The Tea Sage Lu Yu

The Tang dynasty saw the first comprehensive treatise on tea and its varieties, though shorter works had appeared earlier. This was The Book of Tea(Cha Jing)now known as The Classic of Tea by the man of letters Lu Yu(733-804). Lu was abandoned on a riverbank when he was very small,  he was found and adopted by the famed Buddhist monk, Ji Ji, of the Dragon Cloud Buddhist monastery. Lu did not want to become a monk so was put to tending a herd of buffalo. What is probably a Confucian retelling of his story has him so avid for study that he practiced writing his characters while sitting astride a buffalo. Later he became a clown with a group of traveling performers and endeared himself to the company for his cutting and editing of play texts. After years of wandering he settled in Zhejiang province, Lu's interest in tea dated back to those early years when he had to brew it for his foster father. The drinking had become widespread and Lu began to investigate the process and its history. He began work in 760 and the book was published in 780.
The chapter headings are:
1. Origin, Characteristics. Names, and Qualities of Tea.
2. Tools for Plucking and Processing Tea.
3. Varieties, Plucking and processing Methods.
4. Utensils for Making and Drinking Tea.
5. Methods of Making Tea and the Water of Various Places.
6. Habits of Tea Drinking.
7. Stories, Plantations and Tea as a Medicine.
8. Which Kinds of Tea Are Better in Different Locations.
9. Utensils Which May Be Omitted.
10. How to Copy This Book on Silk Scrolls.
The book made Lu a celebrity. He spent the last decades of his long life in semi-seclusion polishing others of his total of ten books, all now lost. Lu Yu's work played a great role in giving tea cultural significance, Francis Ross Carpenter points out in the preface to his translation of The Classic of Tea. Before Lu Yu, tea was a rather ordinary drink, says an early preface to the classic, and "he taught us to manufacture tea, to lay out the equipage and to brew it properly."
After Lu became known as the patron saint of tea, tales about him proliferated. The water used for tea is crucial and Lu was skilled at distinguishing its kinds. He later write a book on twenty sokurces for fine water, the best of which was held to come from, midstream on the Yangtze at Nanling. Water from near the bank was often brackish. During a trip on the river his host gave Lu water from that spot to taste. Lu sipped and said the water was from neat the bank. The servant who had drawn it swore it was from the favored place. Lu took another sip and conceded that perhaps it was, but some other water was mixed in. Then the man admitted that when his boat rocked, some of the water in the jar had spilled out and he had added a bit from near the bank.
In another tale, the emperor refused to believe the story that when Lu left home his foster father gave up tea because no one could make it so well. The emperor invited the old abbot to the palace for a cup of tea made by his most skilled court lady. The monk was not impressed. But, when served a cup of another brew, he declared that even his son could not do better. What the abbot did not know is that the second cup had been made by Lu himself, summoned to the palace to make tea for an "unknown guest."