Tea and Life

-- the timeline of tea

 

 

 

I have a special connection with tea.

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When I was a little girl, I saw my mom always drinking tea. 

 

I was curious about it, so I asked, “Mom, why do you always drink tea, not plain water?”

“Because if you put the tea in the boiled water, you don’t see the sand sunk in the water,” mom answered with a smile. 

 

So the basic function of tea in my mind is to make the water drinkable. Since then, I started to drink tea from a very early time. 

 

When I became a teenager, I saw that many people sitting in the old fashioned tea house in the park in China were old generations, chatting and resting. It was rare to see young people sitting in a tea house. 

 

Then I found out that another function of tea is to accompany the casual time of the old.

 

After I stepped into the fifties, I could see a lot of well-decorated tea houses with different styles in the modern cities in China, overwhelmed by the younger generation and rich people. Most tea houses are located in a place with good scenery, for example, by the lake or in front of a small mountain. 

 

Tea ceremony became popular and people started to study Zen with tea. The knowledge of tea was introduced in various ways to the tea fans. 

 

High-quality tea houses, both in Taiwan and China mainland, focus on the quality of tea and the meaning of tea ceremony. The owners of the tea houses would rather look at their tea business as a practice of meditation, tasting life while tasting the flavor of the tea. 

 

Refer to the tea history, tea plants are native to East Asia, and probably originated in the borderlands of north Burma and southwestern China. Basically, tea can be divided into three types,  Chinese (small leaf) tea; Chinese Western Yunnan Assam (large leaf) tea and Chinese Southern Yunnan Assam (large leaf) tea. Indian Assam tea comes from Chinese Western Yunnan Assam (large leaf) tea. 

 

The earliest written records of tea come from China. In Chinese legends, the invention of tea is mythical Shennong in 2737 BC. 

 

In 2016, the earliest known physical evidence of tea was discovered in the mausoleum of Emperor Jing of Han in Xi'an. This means that tea from the genus Camellia was drunk by the Han Dynasty emperors as early as the 2nd century BC.  A Chinese poet during the Western Han Dynasty Wang Bao first wrote about the boiling tea in his work "The Contract for a Youth" in 59 BC.

 

Another early credible record of tea drinking was in a medical text by Hua Tuo dates to the third century AD, stating that  "to drink bitter t'u constantly makes one think better."

 

The first record of tea cultivation is also dated to the Han period in the reign of Emperor Xuan during which tea was cultivated on Meng Mountain (蒙山) near Chengdu.

 

Before the mid-8th century Tang dynasty, tea-drinking was primarily a southern Chinese practice. It became widely popular during the Tang Dynasty, when it was spread to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

 

a variety of techniques for processing tea, and a number of different forms of tea, were developed through the centuries:

• Tang dynasty, tea was steamed, then pounded and shaped into cake form;

• The Song dynasty, loose-leaf tea was developed and became popular. 

• Yuan and Ming dynasties, unoxidized tea leaves were first pan-fried, then rolled and dried, allowing the tea to remain green;

• 15th century, oolong tea, in which the leaves were allowed to partially oxidize before pan-frying, was developed.

 

In the 16th century, tea was termed of chá, when it was first introduced to Portuguese priests and merchants in China.

 

In 1607, the first shipment of tea started from Macao to Java, according to the first record. Two years later, the Dutch shipped tea from Japan to Europe and then introduced tea to Germany, France, and New York.

 

The tea that appeared in the English record was in 1615. A traveler and merchant trader called Peter Mundy went to Fujian in 1637. He wrote, "chaa – only water with a kind of herb boiled in it "

 

In 1836， India was introduced Chinese small leaf tea by the British in an attempt to break the Chinese monopoly on tea. In1950s, tea became widely popular in India because of a successful advertising campaign.

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The more I get to know the tea, the more I prefer to enjoy the tea life. It helps me to sense a lot of life philosophy and see a world from a piece of tea leaf.