Matcha’s 1,000-Year Journey: How a Chinese Ritual Became a Global Trend

In recent years, no drink has earned a more prominent place in the Instagram feeds and TikTok videos of food influencers worldwide than matcha. The verdant beverage, prepared by vigorously whisking water with finely ground green tea leaves, is popular for several reasons. Its vivid green color is certainly part of the appeal, but matcha is also delicious and boasts an impressive nutritional profile, all of which gives it an outsized place in the beverage conversation. 

As with the American adoration with Hello Kitty and selvedge denim, today's matcha craze is rooted in Japanese tradition—or at least that's what many matcha enthusiasts think. But matcha's roots actually lie in China, where a confluence of cultural circumstances, changing tastes, and the exchange of information between Chinese and Japanese monks thousands of years ago came together to create what would eventually become a trendy phenomenon.

From Medicinal Tonic to Everyday Drink

Tea has, essentially, been produced in China since time immemorial. According to the Association of Asian Studies, the region first began cultivating and consuming the camellia sinensis leaf around 4,000 years ago. It was initially used as a medicinal tonic, offered to Buddhist monks to stimulate their minds during meditation. It wasn't until the Zhou Dynasty (1046 BCE to 256 BCE) that tea was seriously recorded and used as a medicinal substance. If it was consumed on its own, the tea of this era was thicker and much more paste-like. In some parts of China, it was more commonly used as a cooking ingredient before evolving into the drink we know today. 

"Gradually, it became a medicinal soup, and then a beverage,” says Katharine P. Burnett, Founder and Director of the Global Tea Institute for the Study of Tea Culture and Science at the University of California, Davis. “By the Tang dynasty [618 to 907 CE), it was fully a beverage, and people were drinking tea the way we think of tea.”

Milled Tea During the Tang Dynasty

As tea culture developed in China, so did the way that camellia sinensis leaves were grown, produced, and prepared. Though it seems counterintuitive, milled tea actually pre-dates the usage of loose-leaf tea. During the Tang dynasty, tea leaves were pounded or milled into a fine powder, then molded into cakes. This process preserved the leaves and made them easier to transport. Around that time, the Chinese tea master Lu Yu, arguably the world's first tea scholar, described his personal tea preparation ritual very simply in his seminal work, The Classic of Tea, which was completed sometime between 760 to 762 CE: powdered tea, steeped with water, and never with fruits or other additives, such as ginger, that were popular at the time. 

"Sometimes such items as onion, ginger, jujube fruit, orange peel, dogwood berries or peppermint are boiled along with the tea," Yu wrote in the book "Such ingredients may be merely scattered across the top for a glossy effect, or they can be boiled together and the froth drawn off.” He was not impressed, adding, "Drinks like that are no more than the swill of gutters and ditches; still, alas, it is a common practice to make tea that way."

The Zen Buddhist Monk Connection

It wasn't until the Song Dynasty, from 960 to 1279, that the whisks, bowls, and other tools necessary to froth mo cha, which translates to "powdered tea," began to emerge. "By the Song, people were using whisks to froth the tea, and having competitions to see who was the best at preparing mo cha,” Burnett says. "Throughout the Song Dynasty, you see tea being whisked and frothed." At the time, it was even somewhat common for those who prepared mo cha to draw designs in its foam, similar to the latte art we see in coffee shops today. 

Amid all this change, Zen Buddhist monks, priests, and abbots began traveling to China to obtain books and sutras from scholars there. Perhaps the most prominent was the Japanese priest Eisai, who traveled to China sometime around 1191 and brought back tea seeds and the preparation rituals from China to Japan. "The monks encountered mo cha in the temples, and it's through the temples that this style of tea consumption develops," Burnett says. "They take that style back to Japan, start cultivating their own plants, and then as tea becomes a ritualistic component of rulership for the samurai, it continues to evolve."

Shifts in Tea Culture in China and Japan

But by the time the Ming Dynasty began in 1368, a fundamental shift in Chinese tea culture had come about by way of royal decree. In 1391, Emperor Ming Taizu outlawed the production of pressed tea cakes, decreeing instead that his subjects present him with a tribute of loose-leaf tea. And while it's unclear exactly why Ming banned tea cakes, it could be as simple as his preference for tea made with whole, dried leaves. According to Burnett, Taizu also viewed the process of growing the tea as overly laborious for farmers. As a result, loose-leaf tea gradually became the dominant form of tea consumption in China. 

In Japan, however, matcha quickly found favor with the imperial household, which controlled its production. "Matcha spread through Japan from monk to monk, temple to temple," Burnett says. "It's very slowly shared out of the temples by people who come to devotions to meet with the monks." Later, the imperial household lost power and was replaced by the samurai class, who appreciated the monks' regimented, ritualized behavior as they prepared tea. 

"There was something about this very strict, regimented behavior that was appealing to the samurai to keep their soldiers focused and in line," she continues. "Those values that were once being addressed in stricter sects of Zen Buddhism transfer into the samurai class, get absorbed, and then spread widely. As the cultural and political leaders of Japan, their activities become the norm and the standard for the rest of Japanese society.” 

Burnett also speculates that even though matcha preparation has evolved, and Japanese matcha drinkers introduced the use of bamboo tools to simplify the process of preparing the drink, the way mo cha was consumed when it was brought to Japan and evolved into the matcha that we know today was probably very similar. This continuity was due in large part to the reverent nature of first encountering the beverage in sacred Buddhist temples. 

"The process of taking the leaf, grinding it, whisking it, I would be willing to wager that the steps were kept meticulously the same," she says. "It was probably a point of honor for those who received the leaf and were taught how to prepare it, and they saw value in keeping those methods the same.”

From Tea Ceremonies to Strawberry Matcha Lattes

And for a very long time, before the strawberry matcha latte dominated our Instagram feeds, matcha was still mostly used for ritualistic purposes in tea ceremonies—that's where the “ceremonial grade" on your tin of matcha comes from. Still, the vast majority of tea consumed in Japan is sencha, or loose-leaf tea, which accounts for around 80° of all tea drunk in the country. And now, thanks to the explosion in its popularity, Japan is exporting about half of all the matcha it produces. And even though mo cha consumption has not returned to favor in China, the country is still planning to ramp up its production of matcha to help meet the massive increase in global demand driven by all those 'gram-worthy matcha concoctions.