| Abstract: | In Taiwan, a group of tea lovers try hard to learn how to make good flavor tea. They are even devoted to a complete training provided by the associations and set goals to become certified tea masters by passing the tests. The recreational specialization stages require not only characteristics of serious leisure activities but also certain degrees of involvement and construction of related professional knowledge. It is a process for recreation turning from serious leisure activities to high-specialized ones, so the further research on this aspect is of great worth.
This paper, applying previous literature and in-depth interviews, aims to explore the motives of those professional tea master instructors who have been certified tea masters or those who won the tea-making or tea sommelier competitions before. Besides, it also focuses on how their jobs, daily lives and leisure time have been changed because of tea and what their visions are for the future.
The results show that most of these tea masters have a mission of tea cultural heritage and great perseverance. Through the tea-making learning process, they have got self-confidence and a sense of achievement. The specialization process also expand their social life, cultivate their taste, change their future career a lot, and even locate the spirit of Chinese culture.
This research also finds out that tea has closely integrated into the daily lives of the professional instructors as well as other tea masters who have serious recreation characteristics. Based on the core value of tea culture, they also develop it to all levels of the lives, including aesthetics and life philosophy, which are quite different from other serious recreational activity participants.
As for recreational specialization of tea masters, it is divided into high, middle, and low levels from the differences among the degrees of experience, techniques, ability, life center involvement, and equipments. However, the tea masters? devotion to the associations, their enthusiasm for promoting tea arts, understanding of tea culture and the attitude toward it are all the same. |
