Reading the tea leaves

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Farmers near Bandung, Indonesia, picking tea leaves. Joanna B. Pinneo

TO PUT THE HISTORY OF TEA on a time line, you’d have to use a sheet of paper wide enough to let your pen trace back more than 4,000 years. And you’d want to leave plenty of room for the years ahead, if medical inquiry into this plant continues at its current pace.

Tea—specifically green tea—is drawing attention from medical researchers seeking treatments for ailments ranging from acne to heart disease, to name just two. While definitive conclusions of this research are still being formed, it appears that—at the least—green tea is a powerful antioxidant to be considered seriously in terms of disease prevention.

From legend to market

Tea was discovered, the story goes, by a Chinese emperor living in about 2700 b.c. As he sat in the shade of a wild tea plant, a few leaves fell into his cup of hot water. He took a sip, and the rest is delicious history.

Historians trace tea’s first use to China in the twenty-eighth century b.c., but written references to it don’t appear until the third century b.c. The Chinese gathered tea leaves from wild plants until a.d. 600, when they began cultivation to satisfy demand for it—tea had become a popular medicinal tonic and beverage. Those associated with the tea trade prospered, including manufacturers of exquisite tea ware.

In about a.d. 800, a Buddhist monk studying in China took some seeds of a tea plant home with him to Japan, where cultivation of the plant soon began. Buddhists drank tea to stay awake during meditation and, in the twelfth century, the Japanese combined Buddhist beliefs and tea drinking into a ceremony of spiritual rejuvenation and harmony with the universe (the Japanese Tea Ceremony is still practiced today). Europeans trading in the China Sea discovered tea in the seventeenth century, and by the late 1700s it was widely consumed throughout Europe.

Today, tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world (water is first). About 2.5 million tons of tea leaves are produced annually, according to the University of Texas Center for Alternative Medicine Research in Cancer. Green tea is most popular in Japan and China, where its consumption accounts for about a fifth of all tea consumed worldwide.

Tea’s many names represent the country of origin (Ceylon, for example, today known as Sri Lanka), the district (such as Darjeeling), the grade or size of the processed leaf (pekoe), or the manufacturing process (green tea is unfermented, oolong is semi-fermented, and black tea is fermented). India is the world’s largest tea grower, producing 672 million pounds a year; China produces 600 million pounds, of which only 70 million are exported.