Tea

4.8

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 of the people in Europe did not know anything about “tea”. Some people heard about tea but very few of them knew what to do with it.

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

She told her friends about the present and asked them for dinner to try “tea”. When her friends came, the old woman brought in a dish and put it on the table. There were brown leaves of tea on it. The leaves were boiled. The guests began to eat these boiled 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 has never 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 tell jokes about it.

The Chinese were the first people in the world who began to grow tea. We know that more than two thousand years ago Chinese people knew and liked tea. It were the Chinese who taught other peoples to drink tea. The English word “tea” and the Russian word «чай» are borrowed from Chinese. English people 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 people learned to grow tea shrubs. There is only an old legend about it. Here it is:

Once a man promised to the gods not to sleep for nine years. At the end of 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 out of his eyelids. He did not sleep for two more years. Then again he felt that he wanted to sleep very much. He ate some leaves from the shrubs and felt strong enough not to sleep. He called this shrub “tcha”.

This is only a legend of course. We shall never know the name of the first man who planted a tea shrub and made a drink which most of the people in the world like so much.