Freeds: Dependable Coffee & Tea

Tea's rich history

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.