Tea

Every morning we like to begin our day with a cup of tea. We drink tea every day, but only three hundred years ago most people in Europe did not know anything about tea. Some had heard about it, but very few knew what to do with it.

There is a story about an English sailor who brought home some tea leaves as a present for his mother.

She told her friends about the present and invited them to dinner to try "tea." When her friends came, the old woman brought in a dish and put it on the table. There were boiled brown tea leaves on it. The guests began to eat the leaves. Of course, nobody liked their taste.

At that moment the sailor came in. He looked at the table, smiled and said, "Mother, what have you done with those tea leaves?"

"I have boiled them, as you told me to do."

"And what have you done with the water?"

"I threw it away, of course," answered the poor woman.

"Now you may throw the leaves away too," said her son.

Maybe such a thing never really happened, and this story is only a joke, but it shows that people in England at that time knew very little about tea and liked to make jokes about it.

The Chinese were the first people in the world to grow tea. We know that more than two thousand years ago, the Chinese already knew and liked tea. It was the Chinese who taught other peoples to drink tea. The English word "tea" and the Russian word «чай» are borrowed from Chinese. The English got tea from southern China, and in the south, Chinese people call tea "thee."

We got our tea from the north of China, and we began to call it as the people in the north of China call it — "tcha."

Nobody knows when and how the Chinese learned to grow tea shrubs. There is only an old legend about it. Here it is:

Once a man promised the gods not to sleep for nine years. After three years he fell asleep. When he woke up, he was so angry that he cut off his eyelids and threw them on the ground. A beautiful shrub grew from his eyelids. He did not sleep for two more years. Then again he felt very sleepy. He ate some leaves from the shrub and felt strong enough to stay awake. He called this shrub "tcha."

This is only a legend, of course. We shall never know the name of the first person who planted a tea shrub and made a drink that so many people in the world love today.