While tea drinkers in the West might just drop a tea bag into boiled water and think nothing more of it, Chinese tea aficionados have elaborate preferences for how to pour water of what temperature over which quantity of what kind of leaves — preferences that are steeped in a rich Chinese history of tea drinking that goes back thousands of years. Nevertheless, some parts of this history even Chinese people have forgotten.

I was reminded of this while doing research at a Chan, or Zen, temple in China in 2023. The temple aimed to revive the “way of tea,” a set of customs about how to prepare and consume tea, as it existed in the Song dynasty, which lasted from the year 960 until 1279.

While Chinese people now brew tea with whole leaves, back then, tea was made with ground leaves and then whisked to give the beverage a frothy layer. But I observed that whenever students at the temple performed this procedure, visitors confused the practice with a custom associated with a popular foreign drink. They’d ask, “Why is a Chinese temple doing the Japanese matcha tea ceremony?”

Today, matcha is consumed globally — by visitors not just of traditional Kyoto tea houses making matcha according to 500-year-old techniques, but also by, for example, American fitness influencers who see it as a healthy lifestyle choice. Market research firms project the global matcha market will exceed $5 billion by 2030.

The starting point of this story, however, lies in 11th-century China. Tea was the drink of choice among Song dynasty elites and commoners. According to “Record of a Dream of the Capital,” by contemporary author Wu Zimu, “Tea shops are the places where scholars and officials meet with their friends. But each street has its own tea vendors going door to door to whisk tea.” Tea lovers would grind tea cakes into a powder, add a little water to make a paste, add some more hot water, and then beat it with a bamboo whisk.

Literati gatherings often featured whisking powdered tea in so-called tea battles — a kind of friendly drinking game where people would compete to see who could create the whitest and longest-lasting foam. Emperor Huizong of Song even described how to judge a tea’s foam in his “Treatise on Tea”: “When it comes to the color of the whisked tea, pure white is the ideal, followed by greenish white, then grayish white, and finally yellowish white.” Describing the elegant shape of the foam in the cup, he wrote, “The milky foam surges, overflowing the cup, swirling without movement, and this is called ‘biting the cup.’”

Back then, tea wasn’t yet the global drink it is today. A group of Japanese monks who had come to China to study Buddhism picked up the local tea culture. In 1191, Japanese monk Eisai returned to Japan with tea seeds. He would write a book called “Drinking Tea for Health,” which recorded methods for steaming loose green tea and for whisking tea, as well as the health benefits he believed tea’s bitterness possessed. In 1215, Eisai used tea to cure the shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo from an illness, and tea grew in popularity.

Japan developed its own “way of tea” — chado. Murata Juko, a central figure in Japanese tea history, at the beginning of the 16th century proposed using everyday utensils to drink tea, rather than the expensive Chinese imports that only the samurai class had access to. Under the guidance of Sen no Rikyu, known later as the “sage of tea,” Japanese tea ceremonies gradually developed a tranquil, solemn ceremonial quality — quite a difference from the entertaining and recreational Chinese tea whisking battles.

The cultivation and processing of tea itself also changed. In the second half of the 16th century, Uji, a town near Kyoto, began using rice-shoot and grass sheds to provide tea plants with shade for a few weeks before picking, which produced sweeter and fresher tea. After steaming and drying it, it was ground into a fine powder using a mortar for tea gatherings. This method is reflected in the name matcha, which translates directly as “grinding tea.”

Starting in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), China switched from whisking tea to drinking full-leaf tea, while Japan’s way of tea — including ground tea — became an important part of Japan’s national narrative. An etiquette manual produced in the late 19th century, when the country sought to emphasize an identity distinct from Western culture, describes the tea ceremony as a “civilizing device that can connect tradition and modernity, private morality and public order.” For Japanese citizens in the new era, especially women who acted as family managers, the tea ceremony became an essential skill.

The food industry brought matcha to even wider popularity. Companies used the tea, originally appreciated for its bitterness, as a new flavor for often sugary desserts. A key event was the launch of matcha-flavored ice cream by Häagen-Dazs in 1996, which quickly overtook vanilla as the company’s most popular flavor in Japan. Starbucks launched its first matcha drink 10 years later.

In an era when Instagram and TikTok dominate lifestyles, the greatest value of matcha is neither the pleasure of feasting with Chinese literati, nor the “bitterness” emphasized by Zen master Eisai, nor the tea ceremony philosophy of Sen no Rikyu. It is its color: food giants bind the green color of matcha to “nature” and “purity” — Danone’s environmentally friendly matcha yogurt packaging and Trader Joe’s matcha coconut slices all utilize this psychology of color.

Matcha is now so popular that, this summer, Japan is facing an unprecedented shortage of ceremonial-grade matcha. Visiting Uji — the town that began shading its tea plants, now considered the home of Japanese tea culture — I found traditional tea shops with nearly empty shelves, their prized artisanal powders reserved only for the most devoted customers.

Yet, curiously, from London to New York to Hong Kong, matcha lattes continue flowing without interruption. This paradox reveals a shift in the global matcha economy that, in a way, brings the history of whisking tea full circle. While Japan’s high-grade, jade-green powder remains the quintessential matcha, the world’s cafés and kitchens have quietly embraced matcha sourced from China.

Ten years ago, Japanese processing techniques sprang up in and around the southwestern Chinese city of Tongren. The region now dominates the commodity matcha market. While its flavor and color are less than perfect, Chinese matcha is perfectly fine for sweetened drinks and confectionery. In matcha’s journey from Song literati to Japanese tea masters and to Starbucks baristas, we see the endless dance between preservation and innovation — where every whisked bowl contains hundreds of years of history, yet remains forever contemporary.

Translator: Matt Turner.

(Header image: A practitioner paints using matcha during a “diancha” tea whisking ceremony in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, 2021. Lian Guoqing/VCG)