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by James Norwood Pratt
`All the tea in china--" this famous phrase, a metaphor
for great riches, was according to lexicographer Eric Partridge
first used in Australia in the 1890s.
UNCERTAIN ORIGINS
Tea is a consciousness-altering substance obtained from the
leaves of an evergreen shrub, Camellia sinensis, which has
been in continuous use since the days when Egypt's pyramids
were built. Its origins are variously ascribed to legendary
figures like Emperor Shen Nung (the father of agriculture
and herbal medicine, known as the Divine Cultivator, circa
3000 BC), or Gan Lu (a Buddhist monk said to have introduced
tea from India about the time of Christ), or Bodhidharma (the
first patriarch of Zen, who also came to China from India).
The earliest legend tells of tea leaves falling into water
Shan Nung was boiling outdoors. He liked the drink, found
it to have medicinal value, and so tea was born. Regardless
of tea's origins, what is clear is that Buddhism played the
same role in the slow development of tea in Asia which the
Catholic Church played over wine's long history in Europe.
EARLY PROCESSING AND PREPARATION
The drink had been in common use well over a millennium before
the Cha Jing, the first book on tea, was written in 780 AD.
By then tea had long since been planted throughout its present-day
growing area in China and had for centuries been a commodity
traded with the nomadic tribes beyond China's Great Wall.
The Cha Jing describes tea bricks which were powdered and
prepared by boiling. In time boiled tea gave way to whipped
tea, developed as a new way of preparing tea by whipping the
powdered leaves in hot water with a bamboo whisk. Tea eventually
spread to Japan; China instituted Tribute Teas and the tea
house. These survived the Mongol conquest of China, but whipped
tea survived only in Japan, where it remains the basis of
the Japanese Tea Ceremony (Chanoyu). By the 1300's the Chinese
had begun to steep tea, which was not compressed into cakes
but in the loose leaf form we know today. Other inventions,
like using the process of oxidation to create oolong and black
teas, and the first teapots, such as the doll-sized unglazed
Yixing clay pots used in the informal Chinese tea ceremony
Kung Fu Cha, also appeared before China began direct trade
with Europeans.
TEA TRAVELS TO EUROPE
The Dutch brought the first tea to Europe in 1610 as an exotic
novelty for aristocrats and the Dutch royal family, the House
of Orange, which almost certainly accounts for the still-current
term "Orange Pekoe." Though at first very expensive
and sold only in pharmacies, by 1675 tea was available in
food markets and was in general household use throughout Holland.
TEA OR TAY?
The english word tea is derived not from the traditional Chinese
cha but from the word in the Amoy (Xiamen) dialect, te. The
Dutch carried on their earliest trade with the Chinese in
Java, Indonesia, where they met Chinese boats out of Xiamen
port, and thus learned to say to (pronounced tay or day).
WITHOUT TEA...
Tea, utterly unknown outside China and her immediate neighborhood
as recently as 400 years ago, has rapidly become the world's
most-drunk beverage (second only to water), and is another
of those Chinese inventions--paper and printing being two
others--without which life is simply unimaginable.
Copyright © 1998 Tea Estates Limited, all rights reserved
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