The Chinese origin: the Tang dynasty (618-907)
Powdered tea was not invented in Japan. Under the Tang, Chinese Buddhist monks were already making pressed tea cakes that they grated and dissolved in hot water to support meditation. The poet Lu Yu (陆羽, 733-804) recorded the practice in his Chajing (The Classic of Tea, 780), considered the first systematic treatise on tea.
Under the Song (960-1279) the practice changed: instead of pressing and grating, monks began grinding the leaves directly on stone and whisking the powder with hot water in dark ceramic bowls. Jingshan temple (径山寺) in China, founded in the eighth century, was the centre of this refined practice. Its monks held large tea ceremonies (茶宴, chaen) with dozens of participants.
Arrival in Japan: Eisai (1191)
The Buddhist monk Myōan Eisai (明菴栄西, 1141-1215) made two journeys to China to study Chan Buddhism. On the second, between 1187 and 1191, he stayed at Jingshan temple, where he learned to whisk powdered tea in a bowl. Returning to Japan in 1191, he brought tea seeds and the method with him.
Eisai planted his first seeds on Mount Sefuri in Kyushu, then sent plants to the monk Myōe (1173-1232) at Togano-o, near Kyoto. Togano-o became Japan’s first high-quality tea region, and its matcha was declared «honcha», genuine tea, as against all the rest. Uji, then just one growing area among many, would take decades to overtake that reputation.
From the shogunate to the codified ceremony (1300-1591)
In the thirteenth century the samurai took up matcha and the first elements of the ritual took shape. In the fourteenth, the Ashikaga shogunate made tea a symbol of status and power. Contests to guess a tea’s origin (tocha) were a common aristocratic entertainment.
Murata Jukō (1423-1502) was the first to articulate wabi in the ceremony, bringing plain Japanese ceramics in alongside the venerated Chinese pieces. Takeno Jōō (1502-1555) continued in that direction. Finally Sen no Rikyū (1522-1591) codified the ceremony for good, raised wabi-sabi to a guiding principle, and set the protocols three schools (sansenke) still keep.
Uji takes the lead (14th to 17th century)
Uji rose to prominence during the Muromachi period. In the fifteenth century the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu made its gardens official suppliers to the court. The microclimate of the Uji river valley, its mists and alluvial soils, proved ideal for tencha. In the Edo period (1603-1868) the Tokugawa shogunate consolidated the Uji production system with protected trade routes.
The twentieth-century breeding programmes modernised production without breaking the tradition. The Gokou, Asahi and Samidori cultivars, developed between the 1930s and the 1990s, define contemporary Uji matcha.
Going global (2010-2025)
Matcha reached Western markets in volume in the second half of the 2000s, driven by the growth of natural foods, the rise of social media and interest in Japanese culture. Google Trends shows steady growth in English-language searches for «matcha» since 2012, with jumps in 2015 (the Instagram boom), 2020 (the pandemic and wellness) and 2023-2025 (TikTok and speciality drinks).
The United Kingdom was one of the early markets. Spain, where we write from, came to it 3 to 5 years behind the UK and the US, though growth there since 2020 has been fast: the Spanish ceremonial matcha market, still small in absolute volume, has grown more than 30% a year since 2022.