Tea - who brewed it first?

"Drink wine in the morning and tea at lunch". - Vietnamese say. While many may give themselves wine, tea in the morning, at lunch and in the evening - never!

With tea, every meal begins and ends with tea. Tea is placed on the altar as an offering and served to guests. At a wedding, funeral, festival or business meeting - a cup of bitter green tea is mandatory.

Apparently, tea grew in Vietnam before it reached China; at least that's what the Vietnamese claim. Some of the oldest tea bushes growing in the mountains in Lạng Sơn Province reach 18 meters in height.

When a guest comes to the house, the host or hostess leaves all activities behind, washes his or her hands and proceeds to brew tea. Although there is no tea ceremony in Vietnam as there is in China or Japan, there are nevertheless a number of rules for preparing a cup of real tea.

According to tradition, tea should be prepared from rainwater, or better yet: from dewdrops collected from lotus flowers before sunrise. It should proceed as follows:

At sunset, one should get on a boat, sail towards the lotus flowers before they close for the night, pour a little tea on each flower, and early in the morning, before the flowers open, pick them and collect the dew from their leaves into a pitcher. With the collected water, brew the lotus flowers together with the tea.

On a day-to-day basis, slightly less poetic ways are used, but, taking a bowl of tea in hand, one should drink it slowly, in small sips, enjoying its fragrance and taste. And one more thing: don't drink too much; there's a good dose of caffeine in those tiny cups.

The Vietnamese have long planted two types of tea bushes:

• tea grown in family gardens for making the drink from fresh leaves - on the plains of the Red River and in the hills of Nghe An province;
• forest tea in mountainous regions, which was drunk after partial fermentation of the leaves - Ha Giang, Bac Ha regions.

Lê Quý Đôn, an 18th century Vietnamese scholar, wrote: "tea bushes overgrow the entire forest on the mountains of Thanh Hoa province. Local people pluck leaves from the shrubs and dry them in the shade until dry. When boiled, the drink tastes slightly refreshing and stimulates the heart. Tea flowers are even better and have a natural aroma...".

In the early 20th century, members of a French-Dutch scientific expedition stated: "tea forests grow everywhere along the banks of rivers, such as the Red River in China and Vietnam, the Mekong (China, Thailand, Vietnam), and the Brahmaputra in India."

The study of the evolution of tea bushes in their natural environment in areas of China and Vietnam has led to interesting conclusions. Well, the scheme of tea evolution can be presented as follows:

Camellia (tea is a plant of the camellia family) → Vietnamese tea → Yun Nan tea with large leaves → Chinese tea → Assam tea (India).