Chanoyu (tea ceremony)

Drinking powdered tea came to Japan from Song-dynasty China. Around the 12th century, Zen monks who studied there learned the new way of drinking tea, and it spread among Zen temples and samurai families, who showed their standing by furnishing the tea room with fine Chinese objects called karamono. In the Muromachi period, Murata Jukō turned to Japanese-made utensils too and found beauty in what is lacking; Takeno Jōō simplified this further into “wabi tea,” and the tea room became a small, farmhouse-like space. In the 16th century Sen no Rikyū perfected wabi tea, setting Chinese works beside humble everyday utensils, and tea spread to townspeople. The seven rules handed down as Rikyū's words are plain: make the tea so that it tastes good, lay the charcoal so that the water boils, cool in summer and warm in winter, flowers as they are in the field. For the bowl, see tea bowls; for the taste behind wabi, wabi-sabi.

Read the name (mei) on a tea utensil's label. Many are named for a scene or story someone saw in the glaze or shape of the piece.

• Tea bowl 茶碗→The bowl in which the tea is whisked and drunk.
• Wabi-sabi 侘び寂び→The taste behind wabi tea.