Summary

- The birth in a legend
- Tea goes West
- Tea types
- Japanese green tea ceremony
- Afternoon tea


The birth in a legend
Tea is probably the best-known beverage worldwide. In its many different versions, it belongs to almost every culture. Moreover, many of these reserve for it a place of honour in their own customs. From East to West, across the Oceans, each people can trace its own tea history. However, tea must have originated in a precise place at a precise moment. Even if it seems too far from here and now to state it once and for all, at least we can recall the most widely accepted versions regarding the birth of tea.

The first element we can take for granted is that tea originated in Asia, because it's exactly there that the plant was first grown. There is a famous Chinese legend telling how the infused was discovered about 5000 years ago by Emperor Shen Nung. The emperor was well-known for being devoted to science, so he spread the custom of boiling the water before drinking it. In order to follow this rule, it was very common to find pots on fire everywhere, until tea leaves eventually fell into the emperor's boiling water. Shen Nung saw the water turning its transparency into a smooth brown. A pleasant aroma exhaled from the pot and persuaded the emperor to taste it. He found it delicious, and tea was born.
The new drink became quickly popular among Chinese people and then among Buddhist monks. When Buddhism was imported in Japan, tea came along, and found its way in the Japanese Empire. Even if the first written reference to tea made by a Japanese monk dates back to the early ninth century, Buddhists in Japan were not very happy to ascribe the discovery to a Chinese emperor, so they decided that tea was given by Buddha himself.
The legend says that when the Bodhidharma moved from India to China, he sat in front of the Shaolin Temple and started a nine year long meditation. He was about to fall asleep once, and felt so disappointed that he sliced off his eyelids to avoid it could happen again. The eyelids felt on the ground and Quan Yin, a compassionate deity, turned them into tea bushes to aid the Bodhidharma and those after him in their meditation. That's the reason why tea helps in staying awake. As a supposed consequence of this legend, the Japanese characters for tea and eyelids are the same.

Tea goes West
Whichever is the real story of its discovery, tea is a common beverage in Japan and China since a very long time. It quickly spread in neighbouring Asian countries such as Korea, but it had to wait until 16th Century to reach Portugal and 1610 to be first traded in Europe. That was the time when most of the commerce between China and Europe was due to Dutch merchants, who eventually founded resident bases in Orient and created the Dutch East India Company. Once in China, travellers of any sort started to drink tea as a habit, so it was a natural consequence to bring it back with them. In the beginning, tea was welcomed as a very expensive trend, but it soon became very popular among the whole population.
Tea moved rapidly from Holland, invading the rest of Europe. It became the great novelty of the century almost everywhere, but only in England and Russia it revealed itself to be more than a fashionable trend.

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