Tea the beverage and “tea” the word originate in ancient China. Legend holds that Dharuma, a Buddhist monk who lived about the fifth century A.D. was responsible for stimulating tea drinking. During a period of deep meditation, he found that he was becoming drowsy. He grabbed his offending eyelids, cut them off and cast them aside. They landed on the leaves of a nearby bush. As it turns out, the leaves of this plant help to keep one from falling asleep. Undoubtedly tea was used for many hundreds, if not thousands of years before the first authentic account of the tea plant by Lo-yu recorded in 780 A.D. He described intricate methods of leaf preparation, and wrote that the leaf must be picked only during certain moons, and not on cloudy or rainy days. The leaf was carefully rolled by hand, dried, then placed in sealed containers. We know that the use of tea must have had evolved over many centuries, as Lo-yu states that there are “a thousand and ten thousand types of tea.” Ancient Chinese authors suggest that tea originates from the mountains of Fujian province on the southeastern coast of China, while others suggest it came from the mountains of Sichuan. In various Chinese dialects, what we now call “tea” was known as te, chai, or cha.

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