Some interesting, amusing and humorous facts about tea.
- Tea was supposedly discovered by the Chinese Emperor Shen-Nung when the wind blew tea leaves into boiling water. This is said to have happened nearly five thousand years ago.
- Next to water, tea is the most-consumed beverage in the world.
- The Dutch may have been the first to introduce tea to Europe and America. The European claim is rivalled by the Portuguese, who claim that the Jasper de Cruz, a Jesuit, who brought the beverage to Europe for the first time in 1560
- The Irish drink more tea than the English.
- Before the English began drinking tea for breakfast, they usually drank ale, or beer. This had been the common practice ever since the Middle Ages.
- During the Battle of Britain, stocks of tea were cached in secret locations all over England to protect them from the bombs of the Luftwaffe.
- The U.S. is the only nation in the world that consumes more iced tea than hot tea.
- Taxes on tea were among the causes of the American Revolution. In the famous ‘Boston Tea Party’ of 1773, colonists dressed as Native Americans dumped 45 tons of tea in the harbour at Boston, Massachusetts.
- Many Indians love ‘masala tea’, flavoured with a range of spices including coriander and cloves.
- The French, Koreans and Vietnamese prefer their tea without milk.
- Iranians will hold a cube of sugar between their teeth while drinking tea.
- Tibetans prefer to flavour their tea with yak butter.
- Ceylon Tea was an enormous hit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, where over one million packets were sold.
- It takes between three and five years before a newly planted tea bush is ready for plucking. The higher the altitude, the longer it takes to reach maturity.
- Once mature, the bush will yield tea for fifty years or more.
It takes four years for the average tea bush to produce a kilo (2.2lb) of finished black tea. - The largest cultivated tea-bush on record was found on an estate of the Battawatta Group at Madulsima in Uva district in 1934. It had a diameter of 7.5m (24ft) and a circumference of 21m (67ft). It yielded almost 2kg (more than 4lb) of green leaf it in a single day’s plucking.
- There are over 3,000 different varieties of tea – but all of it, whether black, green, white, or oolong comes from the same plant, Camellia sinesis.
- Herbal tea is not really tea, but a tea-like drink made from flowers, fruits or herbs. ‘Flavoured’ teas, on the other hand, are made of real tea with various added essences, including herbal ones.
- Tea contains between one-third and one-half as much caffeine as coffee.
- Tea is known to be a mild appetite suppressant; a fact many slimmer’s find worth remembering.
- One cup of white tea contains as high a concentration of antioxidants as 10 cups of apple juice.
- Tea bags contain fine leaf particles known as ‘fannings’ or ‘dust’, which tend to brew very quickly and produce a relatively strong liquor. The first tea bags were produced in 1904.
- Before the tea bag came the ‘tea egg’ and the ‘tea ball’ – perforated metal containers filled with loose leaves and dropped into boiling water. A chain was attached to the ball to aid retrieval.
- The art of foretelling the future by ‘reading the tea leaves’ is known as ‘tassology’.
- Sprinkling dry tea leaves over charcoal adds a piquant flavour to barbecues.
- Tea bags can be used to reduce the swelling of puffy eyes. Moisten a tea bag and keep it in place over the eye for about twenty minutes.
- Cold tea applied on patches of sunburn helps to reduce the irritation.