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Tea specialists
Tea culture didn't happen by accident: specific people, across centuries and continents, shaped how it's grown, prepared and understood. Here are some of the figures worth knowing, historical and modern.
Historical figures
Lu Yu (733–804)
A Tang dynasty writer, Lu Yu wrote the Cha Jing ("The Classic of Tea"), the earliest known dedicated treatise on tea: covering its cultivation, processing, equipment and preparation. It remains the founding text of tea scholarship, and Lu Yu is often referred to as the "Sage of Tea" in China.
Eisai (1141–1215)
A Japanese Buddhist monk who studied in China and returned with tea seeds and Zen Buddhist teaching, Eisai is widely credited with popularising tea in Japan and linking it to Zen practice, laying groundwork for what would later become the Japanese tea ceremony.
Sen no Rikyu (1522–1591)
Perhaps the most influential figure in Japanese tea history, Sen no Rikyu refined chanoyu (the Japanese tea ceremony) into the disciplined, minimalist art form still practised today, emphasising simplicity, humility and mindfulness (the aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi) over display and luxury.
Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705)
A Portuguese princess who married England's Charles II in 1662, Catherine is widely credited with helping popularise tea drinking among the English aristocracy, contributing to tea's rise as a fashionable, then eventually everyday, drink in Britain.
Robert Fortune (1812–1880)
A Scottish botanist sent by the British East India Company on missions into China, Robert Fortune is best known for smuggling tea plants, seeds and processing knowledge out of China into British-controlled India in the 1840s–1850s: a pivotal, ethically fraught moment that helped establish India as a major tea-growing rival to China.
The modern tea specialist
Today, "tea specialist" or "tea sommelier" describes a recognised profession: people trained to evaluate tea the way a wine sommelier evaluates wine (by leaf appearance, aroma, liquor colour, taste and mouthfeel) and to guide sourcing, blending, and pairing. Several institutions and tea-industry bodies around the world now offer formal tea sommelier certification, and professional tea tasters remain essential to the industry, especially at tea auctions in major producing countries, where experienced tasters grade and price enormous volumes of leaf by palate alone.