The Origins and Sources of Tea: China, Japan and India

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad that I was not born before tea.

Reverend Sydney Smith

The history of tea is jewelled with tales of adventure and commerce, stories of comfort in hardship and relief when things get better. At once the most domestic of beverages, tea is also the most elegant, the most evocative – and the most inspiring to writers.

Founding father

The story of the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung highlights the origin of tea. The founder of Chinese agriculture and skilled in medicine, Shen Nung drank nothing but boiled water. One day in 2737BC, he sat with his simmering water by a handsome tree. The breeze swayed through the leaves, wafting a few of them into his water. The fragrance was wonderful; the beverage deliciously stimulating. The tree, it turned out, was a tea tree, and in this way the first pot of tea serendipitously brewed itself. As the Emperor noted in his Pen ts'ao or Medical Book, tea does more than relieve ailments: 'It quenches thirst. It lessens the desire for sleep. It gladdens and cheers the heart.'

How true those observations are! Not so the tale of Shen Nung. Enchanting as it is, it cannot be literal fact. Tea leaves are dried and processed before being made into a pot of tea. More important, the earliest version of Shen Nung's book was not written until the Second or Third Century AD, and its references to tea date from that era, not from the dawn of Chinese history, when Shen Nung lived.

So the story about the Emperor and the tea leaves is a myth. But like all myths it explains why we do what we do, and it captures truths: tea uplifts the spirits and sharpens the mind; it soothes the sick and preserves the healthy; it charms; it entrances. Its discovery has been a blessing and a pleasure to the countless millions who have made it the world's most popular beverage.

Writers on tea

Writers have been some of the world's greatest tea lovers. From its earliest days, tea has inspired tales and poems. Soon after the beverage arrived in England in 1657, poet Edmund Waller highlighted its stimulating effect on poets' minds: 'Tea doth our fancy aid' he claimed. He called it 'the Muse's friend,' noting its triumph over earlier inspirations:

Venus her Myrtle, Phoebus has his bays;
Tea both excels, ...

Matthew Prior also linked tea to poets. In his 1687 poem The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, the Country Mouse confesses to Bundle that he had 'heard much talk of the Wits' Coffee House':

'Thither,' said Bundle, 'you shall go and see
Priests drinking coffee and Poets tea.'

A century later, Dr. Samuel Johnson confessed himself:

A hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.

Like Johnson, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley could put away countless cups of tea, and he loved tea-time foods. Thomas Hogg, his biographer noted:

Tea was ever grateful, cup after cup ... Like all persons of simple tastes, he retained his sweet tooth; he would greedily eat cakes, gingerbread and sugar; honey, preserved or stewed fruits with bread.

In the 1940s, when gingerbread was rare and tea severely rationed, George Orwell devoted an Evening Standard article to how to make tea, detailing the eleven points necessary for 'wringing out of one's ration' twenty decent cups of tea a week.

Poets, tea and the pleasures of home

But tea does more than stimulate literary creativity; it also taps a golden lode of images. For poets, tea suggests home comforts. In England, William Cowper voiced these most memorably in his 1785 poem The Task:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

For the Ninth-Century Chinese poet Po Chu-I cups of tea mark the routines of daily life:

After lunch – one short nap;
On waking up – two cups of tea.

If such routines are destroyed their memory becomes a hunger for past content. Rupert Brooke captured this in The Old Vicarage, Grantchester:

And does the clock still stand at ten to three,
And is there honey still for tea?

Conversely, the Twentieth-Century Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, looks ahead to memories to warm the future in his poem Picnic to the Earth:

Here I will keep on saying 'I have returned!'
As long as you repeat 'Welcome back!'
Here I will keep on returning again and again,
Here let's drink hot tea.
Here sitting together for a while
Let's have the refreshing wind touch us.

The tea-drinking characters of novelists and playwrights

Novelists and playwrights use tea-times to set a scene, convey character, develop relationships, and suggest feelings and ambience. When Algy eats the cucumber sandwiches he has ordered for Lady Bracknell at the beginning of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest the audience realises that he little fears the fire of this dragon aunt. All will clearly be well at the end of the play. Readers of Molly Keane's novels of Irish country-house life soon spot that anyone who is given an egg with their tea is being favoured – perhaps for sporting exploits, but also for personal charms. In contrast to the lavish Irish teas, the abstemious tea parties of the ladies of Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford exemplify the genteel economy of their lives. They cannot provide the eggs, the muffins, and the cakes that make teatime a late-afternoon feast. Nonetheless, they reign over their tea-tables like the women in thousands of novels and plays, asserting a social position and controlling a domain.

In short, fictional tea-times tell us what it felt like to be taking tea in earlier centuries, capturing the pleasures that powered the economics of getting tea from tropical tea gardens and into British teacups, and vivifying tea-times of today by conjuring benign shades of tea-times past.

Origins and growth

Tea comes from the leaves of Camellia sinensis. Lovingly called 'the queen of camellias' by the Japanese tea historian Okakura Kakuzo, it is one of hundreds of important and beautiful plants that evolved in the botanical paradise of the Himalayas. These steep mountains stride the tropics, drawing monsoon-bearing winds up their heights. Tea thrives in heat and humidity, now not only in the Himalayas but in the mountains of Japan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Kenya and other places of similar climate.

Eating tea

Tea leaves were probably first eaten rather than drunk, maybe as long as 60,000 years ago. Early travellers reported that forest peoples in Thailand, Myanmar, and Assam chewed tea leaves. In the cold regions of Asia such as Tibet and Mongolia tea is still mixed with butter and meal to make a sustaining gruel rather than a drink. The Dong people of southern China make a festive soup of green tea leaves, mashed ginger and garlic served garnished with peanuts and puffed rice fried in teaseed oil.

Drinking tea

The legend of Shen Nung notwithstanding, the first unquestioned reference to drinking tea rather than chewing it, is in the Erh Ya, a Chinese annotated dictionary of 350AD, which explains that the leaves are brewed with boiling water, then drunk to improve eyesight, relieve lethargy, and dispel 'noxious gases of the body.' The boiling water needed to make tea certainly protected the residents of the populous Fifth-Century Chinese cities from the water-borne epidemics of cholera and typhoid that plagued large European towns until the end of the Nineteenth Century.

But tea has always been more than a herbal remedy. A Fifth-Century Chinese dictionary noted that it was a pleasant beverage that could lift the pall of a hangover. An emperor recorded in the Eighth-Century Ch'a Ching noted: 'The use of tea grows upon me surprisingly; I know not how it is but my fancy is awakened and my spirits exhilarated as if by wine.'

By this time drinking tea was so widespread that Ninth-Century Arab travellers reported that the Chinese government depended on the taxes on tea and salt for most of its revenue. Salt was actually used in tea, as were garlic, onions, orange peel, ginger and other spices.

Making tea Lu Yu's way

With tea well-established as both a popular drink and a polite amusement among connoisseurs, tea merchants prospered. In 780 they commissioned the poet Lu Yu to write a book about tea called Ch'a Ching – variously translated as Tea Book, The Code of Tea or Classic of Tea.

Lu Yu knew what he liked. Describing the characteristics of good tea leaves, he wrote that they should have:

Creases like the leather boots of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of the mighty bullock, unfold like the mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like fine earth newly swept by rain.

Lu Yu despised all flavourings except salt, and advised using mountain spring water to make tea. Paraphrasing his words in limpid metaphors Okakura Kakuzo explained how to boil the water:

There are three stages of boiling: the first boil is when the little bubbles like the eye of fishes swim on the surface; the second boil is when the bubbles are like crystal beads rolling in a fountain; the third boil is when the billows surge wildly in the kettle. The cake tea is roasted before the fire until it becomes soft like a baby's arm and is shredded into powder between pieces of fine paper. Salt is put in the first boil, the tea in the second. At the third boil, a dipperful of cold water is put in the kettle to settle the tea and revive 'the youth of the water.' Then the beverage was poured into the cups and drunk. O nectar! The filmy leaflet hung like scaly clouds in a serene sky or floated like water lilies on emerald streams.

Perhaps because of Lu Yu's encyclopaedic work, the Chinese abandoned onions, ginger and other strong flavourings, replacing them with flowers. Jasmine and rose are now the best-loved, but many flowers including chrysanthemums, marigolds and fruit blossoms have also been used.

The Chinese also changed their brewing methods. They drank boiled cake tea during the Tang dynasty (628–907), later developing powdered green tea whipped until it had a foamy head in the Sung dynasty (960–1127). Steeped tea only became the norm in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It was this tea that European merchants of the Renaissance first encountered, and so it was this way of making tea that came to the west.

Tea in Japan

The Japanese also usually drink steeped tea, serving it from lovely pots or buying it from wagons in the street, even glugging it in tins from slot machines. Yet the whipped green tea of the Sung dynasty – 'froth of the liquid jade' Okakura called it – survives in the Japanese tea ceremony, and is still the most prized.

Okakura writes that tea arrived in Japan in 729 when the Emperor Shomu served it to 100 monks to help them stay awake during a four-day reading of Buddhist scriptures. Monks began growing it at their monasteries, and in 1191 the monk Yeisaizenji brought new tea plants and information about the fashionable whipped tea from China, thus shaping the love of tea and the art of making it in Japan.

The legend of Daruma's eyelids

The Japanese myth about the origin of tea shows why it was so invaluable to monks that they planted their own tea gardens.

Daruma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, advocated long hours of contemplation. But one day he fell asleep whilst meditating. He was so horrified by this lapse that he cut off his eyelids so that unwanted slumber could never again overwhelm him. Where the eyelids fell, two bushes grew, producing leaves that could be brewed into a stimulating drink – tea – that prevented sleep.

This tale of the miraculous appearance of an aid to spiritual contemplation could not be more different from the Chinese legend of Shen Nung, which highlights the lucky discovery of a delightful and health-giving plant. Arthur Dobrin meditates on the two myths in his poem The Wine of the Poor, which celebrates the pleasures of tea:

Which to believe –
The eyelids of a holy man
falling to the earth and sprouting,
or a leaf silently descending into an emperor's cup?
I consider this question sipping
one day Spring Jade,
another
Precious Dew

I pour the queen of camellias,
look out of my window
at the rustling bamboo,
breathe in the steam from a blue cup.
Drink slowly
this exotic brew,
this wine of the poor.

Okakura Kakuzo on Teaism

Quoting a sage who said that its 'delicate bitterness reminded him of the after-taste of good counsel,' Okakura Kakuzo emphasises the Japanese link between religion and tea. From the days when early Zen Buddhist monks gathered before the image of Bodhi-Dharma to drink tea from a single bowl, Okakura traces Japanese Teaism:

A cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence ... a worship of the Imperfect ... a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. ... It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humour itself, the smile of philosophy. All genuine humourists may in this sense be called tea philosophers – Thackeray for instance, and of course Shakespeare.

Most fundamentally, says Okakura, Teaism focuses on the significance of the smallest incidents: 'Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.'

Japanese tea ceremony

Cups of tea swigged off throughout the day can have no such effect, nor can the happy bustle of an English tea-time. But the Japanese tea ceremony cha-no-yu ritualises tea-drinking, focusing the mind on every utensil, every step, every gesture.

Traditionally, it occurs in a small tea house. Guests enter via a winding path and a low door that emphasises its separation from the everyday world. They find themselves alone as Kakuzo explains:

The host will not enter the room until all the guests have seated themselves and quiet reigns with nothing to break the silence save the note of the boiling water in the iron kettle. The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on some faraway hill.

The host wipes each utensil with prescribed gestures. The boiling water is poured on matcha, a powdered green tea. The stirrer must click just once on the side of the bowl. The host whisks the tea with a bamboo whisk, then turning the cups to their loveliest side presents them to the guests. After drinking every drop, they must ask to examine the cups and utensils and praise their beauty. They may also speak of religion or art, but not of frivolities. The only food served is bean-paste sweets confected to reflect the season: pink plum-blossom shapes in spring, for example, peach shapes in summer, chestnuts in autumn, green pine-needles in winter.

Describing the ceremony as performed by the early teamasters, Okakura calls it both an 'oasis' – suggesting that it relieves the difficulties of everyday life – and an 'improvised drama ... woven about the tea, the flowers and the paintings' – suggesting it refocuses and clarifies the mind.

The tea ceremony could last up to four hours. Today, it is shorter – a relief to westerners unaccustomed to sitting on their knees. Often it is performed at home, usually by women who have taken classes in cha-noyu and ikebana – the art of arranging flowers. Japanese hotels offer it to visitors, while restaurants catering to businessmen have geisha tea ceremonies, where silken kimonos evoke the seasons and porcelain cups brighten the Zen original.

It can all seem fantastical to westerners, but in a melancholy tone Okakura encourages us to think again:

When we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of a tea-cup. Mankind has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus we have sacrificed too freely; and we have transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of Camellias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar?