Our Sources & Standards

This page explains how we decide what to state as fact, what to hedge, and what to leave out.

The order we cite in

We prefer sources in roughly this order, and we say which one backs a given claim.

1. Primary and institutional. The schools’ own materials (Urasenke and the others), museum collections and scholarship (such as The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline), the Global Japanese Tea Association, Encyclopædia Britannica, and public-domain primary texts — Okakura’s The Book of Tea (1906) chief among them.
2. Producer and processing facts. Growers and makers for the specifics of how tea is grown, processed, and brewed. We cross-check these where we can.
3. Peer-reviewed research, for health only. Anything touching the body is sourced to systematic reviews, trials, and the like, and always hedged: studies suggest, a review found — never proven or boosts.

Where we can, an article names the sources it drew on so a claim can be traced back.

How we handle contested history

Some of the most-repeated stories about tea are later additions or legend. Where the record is debated — a text of uncertain authorship, a famous quotation that may be apocryphal — we attribute carefully and flag the doubt rather than presenting it as settled. Dates and lineages are easy to get wrong, so we treat those with particular care.

What we will not do

We do not invent sources or personal experience, and we do not state a health benefit more strongly than the research supports.

If a claim cannot be sourced or honestly hedged, it is cut.