How tea came to India from China

During the Northern and Southern Dynasties in the 5th century AD, China's tea culture began to spread to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia at the same time as it flourished in Japan.

Vietnam shares a border with our country. At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Buddhism was introduced to Vietnam and was revered as the state religion in the 10th century. The time when our tea was introduced to Vietnam was no later than this period.

Vietnam has a long history of tea cultivation, and began to operate a large-scale tea industry in the 19th century. Subsequently, Vietnam introduced tea varieties and tea-making technology and equipment from South Asia, which made the production and development of tea rapidly. In 1684, Indonesia in Southeast Asia took tea seeds from China for trial planting, and then introduced them to Japan and Assam (India) for trial planting.

India in South Asia tried to plant Chinese tea seeds through the British East India Company in 1780, and then introduced and expanded the seeds on a large scale, established tea farms, sent tea makers to China to learn tea planting and tea making skills, and recruited Chinese technicians to India to teach in person. Through the efforts of all parties, the development of Indian tea culture has reached the level of "the name of Indian tea, full of noise in the world" in the latter part of the 19th century. Sri Lanka introduced Chinese tea seeds in the 17th century, and tried to plant in 1780, and after 1824, a large number of Chinese tea seeds and Indian tea seeds were introduced to expand the planting, and hired professional and technical personnel to guide them.

In the Tang Dynasty, China's tea spread to the Arab region of West Asia, and since then it has officially entered the Arab countries. According to the "New Tang Dynasty Book: The Biography of Lu Yu", it is recorded: "Yu loves tea, and has written three scriptures, saying that the source, method, and equipment of tea are especially prepared, and the world knows the ...... of drinking tea."Later, tea became popular, and when he returned to the beginning of the dynasty, he drove the horse market tea.

The Uighurs exchanged horses for tea, and while drinking, they sold some of the tea to Turkey and other Arab countries to make huge profits. Tea cultivation began in 1888 in Turkey in Western Asia, first with the introduction of tea seed cultivation from Japan and then from Georgia in 1937. After being developed and planted in batches, the scale of its tea industry gradually took shape and developed steadily.

The earliest Western document on tea is The Relations between China and India, written by an Arab merchant in 851 AD. Subsequently, tea was also described by some Western travelers, which led to a strong interest in tea in the West. But it wasn't until the 17th century that tea was brought back to Europe by missionaries.

Courtesy of Li Zixiao).

Imports are too expensive, and the British want to produce their own.

For centuries, Europeans loved tea, but no one had ever seen a real tea tree, because China did not allow European traders to enter the interior. Therefore, this mysterious plant of the ancient country of the East has aroused great curiosity among Westerners.

In 1560, the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Cruz disguised himself and blended into a group of merchants, and spent four years traveling back and forth between China's ** port and the interior before he figured out the ins and outs of tea. After returning to China, he wrote what he had seen and heard in the past few years in the "Chinese Tea Drinking Record", which was the first monograph on Chinese tea in Europe.

Starting with Cruz, many Western explorers salivated and started the idea of Chinese tea.

In 1848, in order to obtain high-quality varieties of tea trees, and at the same time to find Chinese tea farmers and cultivation tools, to help the British ** establish tea plantations in their South Asian colonies on a large scale, and to plunder the huge profits that China ** made through the world's tea**, the East India Company sent Scottish's most successful plant thief, Fu Qiong, to China.

One day in August of this year, in his apartment in India, Fu Qiong sat on an Indian-style chair, and outside the window, the sun was blazing. He put on the clothes of the Qing Dynasty of China and had his guide shave his head in the style of the Qing Dynasty of China. The guide's hand holding the sharp blade trembled, and with his clumsy and blunt technique, he scratched Fu Qiong's scalp several times, and the blood mixed with Fu Qiong's tears from the unbearable pain.

Fu Qiong recounts this adventure in detail in his second book, A Trip to the Tea Country. In the garden of a small inn, he found a plant that he had never found before. He just wanted to climb the wall to get in, and suddenly realized that he was already dressed as a Chinese.

So, they calmly walked into the inn, sat down at a table, and ordered food and drinks.

After eating, Fu Qiong slowly lit his Chinese pipe and said to the shopkeeper, "These trees are so beautiful, I came from the sea, and I can't see them there, so give me some seeds." "The kind owner accommodated his request.

In this case, Fu Qiong collected tea seeds from Quzhou and other parts of Zhejiang, and he also collected a large number of tea tree specimens from Ningbo, Zhoushan and other places. In the end, he brought 23,892 small tea plants and about 17,000 tea seeds to India and brought back eight Chinese tea workers.

Fu Qiong's trip to China in 1848 was undoubtedly a major watershed in the history of tea in the world. Soon, tea plantations were popping up in the Indian states of Assam and Sikkim. By the second half of the 19th century, tea was India's main export.

In the 75 years from 1854 to 1929, Britain's tea imports rose by 837%, and behind this staggering figure was a sharp decline and decline in the amount of international tea in China, the native country of tea.

Fuqiong's trip to China also unraveled a mystery for Western tea tasters and botanists: they had long believed that there was a distinction between green and black tea trees, but Fu Qiong told Westerners that the difference between green tea and black tea was only in the difference in tea-making technology.

His view was initially ridiculed by the public and experts, and he asked Indian tea experts to verify it in person in the UK before it was recognized.

China is the homeland of tea, and tea culture has a long history. In the Tang Dynasty, the trend of drinking tea has risen, and tea has become a daily necessities. On this basis, Lu Yu, a famous scholar in the Tang Dynasty, wrote the first book in the history of the world that specialized in the study of tea, "The Book of Tea".

With the development of the Maritime Silk Road, tea spread around the world as a representation of Chinese culture and had a significant impact on other countries.

The huge profits of tea directly led to the introduction of wolves. In order to pursue high profits, the British sent "economic spies" Fu Jun to steal China's tea planting technology, and turned to the colony at that time to plant and process.

In the 18th century, tea was only grown in China. Due to the popularity of tea abroad, Britain continued to purchase large quantities of tea from China, and tea at that time was even much more popular than Chinese specialty products such as silk and ceramics. But the Chinese have no interest in what is produced on this island, and will not buy British things at all, China only needs **.

This continued asymmetry** leads to economic disaster.

Relying on its hegemony at sea, Britain directly used guns and cannons to bombard China's first door with opium. In September 1848, the British sent Fu Jun to China to steal tea seeds and technology. In order not to be recognized by the local people, Fu Jun got a set of clothes worn by Chinese, dressed up as a rural peasant, and began the road of tea theft.

At that time, many people in China did not think that the skills of growing tea were "ulterior" trade secrets, and the hospitable Chinese selflessly taught Fujun the cultivation and production techniques.

In December 1848, Fu Jun obtained a large number of tea seeds and tea seedlings, and in order to minimize the loss, he shipped each batch of tea seeds and tea seedlings to India in three ships. However, in order to transfer China's tea-growing and tea-making technology to India, Fujun alone is not enough. Therefore, before returning to India, Fujun recruited 8 Chinese workers (6 tea planters and tea makers, and 2 tea canisters).

At this point, Chinese tea was introduced to India.

The customs of planting, making and drinking tea, which are widely spread in the world today, have all been spread from China to the outside world. It is speculated that Chinese tea has spread abroad for more than 2,000 years. Around the fifth century A.D., during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, China's tea began to be exported to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia and other parts of Asia.

In the first year of the Common Era, Japan's most Cheng and Haikong Zen masters came to study in our country, and when they returned to China, they brought back tea seeds for trial; The Rongxi Zen master of the Song Dynasty introduced tea seed cultivation from China. The Japanese tea industry inherits the ancient principle of steaming green tea in China, and the tea is green and verdant, which has a unique flavor.

In the 10th century, when the Mongolian caravans came to China to engage in the first class, they brought Chinese brick tea from China to Central Asia through Siberia. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Portuguese merchant ships came to China for trade**, and tea to the West ** began to appear. The Dutch brought tea to Western Europe around 1610 AD, and after 1650 it spread to Eastern Europe, and then to Russia, France and other countries.

It spread to the Americas in the 17th century. In 1684, Indonesia began to introduce tea seeds to China, and later introduced Chinese, Japanese tea varieties and Assam varieties for trial. After ups and downs, it was not until the latter part of the 19th century that it began to show obvious results.

After the Second World War, the recovery and development of tea was accelerated, and it gained a place in the international market.

In 1780, India was introduced to China by the British East India Company for tea seed cultivation. By the end of the 19th century, it was "the name of Indian tea, full of noise in the world". Beginning in the 17th century, Sri Lanka introduced tea seeds from China for trial planting, and then in 1780, and after 1824, it introduced Chinese and Indian tea varieties for expansion and hired technicians.

The quality of the black tea produced is excellent, and it is a major tea earner in the world. In 1880, China exported as many as 1.45 million quintals of tea to Britain, accounting for 60 to 70 percent of China's tea exports. In 1833, tea seeds were introduced from China in the imperial Russian era, and in 1848, tea seeds were imported from China and planted on the Black Coast.

In 1893, he hired Liu Junzhou, a Chinese tea master, and led a group of skilled workers to Georgia to teach tea planting and tea making techniques.

In the 20s of the 20th century, the Republic of Guinea began to experiment with tea. In 1962, China sent experts to Guinea to inspect and plant tea, and helped design and build a 100-hectare tea plantation Masanda tea farm and the corresponding mechanized tea factory. In 1958, Pakistan began to plant tea on a trial basis, but it did not form a production scale.

In 1982, China sent experts to Pakistan for cooperation. In the 50s of the 20th century, the Republic of Afghanistan tried to grow tea. In 1968, at the invitation of Afghanistan, China sent experts to introduce Chinese group varieties.

In 1962, China sent tea experts to the Republic of Mali on the edge of the Sahara Desert, and succeeded through arduous introduction experiments.

At present, Chinese tea has been marketed to hundreds of countries and regions on five continents in the world, more than 50 countries in the world have introduced Chinese tea seeds, tea trees, tea plantations cover an area of more than 2.47 million hectares, people in more than 160 countries and regions have tea drinking customs, tea drinking population of more than 2 billion.

India is one of the world's major tea producers, and its tea cultivation and production characteristics are as follows:

Geographical environment: India has a vast territory, different climate and soil conditions, and the tea growing environment is also adapted to local conditions, resulting in a variety of different tastes of tea.

Growing regions: Indian tea is mainly produced in Assam, Dalcutta and Mumbai in the north-east and in the Nirgilli Hills in the south. The altitude, climate, and soil conditions in these regions vary in tea quality.

Tea varieties: Indian tea mainly includes Assamese, Dalcutta, Nirgilli and other varieties, among which Assam tea is loved for its rich taste and mellow aroma.

Production process: Indian tea is made by hail traditional handmade process, including picking, withering, rolling, fermentation, drying and other links. This process gives Indian tea a mellow taste and a rich aroma.

Export market: Indian tea is mainly exported to Europe, the United States, Russia and other countries and regions, and the quality and taste of Indian tea are favored by European and American consumers.

India is one of the world's largest producers and exporters of tea, and tea is an important agricultural and economic resource for India. India mainly produces many varieties of tea, which include the following:

1.Assam Tea: Assam tea is a specialty of India, and this tea provides most of the world's black tea**. It usually has a rich taste and dark color, and is often drunk as a breakfast tea and a common accessory to Indian pastries.

2.Darling Tea: This tea is loved by people in the northern part of India and is also a very popular tea in India. It is a light-colored tea trembling state, its flavor is quite light, and the natural energy is more balanced than other teas.

3.Magati Tea: Also known as "Darjeeling Tea", this tea is produced in the Darjeeling Ranges region of the Silver Years in southeast India and has a wide variety of flavours and is also exported from its origin to all parts of the world.

Megarti tea has a lot of special flavors and characteristics that make it popular within India.

In conclusion, India is the world leader in tea, producing more tea than any other country. Its traditional tea culture has endured for a long time, whether it is in religion, culture or life, tea plays an important role.