In a Tortoiseshell
Using the health benefits of drinking Chinese tea as a case study, this paper explores how cultural tradition and modern science jointly shape what societies recognize as truth. A comparative analysis of Lu Yu’s The Classic of Tea and contemporary biochemical research shows that scientific findings often substantiate longstanding cultural observations rather than displace them. These texts are put in direct conversation with both Western and Eastern scholars, ultimately demonstrating that “truth” emerges through shifting knowledge conventions relevant to its cultural and historical context.
Excerpt
An Eastern Harmony of Science and Tradition
While historical tea literature associates tea with spirituality, modern scientific analysis reduces the healing effects of tea to its quantifiable levels of catechins and antioxidants. Spirituality-based tea literature and scientific analyses rely on different frameworks, even though they both conclude that tea contains health benefits, thus making it difficult to interpret them with a single lens. In recognizing this tension, it is essential to contrast the Western framework’s intuitive separation between scientific knowledge and cultural tradition with Eastern scholarly philosophical perspectives, which assumes seamless transition from lived experience and quantitative reasoning. Xinyan Jiang’s work “The Relationship Between Chinese Traditional Culture and Modern Science” offers insight that expands upon the patterns observed in historical Chinese tea literature. She directly challenges Daston and Galison’s Western assumption of inherent tension between tradition and scientific inquiry, arguing the fundamental unity between the observer and the observed: in this paper’s case study, the tea drinker’s cultural experience and the tea itself (Jiang 63).
Revisiting Lu Yu: Health as Mind and Body
This philosophical foundation notes that Chinese traditions typically employ “holistic thinking” that “emphasizes the unity of humanity and nature” (Jiang 65), which manifests in Lu Yu’s text through his metaphors linking tea to natural processes. In The Classic of Tea, Lu Yu presents tea as a restorative force tightly woven into the rhythms of human life and health. He writes that tea soothes “aching of the brain, smarting of the eyes, troubled in the four limbs or afflicted in the hundred joints” (Lu Yu 60), offering a catalog of bodily pains that tea can ease.
His language employs concrete, visceral descriptors: “aching,” “smarting,” “troubled,” “afflicted”, which emphasize direct, sensory experience rather than abstract theorization. The phrase “hundred joints” invokes totality through hyperbole, suggesting tea’s comprehensive healing power. When describing tea’s effects, he states it will “dispel an evening’s unproductive lassitude” (Lu Yu 115), where “dispel” suggests an almost magical banishing of fatigue, while “lassitude” elevates everyday tiredness to a condition deserving reverence and attention. This language establishes tea once again as not merely medicinal but spiritually transformative, capable of altering one’s state of being through sensory engagement.
Modern scientific research begins by explicitly acknowledging tea’s deep cultural lineage, calling upon Jiang’s point that truth is not a matter of falsehood, but rather, a difference in approach to knowledge (Jiang 70). A 2014 paper in the Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine opens its abstract by highlighting that “historical texts and legends have long associated tea with health benefits”, pointing to Lu Yu’s Cha Jing (Tea Bible) from the Tang Dynasty (Yang et al.). The paper also references the Xin Xiu Ben Cao of the Tang era, which describes tea as “bitter and sweet, slightly cold and with no toxicity,” able to “eliminate thirst, heat, and phlegm,” and the Ming Dynasty’s Ben Cao Gang Mu, which credits tea with strong anti-inflammatory properties (Yang et al.). By foregrounding both legend and classical medical literature, the scientific paper signals that its inquiry is not a rupture from cultural tradition but a continuation significant to the context of the society and time period in which the inquiry exists.
Yet today’s scientific experiments offer another layer of meaning to Lu Yu’s observations, connecting symbolic understanding to material processes. Revisiting Lu Yu’s healing properties, modern research provides a biochemical understanding of what the Chinese virtue of balance means at the molecular level. The research explains that white tea’s catechins and polyphenols act as “scavengers of reactive oxygen species,” help “prevent cellular damage,” and exert “anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and neuroprotective activities” (Yang et al.). Here, the language shifts markedly: terms like “modulate,” “interfere,” and “regulate” describe precise molecular interventions, while “scavengers” personifies chemical compounds as active agents maintaining bodily equilibrium. This scientific framing grounds the symbolic cultural meanings Lu Yu described, anchoring centuries-old conventions about tea’s healing effects within material reality.
While Western scholars like Kimmerer and Latour often frame the relationship between science and culture as fraught with tension, the case of Chinese tea shows an alternative: one where science and tradition work in complementary harmony. Science here does not challenge cultural knowledge; it extends it, providing new layers of meaning that support long-held conventions.
Conclusion: Redefining Truth as Shared Convention
My analysis challenges Western frameworks – those of Daston and Galison, Latour, Martin, and Kimmerer, which assume an inherent tension between science and culture. Drawing on Xinyan Jiang’s insights and revisiting research papers which reference historical cultural texts to preface chemical analysis, the inclusion of Eastern perspectives embraces unity between empirical observation and cultural meaning. Ultimately, the simultaneous pursuit of poetry, spirit, science, and quantitative systems funnels into the desire for convention and collective truth. “Truth” becomes no longer a guarded entity, but a universal human desire to understand our relationship with the natural world and with each other. After all, “truth” is dictated only by what is seen, believed, and lived by.
Works Cited
Carpenter, Francis Ross, translator. The Classic of Tea. By Lu Yu, Weatherhill, 1974.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Zone Books, 2007.
Jiang, Xinyan. “The Relationship Between Chinese Traditional Culture and Modern Science.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013, pp. 59–70.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Beacon Press, 2001.
Author Commentary / Alice Xu
My writing process for this paper began with a much more straightforward academic research question. I aimed to examine the health benefits of drinking different Chinese teas, something I grew up consuming regularly. In my childhood, tea was often described as a drink that could cleanse the soul, heal the body, and improve blood circulation. My original research plan was to investigate these claims scientifically by examining modern research on antioxidants in different types of tea and correlating these findings with medical recommendations. I expected the paper to focus primarily on biochemical data and graphs showing the relationship between antioxidant content and health outcomes.
However, as I began researching tea more deeply, I encountered historical texts that shifted my curiosity. I discovered The Classic of Tea by Lu Yu, which was written in the eighth century Tang Dynasty, and is widely considered the first comprehensive book devoted entirely to tea. While the book presents itself as an authoritative guide on the “correct” way to produce, prepare, and drink tea, it concurrently contains no statistics, experiments, or numerical evidence. Instead, Lu Yu relies entirely on sensory experience and poetic description to establish tea’s value and healing properties. I was fascinated by the text’s authority seemingly derived from sole lived experience and cultural recognition rather than empirical measurement.
This realization led me to reconsider the central question of my research. Rather than asking whether tea is scientifically healthy, I began asking a broader question: what makes something “true”? I read works from many Western scholars who comment on the definitions of objectivity and perception such as Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, and Bruno Latour. These scholars highlight how modern science strives for objectivity while simultaneously recognizing that knowledge is shaped by cultural context. I also noticed, however, that these scholars often frame science and cultural meaning as existing in tension with one another, always at an arm’s length away.
I then shifted to reading some Eastern scholars, who in contrast suggest a different relationship between tradition and scientific understanding. Rather than opposing each other, cultural knowledge and empirical investigation seemed to function as complementary ways of describing the same phenomena. This perspective was fascinating and blatantly clear when put in conversation with my case study of the health benefits in drinking Chinese tea, as both Lu Yu’s The Classic of Tea and modern research papers become equally “truthful”, just reflections of the knowledge conventions in their respective time periods and societies.
Editor Commentary / Irene Kim
While, naturally, we may approach what we know to be untrue with suspicion, Alice nudges us toward the groundbreaking possibilities in approaching seemingly conflicting beliefs with cultural sensitivity. Through her exploration of the tension between Western and Eastern literature on tea, Alice supports that “Truth” is inextricable from the sociocultural paradigms that produce it. She engages the method of comparative analysis, first through orienting readers on the supposed tensions between the “objectivity” of Western literature and the spiritual, moral, and emotional essence of of Eastern literature on tea:
“While Western philosophy emphasizes the separation between observer and observed—laying groundwork for the “objectivity” that Daston and Galison problematize—Chinese philosophical traditions emphasize what Jiang calls “the unity of subject and object” (Jiang 63).”
Then, Alice challenges Western scholars’ understanding of science and culture as oppositional through highlighting Western science’s endorsement of Chinese traditional practices.
“…they begin by acknowledging cultural wisdom before elaborating on its material basis. The scientific language does not replace poetic metaphor; it provides a complementary vocabulary that enriches rather than dismisses traditional understanding.”
Through drawing consistencies between Western and Eastern literature, Alice disproves the notion that Eastern literature is “unscientific”; in doing so, she advocates for a positioning of Western scientific literature not as “superior nor ignorant of historical culture and belief.” While the beliefs posited by Western and Eastern scholars may appear in tension, Alice’s comparative analysis demonstrates how the same “truths” may be communicated differently through contrasting cultural frameworks. As Alice proves, “Truth” must be approached as deeply dynamic, indicative more of its cultural foundation than what is objectively true.
Author
Alice Xu ’28 is an Electrical & Computer Engineering major, Technology & Society minor from Chinatown, New York City. Growing up between Chinese and Western cultural frameworks, she is interested in exploring how distinct traditions and disciplines intersect, such as in visual art and technology, fashion design and engineering, and science and culture.
Editor
Irene Kim ‘28 is a sophomore majoring in Sociology and minoring in Gender and Sexuality Studies, African American Studies, and Journalism. On campus, she is the founder and head of queer publication Passionfruit Magazine, a Mellon Mays Fellow, and a Writing Center Fellow.