Tea Plant

The tea plant, Camellia sinensis, is the evergreen species whose leaves, buds and stems are processed into every true tea, from green and oolong to black and pu'er. Its history is traced to the borderlands where southwest China, Tibet, northern Myanmar and northeast India meet, and from that centre it was carried to more than 52 countries. Tea drinking probably began in Yunnan in the second millennium BC as a medicinal concoction, spread to Sichuan, and became a southern Chinese habit before the Tang dynasty carried it to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The oldest physical evidence yet identified is residue from the tomb of a Han emperor in Xi'an, showing the leaf was drunk as early as the second century BCE. In the kitchen the plant is the raw material for tea in all its forms, and it also underlies tea ceremonies such as the Japanese ceremony adopted from China in the fifteenth century.