While courtly tea culture became increasingly insular and complex, tea was simultaneously broadening its reach across class and cultural lines. The teahouse, China's answer to the Western pub, sprang up across the country as a meeting spot, and in some cases, a house of ill repute.

Despite its worldly implications, the growth of tea production and culture was largely the product of Buddhist monks who saw tea drinking as an important aspect of their religion. In China and beyond, the promulgation of Buddhism beginning in the seventh century was thus instrumental in encouraging a diversity of peoples throughout Asia to embrace tea.

Around the end of the thirteenth century, a Japanese monk discovered tea and brought the first imported tealeaves to Japan to cultivate there, spawning Japan's own rich tea culture. An interactive exhibition on Japanese tea culture can be found on the Asia Society's website.

Historical accounts suggest that tea culture experienced something of a decline under Mongol rule (1162-1294), even though the Mongols evidently enjoyed tea themselves, trading their prized horses for tealeaves. Historian James Norwood Pratt points out that tea drinking as common culture continued during this era (and in fact, the famous Mooncake revolution of the mid-thirteenth century that overthrew the Mongols is said to have been plotted by rebel tea-drinkers in local teahouses). However, the courtly tea culture of the upper crust suffered, as Chinese officialdom yielded to Mongol invaders. When the Ming dynasty overthrew the Mongols in the 1360s, he writes, "not even scholars could recall the shape of the bamboo tea whisk that had been used by the Song nobility."

The first Ming emperor Zhu Yuan Zhang further popularized tea by lowering the tea tax and encouraging the spread of a less labor-intensive form of tea processing--roasting and drying whole leaves, instead of grinding tea into powder and forming them into bricks. The new process, known as chaoqing or "roasting the green." The looseleaf manufacturing process was standardized with the publication of an official Cha Pu or Tea Manual. Tea diversified across the empire, engendering fermented varieties like the popular Oolong, as well as scented teas infused with floral accents.

The Ming dynasty also brought the creation of the essential tea ware that people use to this day: the teapot, which enhances the flavor of steeped, fermented teas, and the delicate cups into which the concoction is poured.