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The tea history
The trip of the tea: from China to Europe, then to America.
In one popular Chinese legend, Shennong, the legendary Emperor of China, inventor of agriculture and Chinese medicine, was drinking a bowl of boiling water, some time around 2737 BC. The wind blew and a few leaves from a nearby tree fell into his water and began to change its colour. The ever inquisitive and curious monarch took a sip of the brew and was pleasantly surprised by its flavour and its restorative properties. A variant of the legend tells that the emperor tested the medical properties of various herbs on himself, some of them poisonous, and found tea to work as an antidote.
The Tang Dynasty writer Lu Yu's <Cha Jing> is an early work on the subject. According to Cha Jing writing, around 760 AD, tea drinking was widespread. The book describes how tea plants were grown, the leaves processed, and tea prepared as a beverage. It also describes how tea was evaluated. The book also discusses where the best tea leaves were produced. Teas produced in this period were mainly tea bricks which were often used as currency, especially further from the center of the empire where coins lost their value.
The earliest known references to green tea in Japan are in a text written by a Buddhist monk in the 9th century. Tea became a drink of the religious classes in Japan when Japanese priests and envoys, sent to China to learn about its culture, brought tea to Japan.
However, a lot of histories about the origins of foods refer to an 'accident' with enjoyable consequences, and while entertaining, are almost certainly untrue. Whether or not these legends have any basis in fact, tea has played a significant role in Asian culture for centuries as a staple beverage, a curative, and a symbol of status. For these reasons, perhaps it is not surprising that its discovery is ascribed to religious or royal origins.
The tea landed on Europe at the beginning of the XVIIIth century, in Holland, in France, in Germany and in Portugal. But it is especially popular in Russia and in Britain. In 1618, the Chinese offered it to the Czar Alexis. The present lead the signature of an agreement in 1689, which declared the beginning of the commerce.
Thanks to a trader, the tea showed up in London for its first time in 1658. In fact ,it was the queen who made the tea become famous after her marriage with Charles II in 1962.
In the XVIIIth century, the tea became the drink the most spread in Britain. At that time the tea was very expensive. In the middle of the XIXth century, the English began to produce the tea in the region of Ceylon and in the North of India themselves. Then the tea was brought into North America by European immigrants.