A Taste of Tea

The history of tea in China spans thousands of years. It has been suggested that the tea bush came to China from India in the second century A.D., yet even if that was so, according to Chinese scholars, tea was first cultivated as a crop in China—specifically as a cousin to the camellia bush—in Hunan and later in Sichuan. Historians have written that tea, rare and dear, was drunk either as a stimulant or to induce serenity by China‛s rulers and the upper classes perhaps as early as the Han Dynasty, two thousand years before the birth of Christ, but certainly by the time of the Zhou Dynasty, in the eleventh century B.C. Tea became a more widely enjoyed drink, even among among the less privileged, by the Tang Dynasty days, in the eighth century A.D.