Tea comes from China, although tea plant grows all over the world. Like with wine, climate and soil have great impact on tea plants.
Japanese tea ceremony is to drink tea in the afternoon. Chinese people also have ceremony for tea drinking in the afternoon. British people are real tea drinkers, because they drink minimally 6 cups of tea per day. Tea is national drink in India too, the country with the largest tea production in the whole world. The half of it stays in India.
People believe that tea plant is one of the first growth plants. Allegedly in 2737 b.c. Chinese emperor Ksan Nung find the beverage while he was drinking a glass of hot water, wind dropped in the glass tea leaf from the tree under which the emperor was sitting. After this he gave orders for growing teas.
The written document is youngest:
Chinese dynasty Tang (620-907 year) claim tea as royal drink. It's written then how tea leafs was dried.
Period of Song dynasty (960-1279 year) was start time of breaking tea into crumbs.
In the middle of the 15th century under the Ming dynasty people starts to spill hot water over the tea like we do today.
In 12th century tea comes to Japan and in Europe much later thanks to Dutch people not English. In 1610 year Dutch started to with tea shipping on a regular basis. Tea was brought to Russia by Mongols. Vasilij Starkov brought tea on Russian court on 1638 year.
Tea has historical role in America and the story goes like this: Boston Tea Party was action taken on December 16, 1773, by a group of Boston citizens to protest the British tax on tea imported to the colonies. Three British ships arrived in Boston in November 1773 with 342 chests of tea; the citizens of Boston would not permit ships to be unloaded. The royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, would not let the tea ships return to England until the duty had been paid. A group of Bostonians took the action on the evening of December 16, instigated by the American patriot Samuel Adams and many of them disguised as Native Americans, boarded the vessels and emptied the tea into Boston Harbor. The British closed the port when the government of Boston refused to pay for the tea.
|
