Tea history: The Legend of Shennong (ca. 2737 BC)

The practice of drinking tea has a long history in China. This is how it all began (apparently)…

In the early years of mankind, when people still hunted for their food, there lived a legendary emperor by the name of Shennong. Shennong had the body of a man, but the head of a bull. Together with Zhu Rong, the God of Fire, he ruled the southern sky in the heavens. One day, after seeing how quickly the population on earth was growing, he decided to leave heaven and teach people how to farm.

Shennong knew that people could not live by hunting animals forever. So, before he descended from heaven, Shennong took with him five types of seeds. These were rice, millet, wheat, beans and hemp. Shennong summoned a crowd of people together and placed the seeds in the earth and covered them with soil. After a few days, seedlings appeared in the ground. He showed the people how to irrigate and fertise the crops. By autumn, the seedlings had grown and Shennong returned to teach people how to harvest their crops. The people were delighted and began farming, as well as hunting and fishing, for their food.

That winter, after the harvest season, the farmers held a festival to show their gratitude to Shennong. However, Shennong’s mind was preoccupied, and he wanted to be alone to think. So he silently left the festival and headed towards the mountains of Xianyang.

Shennong was thinking about the many illnesses that people suffered. He had watched as people became sick and sometimes even died because no one knew how to cure their diseases. He wondered if some of the plants in the mountains could be used as medicine to heal the sick.

When he reached the mountains, he found all types of plants. But how could he tell if the plants would cure disease? He sat and meditated on the secrets of nature for many days and nights in the forest without food or water. When he woke from his trance, he understood the principals of medicine according to Yin and Yan and the Five Elements.

Shennong knew he would have to try all the plants himself to test them as medicine. He chewed the leaves and noticed their flavour; some were sweet while others were very bitter. During his meditation, Shennong’s skin became transparent, and he was able to see inside his body to his internal organs. Whenever he ate a herb or a leaf, he would watch to see where it went in his body and whether their were benefits.

One day, Shennong decided to take a rest under a Camellia tree and boiled some water to drink. Dried leaves from the tree above floated down into the cauldron and infused with the water, creating a pot of tea, marking the first ever infusion of the tea leaf. Intrigued by the delightful fragrance, Shennong took a sip and found it refreshing. He could also see the good that the leaves were doing inside his body.

Sometime later, Shennong ate a poisonous herb by mistake. he immediately fainted and fell to the ground. Luckily, thanks to his divine spirit, he soon woke up. He looked at his body to see what damage the poison had one, and this enabled him to create a cure. [Tea, Shennong found, acts as an antidote against the poisonous effects of some 70 herbs.]

After trying hundreds of herbs, Shennong collected leaves from different plants and dried them in the sun. When they were ready, he came down from the mountain and distributed the medicines to the people. – Abridged extract from ‘Chinese Myths’ by Sun Xuegang and Cai Guoyun

Since Shennong’s discovery, tea has been grown and enjoyed throughout the world.

In the beginning, tea was used in ritual offerings. Then, tea leaves were eaten as a vegetable, or used in medicine. Later, in the fourth and fifth centuries, rice, salt, spices, ginger and orange peel, among other ingredients, were added to tea. In the Tang Dynasty (618-907), tea drinking became an art form and a drink enjoyed by all social classes.

Tea became a popular drink in Buddhist monasteries after the caffeine proved to keep the monks awake during long hours of meditation. For this reason, many monasteries cultivated vast tea fields. Lu Yu (Chinese: 陆羽), author of The Book of Tea, was an orphan brought up and educated in a monastery. It is likely that his experience growing up surrounded by tea inspired his book written during the Tang Dynasty. In The Book of Tea, Lu Yu recorded a detailed account of ways to cultivate and prepare tea, tea drinking customs, the best water for tea brewing and different classifications of tea.

Tea all but disappeared completely from Chinese culture after the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), when many other aspects of early culture were erased during foreign rule. However, the Chinese later became re-accustomed with drinking steeped tea from leaves and continue to drink it this way today.

(c) Felicia Stewart