With enrollments in etiquette schools booming worldwide, an alternative method for teaching etiquette is growing in Taiwan. Students there learn etiquette via tea art. The tea ceremony elevates the process of tasting tea from a material to a spiritual level. Experience has shown that learning the tea ceremony can change a student’s temperament and can also positively affect their family’s well-being.
Re-establishing the area’s culture
Taiwan’s Taoyuan County was an early tea exporting area. In fact, most of its citizens have been making tea for generations; however, due to the industrial transformation, the tea culture in the region gradually declined. Tea lovers founded the Taoyuan County Tea Research Institute to reinvigorate the area’s culture. One such tea lover, Huang Zhiwei, who works in education, used his expertise to combine tea art with teaching etiquette. Through his method of “learning tea art happily and learning etiquette easily,” he started a trend in bringing tea art to educational settings.
Huang said that many people were confused by the difference between tea ceremony and tea art. A tea ceremony emphasizes form, while tea art is more about the spiritual connotation. Tea is a spiritual facet of the art and a means of cultivating one’s morality and raising one’s temperament. Tea has been a part of Chinese traditional culture since ancient times, but today’s young generation has gradually forgotten how to taste tea.
The mission is to promote tea culture and get tea art into young people’s lives.
Huang said that the teaching of tea art has had the consistent and significant effect of internalizing one’s temperament and changing one’s character. The teaching of tea art in Taoyuan has a history of more than 10 years. It is taught in elementary school, junior high school, senior high school, and even within government offices, and it has gained affirmation from all walks of life. Fan Shu Vocational School has listed the courses as compulsory for their students.
An early tea art class student, Yunzao Ye, said:
“The tea art class changed my attitude and view of life. It calms the mood and improves concentration. It even made me think more about the direction of my life.”
Yunzao works in the computer science industry. The mental and physical pressures are formidable, and making tea is the best way for him to reduce the pressure.
Tea art changes hearts
Dingshen Huang, who was an earlier advocate of the tea art course at Fan Shu Vocational School, noted that while high school students’ minds are typically impatient, the tea courses can make the students more stable, confident, and disciplined through tranquilizing their hearts, meditation, and etiquette. It has been confirmed that the tea courses can change the students’ thoughts and enhance their academic performance. Dingshen remarked vividly:
“There are too many moving stories about the teaching of tea art to count. For example, on each Mother’s Day, while the students serve tea and express gratitude to their mothers, there are always a lot of parents with tears rolling down their faces. The students who had been quite shy became the ones who were the most confident. All this makes me feel that I didn’t just change a child, but I also changed a family, and its influence is like ripples flowing out.”
Follow us on X, Facebook, or Pinterest
