Below are the meetings of the 2019 programme for the Glasgow Branch of the SCA. All SCA members and friends are very welcome, and we look forward to seeing you.

Glasgow Branch meetings are held in the Garnethill Multicultural Centre (GMC), 21 Rose Street, Glasgow G3 6RE. Doors open at 7.00pm, tea and biscuits are served from 7.15 pm (cost £1) with meeting commencing at 7.30 pm. Events are free to SCA members and £1.50 (£1.00 concession) to non-members.

Thursday 26th September "Tea Drinking in Medieval China", Ding Kehan

Tea has enjoyed great popularity in China since the mid-eighth century. Emperors and commoners, monks and literati, all of them drank tea and developed their own tea-drinking customs and associated interpretations, even ideologies. These practices and ideas actively interplayed with each other, and together consisted of and gradually symbolised as a unified, magnificent and mysterious concept of “Chinese tea culture”.

This talk will try to unveil the premodern formation of Chinese tea culture by reconstructing the scenes of tea-drinking in Northern Song China (960-1127 A.D.) I will introduce those lovely tea lovers in the flesh, including the passionate emperor who wrote a tea monograph himself, the cheery commoners who enjoyed lively tea contests, the Buddhist monks who cultivate themselves with a sophisticated set of monastic tea rituals, and the artistic scholars who praise tea with beautiful poems.

Ding Kehan 丁可含, a PhD candidate of Chinese studies at the University of Edinburgh, focuses her research on Chinese tea rituals from Tang to Song Dynasty. Kehan was born and grew up in Beijing. She moved to Edinburgh to pursue her master’s degree in 2017 and started her PhD programme one year later.