This is an admirably clear and readable book that brings a high degree of originality to a topic that has been laid before an Anglophone readership for well over a century now – ever since the publication in New York in 1906 by Okakura Tenshin 岡倉天心 (1862–1913) of The Book of Tea. But despite a steady stream of subsequent books and articles, now incorporating the work of distinguished historians of food science such as Huang Hsing-tsung 黃興宗 (1921–2012), not until now has anyone tried to grasp what the story of the rise of tea was actually all about, in other words the entire “alchemy of culture”, to use the author's expression (p. 41), whence tea drinking emerged. This investigation draws us into a range of sources, from materia medica to poems, concentrating on the important part played by Buddhist monks in promoting the drinking of tea to create through a “rhetoric of temperance” a social environment in which they could interact with the secular elite without having to imbibe alcohol – though there is also plenty here on the use of alcohol within Buddhism (pp. 58–9), as well as a careful consideration of other decoctions prepared in monasteries, both Buddhist and Daoist (pp. 130–7).

In fact there is plenty here on a great range of topics, though somehow the narrative remains consistently smooth and uncluttered. Disarmingly enough, the author points out on p. ix that this study had its origins in an MA dissertation completed at SOAS some time ago. In truth there are some figures here who do seem familiar from that work, such as the early eighth-century imperial cataloguer Wu Jiong 毋煚 (p. 51), who feared that tea, though it provided an instant high, caused long-term damage. But I can vouch for the fact that there is also a very great deal here that is completely new to me, such as for example the careful dissection of what the celebrated finds at the Famensi 法門寺 (pp. 61–6) may or indeed may not tell us about tea culture in the late ninth century, to say nothing of the chapters that carry the story forward after that point. In showing that the drinking of tea no more “just happened” than did the smoking of opium, this book will be of interest to a very wide range of historians, besides those interested in Chinese religion.

Of course I am aware that James Benn has other important long-term projects in mind, to add to his earlier work on self-immolation yet another completely unconnected area of study. But after reading in particular the chapter on “The patron saint of tea” Lu Yu 陸羽 (733–804), and his Classic of Tea, Chajing 茶經, one cannot but observe that Italian has possessed since the 1990s in the work of Marco Ceresa a good academic translation of this text, while Catherine Despeux has also just published in French a well-annotated Classique du thé (Paris: Rivages Poche, 2015). But nothing executed to the same standard exists in English. I do hope that some commercial publisher of translated classics will be able to persuade the author of this path-breaking study to pause in his further researches long enough to provide us with an English version of such a seminal text. I cannot think of anyone even remotely better qualified for this task. When, in the early nineteenth century, the British East India Company maintained in Hertford a college for the education of its future personnel, those destined for a career in Canton were set to acquiring not any competence in Chinese but rather the requisite skills in grading tea. After two hundred years it is surely high time to show that Britons can both recognize the importance of tea and translate Tang Chinese as well.