Tea

Originally from China, tea is said to have been "discovered" by 3rd-century BC emperor Shen Nung, an herbalist considered to be the father of medicine, who consumed hundreds of plants during his lifetime to determine their therapeutic qualities. While pruning his camellias one day, he saw a leaf from a wild bush fall into a nearby pot of boiling water, quickly turning the water brown and releasing a pleasant aroma. The origins of this wild bush are described in an Indian legend about a prince called Darma. After a wild youth, the prince embraced asceticism, became a monk and went to China as a Buddhist missionary, swearing never to sleep again as self-punishment for his nights of depravity. For years, his devotion helped him keep his vow, but one day, when he was meditating on the slopes of the Himalayas, the sleep that was so long overdue finally overcame him. On waking, overwhelmed by sorrow for having broken his vow, he cut off his eyelids, buried them and set off again, tears blending with the blood on his face. Years later, passing the spot where he had made his sacrifice, he saw an unfamiliar bush. He picked the leaves and dropped them into hot water, which was his only nourishment. After the first sip, his lassitude was gone, and his spirit, swiftly motivated, reached the greatest heights of knowledge and beauty.

Tea first appeared in print in a Chinese dictionary in the middle of the 4th century. Its cultivation responded to a quickly growing demand and flourished during the next 200 years. It was first traded along the Mongolian border with the Turks, and at the turn of the 9th century, a Buddhist monk took seeds to Japan. Portuguese and Dutch traders were the first to introduce tea from China to Europe in 1560. Tea was shipped to Lisbon, and then to France, Holland and the Baltic countries. The first samples of tea made it to England sometime between 1652 and 1654 and its popularity fast replaced ale as the national drink. Sometime in the 1660s New Amsterdam's Dutch Director General Peter Stuyvesant brought tea to Dutch colonists in America. (New Amsterdam was later renamed New York by the English.) In the 1670s British colonists in Boston were introduced to tea. Oppressive taxes imposed by England made the drink impossibly expensive and led, in December 1773, to the Boston Tea Party, an act of rebellion that sparked the Revolutionary War. In Boston and at many ports of call along the East Coast, colonists dressed as Native Americans boarded trading ships and dumped their cargo of tea overboard. The excessive taxing of tea angered the English as well, and a boycott against the British East India Company's tea led to the smuggling of untaxed tea from the Netherlands.

The tea plant is hardy and can live for hundreds of years. It's cultivated to produce many young shoots and looks uncannily like a suburban hedge. Harvesting, or plucking, stretches over several months, the spring and early summer leaves yielding better tea than those from late summer and autumn. Grades of tea are largely determined by the location of the leaf on the plant and its size. The young, unopened leaf buds at the tip of the shoot rank first in quality, which decreases as the size of the leaf increases toward the lower end of the shoot. There are four principal types of tea: green, black, white and oolong, which all, surprisingly, come from the same plant. The differences lie in their treatment, processing and fermentation. See also afternoon tea, Assam, bergamot, bubble tea, cha, chai, chamomile, Earl Grey, English Breakfast tea, fair-trade, fat rascal, ginseng, herbal tea, hibiscus tea, high tea, iced tea, Irish breakfast tea, kobucha, masala chai, matka chai, Mexican tea, rose-hip tea, sage, sassafras, sweet tea, teh tarik, tenchan tea, thyme, tisane, vervain.

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