Tea Character 茗

Tea — especially a tea bud or later-picked leaf. In modern Chinese, 茗 can also mean tea generally, but it is not the ordinary everyday replacement for 茶.

The earliest trace currently proposed is in the Han period. The character is plausibly an internal Chinese naming of a sprouting tea bud, related by sound and sense to 萌 “to sprout”; that is an evolution, not a documented single invention.

An often-cited 晏子春秋 passage has 茗 roasted, but it does not securely prove a brewed tea drink; the preparation may have been food or a soup-like dish. Read it as tea-related, not as a precise recipe.

why use 茗 instead of 茶?

Choose 茶 for plain everyday tea; choose 茗 for a literary tea register.

After early competition between the two words, 茶 had the everyday lead by the Tang period, while 茗 survived in older and elegant wording. During the Ming-Qing period, changing brewing habits helped make that stylistic split useful.

Lu Yu's Cha Jing, from the Tang period, lists 茗 alongside 茶, 檟, 蔎, and 荈 as tea names. Those are fellow members of the historical vocabulary of tea, explained in related characters, not visual lookalikes.