Tea in our lives

Tea drinking began on a windy day about 4,700 years ago, when the Chinese Emperor Shen Nong commanded his servants to boil a pot of water for him to drink. Very wisely, he always insisted that water should be boiled prior to drinking. Dried leaves from a nearby tea bush were blown into his pot and turned the bubbling liquid a deep shade of brown. Rather than throw the water away and start afresh, as supplies were short, the emperor insisted on tasting the brew and immediately hailed it as a refreshing drink.For nearly five more millennia, we have been drinking tea. The Japanese soon adopted Shen Nong's drink of tea, along with a ceremony in its preparation. Incredibly, it was not until 4,000 years later that tea-drinking reached Europe. Travelling merchants mentioned the properties of the tea bush, but no-one was sure how to use the leaf or how to serve it. In 1560, however, a Portuguese missionary in China sampled a cup of tea, andfour years later Portugal opened up the first official trade route to China.Gradually, tea drinking became available around the world, but only to people who could afford it. By the end of the seventeenth century, it became a tradition to drink tea mid-afternoon in some countries, and one tea drinker even added milk to the formerly black drink. In London, tea became, surprisingly, the main drink in the coffee houses, where for just a penny customers could obtain a pot of tea and a newspaper.The tea-drinking tradition then travelled across the Atlantic. Until then, tea had been drunk steaming hot. In 1904, however, a heatwave in St. Louis, USA, meant that people were searching for a cooling drink.One plantation grower poured buckets of ice into his brew of tea - the birth of iced tea. Four years later, a tea merchant sent some samples of tea in aerated bags to restaurants. The chefs should have opened the bags of tea to make a drink, but they found it easier to make the tea without opening them, and so the tea bag was born.And today, whether black or green, with lemon or milk, life would bemuch duller without the humble tea leaf.