This gilded silver tea sieve used for sifting tea powder during Tang Dynasty (618-907), was among a batch of royal tea ware items unearthed in 1987 at the 1,800-year-old Famen Temple in northwest China's Shaanxi. After crushing tea leaves into powder, people long ago used this sieve to sift out the best tea powder.

Chinese people have kept the habit of drinking tea since ancient times, and it proliferated during the Tang Dynasty. Lu Yu, a tea scholar at that time, even wrote the first known monograph on tea, "The Classic of Tea."