Tea Reading Answers

Tea is an aromatic drink commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over preserved leaves of the Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub Asia. After water, it is the most extensively consumed beverage in the world. There are many different types of tea; some, like Darjeeling and Chinese greens, have a cooling, somewhat bitter, and astringent flavour, while others have massively different profiles that

comprise sweet, nutty, floral or grassy notes. Tea has an exciting effect in humans mainly due to its caffeine content. Tea originated in Southwest China during the Shang dynasty, where it was used as a medicinal drink. An initial credible record of tea drinking dates to the 3rd century AD, in a medical text written by Hua Tuo. It was propagated as a recreational drink during the Chinese Tang dynasty, and tea drinking spread to other East Asian countries. Portuguese priests and merchants familiarized it to Europe during the 16th century. During the 17th century, drinking tea

became fashionable among Britons, who started extensive production and commercialization of the plant in India. Combined, China and India provided 62% of the world's tea in 2016.

The term herbal tea mentions to drinks not made from Camellia sinensis: infusions of fruit, leaves, or other parts of the plant, such as steeps of rosehip, chamomile, or rooibos. These are sometimes called tisanes or herbal infusions to avoid confusion with tea made from the tea plant. Tea plants are inherent to East Asia, and probably invented in the borderlands of north Burma and southwestern China. Some of the prominent Tea varieties are, Chinese (small leaf) tea, Chinese Western Yunnan Assam (large leaf) tea, Indian Assam (large leaf) tea and Chinese Southern Yunnan

Assam (large leaf) tea. Chinese (small leaf) type tea may have been found in southern China possibly with hybridization of unknown wild tea relatives. Though, since there are no known wild populations of this tea, the exact location of its origin is hypothetical. Given their genetic differences creating distinct clades, Chinese Assam type tea may have two different parentages - one being found in southern Yunnan and the other in western Yunnan. Numerous types of Southern Yunnan Assam tea have been crossbred with the closely related species Camellia taliensis. Unlike Southern Yunnan Assam tea, Western Yunnan Assam tea shares many inherited similarities with Indian Assam type tea. Thus, Western Yunnan Assam tea and Indian Assam tea both may have been made from the same parent plant in the area where southwestern China, Indo-Burma, and Tibet meet. However, as the

Indian Assam tea shares no haplotypes with Western Yunnan Assam tea, Indian Assam tea is likely to have originated from an autonomous domestication.

Some Indian Assam tea seems to have hybridised with the species Camellia pubicosta. Assuming a generation of 12 years, Chinese small leaf tea is assessed to have diverged from Assam tea around 22,000 years ago while Chinese Assam tea and Indian Assam tea diverged 2,800 years ago. The divergence of Chinese small leaf tea and Assam tea would resemble the last glacial maximum. Tea drinking may have commenced in the Yunnan region, when it was used for medicinal purposes. It is also supposed that in Sichuan, "people began to boil tea leaves for consumption into a concentrated liquid without the addition of other leaves or herbs, thereby

using tea as a bitter yet exhilarating drink, rather than as a medicinal concoction." 

Over the centuries, a diversity of techniques for processing tea, and several different forms of tea, were established. During the Tang dynasty, tea was steamed, then pounded and shaped into cake form, while in the Song dynasty, loose-leaf tea was established and became prevalent. During the Yuan and Ming dynasties, unoxidized tea leaves were first pan-fried, then rolled and dried, a procedure that stops the oxidation process that turns the leaves dark, thereby letting tea to remain green. In the 15th century, oolong tea, in which the leaves were allowable to partially oxidize before pan-frying, was advanced. Western tastes, however, favoured the fully oxidized black tea, and the leaves were allowed to oxidize further. Yellow tea was an unintentional discovery in the production of green tea during the Ming dynasty, when apparently sloppy practices allowed the leaves to turn yellow but produced a different flavour as a consequence.

Chinese small leaf type tea was familiarized into India in 1836 by the British in a shot to break the Chinese monopoly on tea. In 1841, Archibald Campbell carried seeds of Chinese tea from the Kumaun region and investigated planting tea in Darjeeling. The Alubari tea garden was opened in 1856 and Darjeeling tea started to be produced. In 1848, Robert Fortune was sent by the East India Company on a job to China to bring the tea plant back to Great Britain. He began his journey in high secrecy as his mission occurred in the lull between the Anglo-Chinese First Opium War (1839-1842) and Second Opium War (1856-1860). The Chinese tea plants he took back were presented to the Himalayas, though most did not endure. The British had discovered that a different variety of tea was endemic to Assam and the northeast region of India and that it was used small leaf type tea as well as likely closely related wild tea species. Using the Chinese planting and cultivation techniques, the British launched

250ea industry by offering land in Assam to any European who agreed to cultivate it for export. Tea was originally consumed only by anglicized Indians: though, it became widely common in India in the 1950s because of an effective advertising campaign by the India Tea Board.