September Tea & Spice
Thursday, September 4
5 to 9 pm
FREE with museum admission ($5 after 5 pm)
Still dusty from its annual trek to Burning Man, Tealchemy's Tea Temple will be erected inside the Asian Art Museum for MATCHA. Everyone can sip earthy tea inside this mammoth atmospheric, communal space, which celebrates the centuries-old nomadic trade and travel of the Silk Routes. Elsewhere in the museum, taste teas from India, Persia, and Tibet (courtesy Samovar) or those along China's Tea and Horse Roads (courtesy Teance).
Discover how these different blends are brewed and grind your own spicy chai (Indian tea), mortar and pestle style. Learn about tea and its cultural influences, see art of the spice routes on a guided tour, and view Power & Glory: Court Arts of China's Ming Dynasty before it closes (Sept. 21).
MATCHA is the perfect way to get your monthly arts and culture fix. Watch performances, stroll the galleries, create art, mingle over cocktails, enjoy music, and more. Check out the season schedule.
1662-1722, Porcelain with overglaze polychrome decoration. China, Jingdezhen, Jiangsu province. Museum purchase, B67P17.
Chinese ceramics were first brought to Europe by land traders traveling the Silk Road. By the Renaissance, European painters had begun to include depictions of Chinese ceramic wares in some of their portraits as a way of conveying the wealth and refined taste of their subjects. This practice was a testament to the long and lively exchange between China and the West. By the early seventeenth century, stoneware teapots from Yixing were brought back to Europe by Dutch sea traders along with shipments of tea. The interesting shapes and relief decorations of these pots had a strong influence on the English manufacturer Wedgwood along with other European stoneware makers. European traders commissioned vessels in traditional Western shapes, but they also noted and were influenced by characteristic China wares. European stonewares and porcelains from Delft in the Netherlands and Meissen in Germany as well as from some English factories were sometimes modeled on Chinese originals. With the shift of trade from land to sea, Japanese models joined the earlier Chinese ones as influences on European manufacturers. In 1639 the Dutch East India Company, a trading company active in Asia since 1602, acquired exclusive trade rights from the Japanese government. Thus began the company's profitable business carrying exotic goods to Japan and shipping Japanese porcelains, lacquer wares, and other goods back to Europe. The Dutch East India Company's monogram, VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie), sometimes appears on these objects.
Enjoy the 2,000 year tradition of tea that crosses all political, economic, cultural and language borders. When two people sit down for tea, magic ensues, and peace blossoms. Visit us, sip some tea, and get your very own piece of our peace. Our goal is to create a company that is good for this world. We partner with tea experts and suppliers from small family farms and estates, and local businesses and organizations. Through our service and environment we aim to embody the tea lifestyle and provide a place for our guests to escape, relax, and be healthy. Our mission is to create peace through drinking tea because the world needs us. If it sounds like a high aim, it assuredly is. The tea experience that we deliver solves the universal needs of humanity: community, vitality, and equanimity. We do it through every little thing we do at Samovar, and we hope you come to visit us to experience it yourself.
We are Tealchemy, and we live to serve tea. We raise our roof as an oasis, a sudden spring. The frame echoes the yurts and tents of wayfarers, paying homage to those tea houses of ancient times: temporary structures for travelers temporarily in the same place and time on the road of life.
This thoroughfare of desires, the Silk Road: it joins the Middle East to the entire Asian continent, from India to China. Roads, paths, highways of desires: exotic goods, spices, herbs and art flow. These roads that run the paths of true global culture thrived as a confluence of ethnicities and spiritual traditions.
As such we hope to be such a way-station for travelers, a cup sturdy and elegant enough to hold the warmth of humanity. In homage to the Silk Road trade, we will be serving our favorite oolongs which were rare tribute teas of Southern China, as well as puer, the most traveled tea of China and the Silk Road.
Teance is located in Berkeley, California just east of San Francisco, home of some of the most leading gourmet food and beverage products in the world. Formerly known as Celadon Fine Teas, the mission of Teance is to promote tea connoisseurship. By providing the most pure, premium, seasonal whole leaf teas possible, they hope to introduce to the consumer the enjoyment, health benefits, and the serenity that comes with drinking tea. Teance is named for tea and all of the elegant thoughts associated with it: nuance, ambiance, elegance.
Since opening in January of 2002, their tearoom and shop, Celadon Fine Teas, has been featured in the May 2003 Organic Style, where it mentioned our Pre-Rain Dragonwell and Wen Shan Baochong under their 10 best teas list. They were also featured in Sunset magazine's January 2003 Best of the West issue, as well as reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Express, and numerous other San Francisco Bay Area publications.
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MATCHA is made possible by support from Wells Fargo
Museum purchase, B67P17. 
