Aestheticizing the Leaf: Literary, Visual, and Cultural Consumption of Tea in East Asia

This chapter theorizes the cultural transformation of Camellia sinensis from botanical matter into an aesthetic and symbolic medium in East Asia. Rather than treating tea as a passive commodity absorbed into existing cultural practices, it approaches tea as a materially and sensorially active participant in cultural production. Tracing tea preparation and appreciation from early modern traditions to contemporary practices, the chapter examines how flavor, aroma, processing, brewing technique, and teaware mediated relationships among botanical materiality, human agency, and cultural meaning. Drawing on literary treatises, visual representations, and material artifacts, it asks how cultivation, processing, tasting, and ritualizing transform plant matter into aesthetic experience and social knowledge. Tea thus emerges not as a mere object of consumption but as a medium producing distinctions of taste, status, and identity. The chapter develops a material-cultural account of aestheticization, demonstrating how tea's material affordances shaped interconnected literary, visual, ritual, and consumer cultures across East Asia.