TEA
Tea is an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub (bush) native to East Asia.[3] After water, it is the most widely consumed drink in the world.[4]There are many different types of tea; some, like Darjeeling and Chinese greens, have a cooling, slightly bitter, and astringent flavour,[5] while others have vastly different profiles that include sweet, nutty, floral or grassy notes.
Tea originated in Southwest China during the Shang dynasty, where it was used as a medicinal drink.[6] An early credible record of tea drinking dates to the 3rd century AD, in a medical text written by Hua Tuo.[7] It was popularized as a recreational drink during the Chinese Tang dynasty, and tea drinking spread to other East Asian countries. Portuguese priests and merchants introduced it to Europe during the 16th century
During the 17th century, drinking tea became fashionable among Britons, who started large-scale production and commercialization of the plant in India. Combined, China and India supplied 62% of the world's tea in 2016.
The term herbal tea refers 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[9] called tisanes or herbal infusions to prevent confusion with tea made from the tea plant.
The Chinese character for tea is 茶, originally written with an extra stroke as 荼 (pronounced tú, used as a word for a bitter herb), and acquired its current form during the Tang Dynasty.[10][11][12] The word is pronounced differently in the different varieties of Chinese, such as chá in Mandarin, zo and dzo in Wu Chinese, and ta and tein Min Chinese.[13] One suggestion is that the different pronunciations may have arisen from the different words for tea in ancient China, for example tú (荼) may have given rise to tê;[14] historical phonologists however argued that the cha, te and dzo all arose from the same root with a reconstructed pronunciation dra, which changed due to sound shift through the centuries.[15] There were other ancient words for tea, though ming (茗) is the only other one still in common use.[15][16] It has been proposed that the Chinese words for tea, tu, cha and ming, may have been borrowed from the Austro-Asiatic languages of people who inhabited southwest China; chafor example may have been derived from an archaic Austro-Asiatic root *la, meaning "leaf"
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