The Poor Man's Bowl

Every spring, in the hills south of Kyoto, some tea farmers put their bushes in the dark. A few weeks before the first leaves are picked, they roof the rows over, traditionally with reed screens and a layer of straw, now often with black cloth, and shut out most of the sun. Growers aim to cut it by around 85 per cent. Under the cover the new leaves do what leaves do in shade. They grow soft and thin and very dark green, packed with extra chlorophyll, as if to catch what light is left. They also change their taste. A shaded leaf keeps more of its theanine, an amino acid with a savoury, almost brothy flavour, and makes fewer of the catechins that make tea bitter and dry the mouth.

After picking, the leaves are steamed and dried, and the stems and veins are taken out, leaving only the flat green flesh of the leaf, called tencha. The tencha goes between two granite millstones, turned slowly, because heat spoils it. One mill makes about forty grams of powder an hour, roughly a small tin. The powder is matcha.

So the greenest tea in the world is green because it was grown in the dark. That is worth knowing about a drink now sold over ice in plastic cups around the world. But the strangest thing about this leaf is not what the shade does to it. It is what people have done with it since. For more than four centuries the most worked-over tea anyone drinks has been served in a bowl made to look as if it belonged to a poor man. Tea is the plant through which Japan's rich learned a habit the rest of the world has since picked up: once everyone can afford more, show off by choosing less, and pay a fortune for the plain thing.

The gold room and the straw hut

The habit has a starting point, and it comes with a comparison so neat it could have been staged. In January 1586 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a foot soldier's son who had fought his way to the top of a country at war and become its regent, had a tea room carried into the imperial palace in Kyoto so that he could serve tea to the Emperor Ōgimachi. It was about three mats in size, and it was gold. Gold leaf covered every surface, inside and out, down to the frames of the sliding doors. It could be taken apart and packed into crates, so that it could go wherever Hideyoshi went. It was a portable fortune you could sit in.

Hideyoshi's tea master was Sen no Rikyū, the son of a warehouse owner from the merchant port of Sakai. Rikyū may even have had a hand in designing the gold room; historians can only guess. But the room he is remembered for is the Taian, two mats of floor in a hut of earth, wood and paper, which still stands at a temple outside Kyoto and is now a National Treasure. Rikyū had his bowls made by a tile-maker, Raku Chōjirō: black, lumpy, shaped by hand rather than thrown on a wheel. He liked rough Korean bowls, and the ordinary things that farmhouses and kitchens used.

Okakura Kakuzō, the Japanese art critic who explained all this to English readers in The Book of Tea in 1906, describes how guests reached such a room. A samurai left his sword on a rack under the eaves. Then everyone, "high and low alike", bent down and crept in "through a small door not more than three feet in height". The building itself was meant "to give the suggestion of refined poverty".

Then Okakura adds the sentence that gives the game away: "A good tea-room is more costly than an ordinary mansion."

That is the poor man's bowl in one line. The hut was not cheap. It only looked cheap, and looking cheap in the right way took the best carpenters in the country, the rarest timber and a master's eye. The gold room told you how rich Hideyoshi was. The straw hut told you something harder to fake: that its owner had taste, and could afford to spend it on looking poor. It is worth noticing which room won. Rikyū's great-grandchildren founded the three main schools of tea that still teach today. The gold room survives mainly as replicas in museums and castles. In 1591 Hideyoshi ordered Rikyū to kill himself, for reasons nobody has ever quite settled. The regent got rid of the tea master. He never got rid of the taste.

And the taste had prices attached. Okakura says that when the tea masters ruled taste, Hideyoshi's generals "would be better satisfied with the present of a rare work of art than a large grant of territory as a reward of victory". Some of those works of art were tea bowls, and some of those tea bowls had been made, in their day, for almost nothing.

Five boxes deep

In 1931 Yanagi Sōetsu, the philosopher who founded Japan's folk-craft movement, went to see the most famous of them. His friend the potter Kawai Kanjirō went with him. The bowl was a sixteenth-century Korean piece called the Kizaemon, after Takeda Kizaemon, an Osaka merchant who had owned it around 1600. By Yanagi's day it was supposed to be the finest tea bowl in the world. It belonged to Kohō-an, a small temple within the great Zen compound of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto. Yanagi had wanted to see it for years.

"It was within box after box, five deep, buried in wool and wrapped in purple silk," he wrote in The Unknown Craftsman (adapted into English by Bernard Leach). "When I saw it, my heart fell. A good Tea-bowl, yes, but how ordinary!"

He went on:

The kiln, he added, was "a wretched affair; the firing careless. Sand had stuck to the pot, but nobody minded; no one invested the thing with any dreams."

Yanagi decided that this was the whole point, and that the bowl was beautiful because nobody had tried. But everybody since had invested it with dreams. One owner after another had kept it, and a story grew that the bowl brought boils on whoever owned it. Matsudaira Fumai, the lord of Matsue and a great tea collector of his age, is said to have paid 550 ryō for it, a small fortune. The family of the last private owners, so the story goes, were so worn down by the boils that they gave it to the temple, in 1822. In 1951 the Japanese government declared it a National Treasure.

A rice bowl used carelessly by a poor man, now kept five boxes deep in purple silk. Put like that, it is the whole mechanism. The plain thing is not beautiful because it is cheap. It becomes valuable because a person at the top decides that the cheapness is beautiful, and once that has been decided, the cheap thing is cheap no longer.

What was in the bowl

Which brings the story back to the leaf, because the tea poured into these poor men's bowls was never poor men's tea.

By Rikyū's time the growers of Uji, the tea district just south of Kyoto, were already putting their bushes under cover. João Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit who lived in Japan for more than thirty years and served as Hideyoshi's interpreter, described the shaded fields in the early 1600s. Recent work on the soil of Uji's old plantations suggests the practice is older still, going back to the first half of the 1400s at the latest. It began, most accounts say, as a way to protect the young shoots from frost. It turned out to make better tea: sweeter, greener, softer.

Then the shade became a privilege. Under the Tokugawa shoguns, who ruled Japan for two and a half centuries after Hideyoshi, only Uji's licensed tea masters were allowed to grow tea under cover. The best powdered tea was, in effect, a protected monopoly. Okakura, writing in 1906, says that Uji "bears still the name of producing the best tea in the world", and that powdered tea, long after steeped leaf tea had taken over everyday drinking, "still continues to hold its place as the tea of teas".

So there was a quiet joke at the heart of the tea room. The bowl said: a poor man used this. The tea in it said: this was grown under a monopoly, in the dark, by people the shogun licensed. The plainness was real, and it was also the most carefully grown thing in the room.

Iced, with oat milk

In 2025 the internet discovered the "performative male": a young man who signals that he is gentle, thoughtful and on the right side of things, with a tote bag, wired headphones, a novel by Sally Rooney and an iced matcha latte. That August a lookalike contest in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Seattle drew a crowd, and others followed in Chicago, San Francisco and on university campuses. The winner in Seattle took home a record player.

The joke works because the drink means something. A matcha latte is not a flashy drink. It is green, mild, faintly virtuous, and it says that you are calm and careful about what you put in your body. It is choosing less, and it costs more than a coffee.

The plant could not keep up. In October 2024 Marukyu Koyamaen, an Uji tea house some three centuries old, told its customers that demand "has already exceeded our production capacity", and began limiting how much anyone could buy. It said it was protecting its long-standing customers, among them temples and shrines that use matcha for religious ceremonies. Ippodo, another old Kyoto house, suspended some of its teas. The 2025 harvest was reported to be a fifth smaller than the year before, and wholesale prices had already doubled.

This is the one point in the story where the plant, rather than the people, sets the terms. A coffee farm can be planted anywhere warm enough. Matcha needs tea bushes that take years to mature, a few weeks of shade every spring, leaves picked young, a once-a-year harvest, and millstones that grind forty grams an hour. You cannot hurry a leaf that has to be kept in the dark. So for a while a Kyoto merchant had to choose between the temples that had bought its tea for generations and a few million strangers who wanted a calm green drink with ice. It chose the temples.

A witness from the Andes

Quinoa is the seed of a plant from around Lake Titicaca in the Andes, where it has been grown for thousands of years and was long the food of people who could not afford much else. From the early 2000s it became a health food in North America and Europe, and between 2006 and 2013 its price tripled. In January 2013 a column in the Guardian by the food writer Joanna Blythman asked: "Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?" The truth, she argued, was that rich Westerners were pricing Andean families out of their own staple.

It was a reasonable worry, and it turned out to be mostly wrong. Three economists, Marc Bellemare, Johanna Fajardo-Gonzalez and Seth Gitter, went through ten years of Peru's national household survey, which asks about 22,000 households a year what they grow, spend and eat. As the price rose, the households that grew quinoa, the ones that ate it without growing it, and the ones that did neither all got better off, and the growers did best of all. "It's really a happy story," Gitter told NPR. "The poorest people got the gains." "Rich people had to spend a bit more, and did," NPR added.

What is interesting here is the scolding. Two and a half centuries earlier, moralists in England scolded the poor for drinking tea above their station. By 2013 the rich were being scolded for eating the food of the poor. In both cases the people being talked about were the ones nobody asked.

The old tea seller

In 1724 a Zen monk of the Ōbaku school, nearly fifty years old, left his temple on the southern island of Kyushu and went to Kyoto. About ten years later he set up a tiny stall by a bridge over the Kamo River and began selling tea. Not powdered tea in rough bowls with a three-foot door, but sencha, leaves steeped in a pot. He later took his kit on the road, carrying it in two bamboo baskets on a pole and setting up wherever there was a view. He became known simply as Baisaō, the Old Tea Seller, and the artists and poets of Kyoto came to drink with him and talk.

He had no fixed price. His terms, in the translation by Norman Waddell, the American scholar of Zen who wrote his life, The Old Tea Seller, were: "The price for this tea is anything from a hundred in gold to a half sen. If you want to drink free, that's all right too. I'm only sorry I can't let you have it for less."

It reads like a reply to a century and a half of tea masters, by a man who had watched the cult of the plain thing grow very expensive. Steeped leaf tea went on to become Japan's everyday tea, the green tea in every office and train station, while matcha stayed the tea of ceremony.

Baisaō lived to eighty-eight. In his eighties, when his back would no longer let him carry his baskets, he burned his favourite basket, along with other tea things, to keep them, he said, from "falling into vulgar hands". It is hard not to suspect he knew what Kyoto did to a poor man's bowl. Somewhere, given a hundred years and a collector with good taste, his basket would have ended up five boxes deep in purple silk. He made sure it didn't.

The leaf, meanwhile, goes on doing what it has always done. Every spring the bushes in Uji go under their covers, and the leaves grow dark and sweet in the shade, as they did for Rikyū and as they will for the next person who pays too much for a plain green drink. The plant has never had any idea whether it is rich or poor. That part has always been ours.