I just finished reading Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin a few months ago, and I am very intrigued by all of the intricate rituals of tea drinking done by the rich and upper class of the Qin dynasty. In the book, they mention several teas, but with names that don't come up as anything when I google. I decided I would ask here, as some were prepared with snow, others with rain water during a certain period on the Chinese calendar, etc. I was wondering what were the actual names of the tea drank by the upper class during this period, and were certain blends only limited to the upper class? I suppose I should also add, what did the poor mainly drink during this time as well?
First of all, I have to assume you're actually talking about the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and not the Qin (221-208 BCE). There were no records of tea drinking from the Qin and while tea was probably already drunk in some way, we have no evidence from that period at all. Cao was also writing about the Qing (even though the story was set in the Ming).
Even for the Qing, it depends on if we're talking about early or late Qing. In the early Qing, the only thing really available for drinking was green tea - there is no written evidence that anything else really existed at the time. Records from the Ming and early Qing all suggest that the teas they consumed were greens of various kinds, not unlike the longjing and biluochun you now find in the market. Biluochun, according to the early 18th century jottings Liunan xubi, talks about how when the Kangxi emperor visited Lake Tai, he was gifted this tea and deemed the original name uncouth (it was called Scary Fragrant) so named it Biluochun instead, a name which lasted till today.
By mid 18th century we start seeing talk of other types of tea - oolong, black tea, etc. An early record of what is unmistakably oolong is from Suiyuan shidan from Yuan Mei. He talks about going to the Wuyi mountains to visit and drinking tea that was offered him by the monks there. The style of drinking was very similar to what you might now experience with gongfucha - small cups, small pots, repeated infusions. Yuan was from Jiangsu, and it's pretty clear from what way he was writing that this was not normal for him - this was a new experience. Instead, what elites like him would do when drinking tea would be green tea, in a large teapot, with somewhat large cups. That still hasn't changed - cultural elites from the Jiangnan area still largely drink green teas.
The fanciful stuff you see in the Dream of the Red Chambers - melting snow, collecting dew, etc. There's a certain level of fantasy there, I think. Nobody else ever really talked about collecting dews for tea, not even someone as crazy as emperor Huizong from the Song dynasty. Cao I think was trying to impart a sense of wonder and one of the ways to do so was to elevate tea drinking - which was a normal activity in any reasonable household by his time - to something else. One of those ways to do that was to make the process of tea preparation sound fantastic.
We know relatively little about what the poor drank. In areas where tea was produced, one would imagine that they drank similar stuff, just lower grade. In the north, they favored teas like jasmine - basically stale green tea that keeps better because of the added fragrance. Only the rich and powerful could afford fresh teas. One also imagines all kinds of roasted grains and what not were drunk as well. In the south, more varied types of teas are drunk - oolongs, largely, which also keep very well once roasted. Black tea was mostly for export and was never really favored by Chinese drinkers until its association with Western culture brought it back in a very different form.
Very informative