A noted scholar and magistrate named Wang Meng at around 300 A.D. China, was known for his tea obsession. It was said that of all of Confucius's rules of conduct, he but breaks one, and that is, 'never administer to others what you do not desire' Wang Meng reinterpreted this as 'whatever you desired, definitely administer to others' , for every single guest to his house was served tea, lots of tea. At that time, many of the Northern officials were moving South as a result of changing borders and wars. Tea was a common practice in the cultured South but not the mandarin North. Many of the officials were unused to the slight bitter tastes of the teas and felt that being forced to drink tea was equivalent to a 'water disaster' (Term used to indicate floods and other water related issues in government parlance) . Not only un-offended, the Southerners smugly made 'water disaster' their code name for tea to test newly arrived government officials to see how cultured they were by how much they knew tea. One official was asked at the state banquet 'how many water disasters have you had in your life?" The official completely misunderstood, and replied 'I was very fortunate in my administration to have had very few water disasters in my jurisdiction' to the resounding laughter of Wang Meng and all of the southern governors.
