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Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things ~ Chaim Pot.
So, where did the culture of drinking tea start?
While India is now well-known for the high-quality tea it produces, and the innumerable cups of chai that Indians drink, the habit of drinking tea as a regular beverage did not originate here. Historically, Indian addiction to chai is a more recent phenomenon when the British introduced the habit of drinking endless cups of tea, simply for trade benefits. It is generally believed that tea drinking originated in China and is said to have been in regular use there, originally as a medicine and later as a beverage.
However, there are debates on the exact area where tea was first grown in China, and claims vary from Sichuan province, to Yunnan province in south China, to the regions where Tibet, Indo-Burma, and Southwest China meet. The practice of drinking tea as a medicine likely began in Yunnan, during the reign of the Shang Dynasty (1500 BC-1046 BCE). As a medicinal drink, tea leaves were boiled with different herbs, seeds, and other plant parts, and this concoction was served to the patient. Later people living in Sichuan (during the Zhou dynasty reign ~1122 to 256 BCE), first discovered the art of making tea, by simply brewing tea leaves in hot water, without adding any medicinal herbs.
The popular legend runs that the famous Chinese Emperor, Shen Nung (believed to have lived around 2737 BCE) was once resting under a tea tree (Camellia sinensis), and his servant served him boiled water to drink. The servant being a careless one, had not bothered to remove the tea leaves that had accidentally fallen in the boiling water. The brewed tea leaves gave the water a distinct flavour. The emperor found...