tea

Tea in China

China is the native place of tea. It is believed that China has tea-shrubs as early as five to six thousand years ago, human cultivation of teaplants dated back two thousand years.

Tea is one kind of drink made by boiling water onto the processed tea tree leaves. in the daily life of Chinese people ,tea is a common but favorite drink. In Chinese we call tea “cha”, originally it was used as a kind of medicine, it was said , Shen nong, the legendary ruler in ancient china, once tasted hundreds of plants and got poisoned many times, it was tea that cured him of the poison.

As the ancient Chinese got to know more about tea ,instead of being regarded as medicine, tea became a drink. Little by little the Chinese tea culture was formed . Tea from China but spread all over the world ,nearly all tea trees in other countries have their origin directly or indirectly in China. The word for tea leaves or tea as a drink in many countries are derivatives from the Chinese character "cha." The Russians call it "cha'i", which sounds like "chaye" (tea leaves) as it is pronounced in northern China, and the English word "tea" sounds similar to the pronunciation of its counterpart in Xiamen (Amoy).

The Japanese character for tea is written exactly the same as it is in Chinese, though pronounced with a slight difference. The habit of tea drinking spread to Japan in the 6th century, but it was not introduced to Europe and America till the 17th and 18th centuries. Now the number of tea drinkers in the world is legion and is still on the increase. up to now, there are six tea system in China :green tea, black tea, scented tea, Oolong tea ,white tea and Compressed tea. each of them has different taste and function, there will be different ways to drink them.