1. What is Tea?
2.The Tea plant
3. History of Tea
4. Tea sorts and their Production
5. Tea grades
6. Tea regions
7. How to brew a perfect cup of Tea
8. Tea and Health
Tea is first
of all a plant.
Secondly everything brewed from the leaf of this plant is called tea also.
Whether it is green, black, white or oolong tea it all comes from the
same leaves. It would be technically incorrect to say fruit tea, herbal
tea or Mate tea because they are not "real" teas. However the colloquial
English today does not make a distinction between them. As long as something
is brewed out of leaves, roots, fruits, tree barks or something similar
it is called tea.
The word tea comes from the Chinese language. In Mandarin it is called "Cha" and the sign for it looks like this:
This sign looks similar to the one for tree (or thistle) so the word tea originally named the plant not the beverage. The tea sign can also mean eye lid (in Mandarin and Japanese). The legend tells that the Indian prince Dharma who dedicated his life to Buddhism (he was later called Bodhidharma) meditated for seven years. At some stage he fell asleep and when he awoke he was very angry about his weakness. He cut off his eye lids and threw them to the ground. Out of the lids grew a plant with oval shaped leaves. When the prince tried the leaves it refreshed him and kept him awake and concentrated.
There is a
word for tea in most languages. It is very interesting to follow the origins
of it in the different countries. Tea was imported into most of the European
countries by ship and the word is quite similar:
English: Tea
German/Scandinavian: Tee
French: Thè
Italian/Spanish: Tè
Dutch: Thee
In the South of China where the Europeans came in touch with tea first "Cha" is pronounced like "Tay". With a bit of twisting and modifying it came to tea, the, tee …
Cha - Chai - Tay - Tea
The expression "a cup of cha" (in Britain and Ireland) seems to go back to the beginnings.
Only in Portugal the word for tea is Chá, similar to the Chinese version. This is because of the Portuguese Jesuits. They lived at the Chinese Emperors court in the 16th/17th century and when they returned to Portugal they made tea known as "Chá" as it is spoken in Mandarin-Chinese.
Other parts
of the world come in touch with tea through the traders who brought their
goods over land in caravans. The silk road led through Mongolia, the Slavic-Indian
area to Arab. In those countries the word for tea is very similar to the
Chinese "Cha":
Japanese: Tscha
Russian: Tchai
Arabic/Turkish: Tchai
