on the surface) remained on the surface for longer. Even this process has a proprietary term-bite.

The process of ordering tea is tedious. The raw material used is tea powder which is ground into fine powder. The whole process of ordering tea will be filled with water seven times. The first time the water is added is to turn the tea powder into a paste, and the last six times water is added with the tea stalks constantly beating, but thick foam appears. Compared with ordinary brewed tea, the tea prepared in this way tastes more dense after ordering tea because of a layer of delicate foam.

Compared with coffee, because the coffee is added with milk, the taste of the whole drink will change, while there is only tea and water from the beginning to the end, so the tea still tastes like tea and will not change.

In addition, during the two Song dynasties, someone would paint on tea, so Han Ximing mixed tea powder and water into tea paste as paint according to his understanding of Song Dynasty painting. Different from pen-and-paper painting, painting on tea soup uses teaspoons to "touch softness" on tea foams. No matter how beautiful the tea foam is, the foam will always dissipate, so you must finish a painting in three to five minutes before the foam disappears, and the whole process from ordering tea to painting is controlled at about 10 minutes.

Over the past six years, he has sketched nearly 200 ancient paintings, including the embroidered Eye of Plum Blossom by Zhao Geng in the Northern Song Dynasty, the fishing boat on the Qiu River by Xu Daoning in the Northern Song Dynasty, the Yunfeng overlooking picture by Ma Yuan in the Southern Song Dynasty, and Qiu Lin in Chuan Ma Yuan in the Southern Song Dynasty.

The process of making tea foam is called "ordering tea", while the process of painting on tea foam is called "tea opera". It should be noted that the Shanghai designer's use of tea cream on tea foam is a modern improvement, and in the end, there is no step to divide the tea. In the comments area of Weibo, some netizens left messages for everyone to popularize science and what is "tea opera".

According to ancient records, in the "Tea Opera" in ancient times, the painting on the tea foam was drawn by injecting water directly or dipping a teaspoon with water. That is, tea as the bottom, water as ink, soup for transport.

Finally, the step of dividing the tea is to divide the tea into cups, one spoonful at a time, and the tea foam of each tea soup should be uniform.

But are you really willing to drink such a beautiful painting?

Photo source: Weibo Little Red Book (bubble)

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