Green Tea : Ancient Drink

Green Tea : Ancient Drink

       The first tea plants known were thought to be grown in Yunnan Province in southern China. From there they spread to other parts of Asia that had the right types of soil and weather conditions. The custom of drinking tea is said to have originated in China with the emperor Shen Nong. Regarded as an iconoclast of Chinese medicine, he introduced the tea plant to people around the year 2700 B.C. The classic on Chinese Tea, Cha jing (The Book of Tea), written by the scholar Lu Yu in A.D. 760, recounts Shen Nong’s efforts to discover the medicinal effectiveness of over three hundred varieties of roots, grass, and tree barks. Legend has it that he would try all of them on himself first and whenever he ingested something poisonous he would cleanse himself by eating tea leaves.
        It seems certain that tea leaves were initially eaten as a medicine long before tea became a popular drink. In fact, there are still some hill tribes in southern China, Thailand, and northern Myanmar that still eat pickled tea leaves, and only until recent times were they aware that a drink could be brewed from the same leaves!
          According to Kouga, the ancient dictionary written during the Later Han dynasty (A.D. 25-220), people in Sichuan Province of western China, compressed steamed leaves into hard bricks to help maintain the quality of the tea over a greater period (very handy when transporting, too). When making a beverage they would season the mixture with ginger or onion. However, this early concoction would not qualify as a conventional beverage in the usual sense because its intended use was medicinal.
           

Edited by : Devraj Jayapalan