Aesthetics of Daily Life

The fountainhead of tea studies: raising tea drinking into the life aesthetics of self-cultivation, hospitality and stillness.

By Lu Yu of the Tang — the world’s first monograph on tea and the ancestor of the way of tea.

The world’s first treatise on garden making: mountains in a few paces, a cosmos rebuilt — the Eastern aesthetics of space.

By Ji Cheng of the Ming — "though made by human hands, it seems opened by heaven."

The elegant everyday of a common scholar: Chinese romance found amid the trivia of living.

Shen Fu’s autobiography, which passed down Yun — called "the loveliest woman in Chinese literature."

The finest running script under heaven: one elegant gathering writing out the rise and fall of life and Eastern taste.

Wang Xizhi wrote it on the spot — a double marvel of calligraphy and prose.