Building on Bruno Latour’s ontological critique of the "social"and Michael Herzfeld’s conceptualization of"social poetics",this paper explores teahouse as a way of life in a marketplace in southern Sichuan. To challenge the existing "public space"paradigm for the study of teahouse,I argue that teahouse in China is not a "public space"in the political sense,which highlights autonomy,rationality and resistance.Instead,as a"space of performance"for self-representation and sociality,a "space of playing"for gambling and passtime,as well as a"discursive space"for arguments and arbitration,the local teahouse is characterized by its poetic rather than political nature.The teahouse is not only a container of multiple performing skills,game tricks and speaking tactics, as a poetic space bridging the self and society, structure and liminality,discourse and practice,but also the bearer of a specific,embedded publicity that is distinct from the western public sphere.