9072View
42m 57sLenght
56Rating

A Mystery Drink - The History Of Tea - History TV Tea is an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to Asia.[4] After water, it is the most widely consumed drink in the world.[5] There are many different types of tea; some teas, like Darjeeling and Chinese greens, have a cooling, slightly bitter, and astringent flavour,[6] while others have vastly different profiles that include sweet, nutty, floral or grassy notes. Tea originated in southwestern China, where it was used as a medicinal drink.[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 the West during the 16th century.[8] During the 17th century, drinking tea became fashionable among Britons, who started large-scale production and commercialization of the plant in India to bypass a Chinese monopoly at that time. The phrase herbal tea usually refers to infusions of fruit or herbs made without the tea plant, such as steeps of rosehip, chamomile, or rooibos. These are also known as tisanes or herbal infusions to distinguish them from "tea" as it is commonly construed. 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.[9][10][11] 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 te in Min Chinese.[12] 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;[13] 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.[14] There were other ancient words for tea, though ming (茗) is the only other one still in common use. Read More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea Subscribe For More Documentary Films: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsc7tosS2c0T-4_y94j23vw?sub_confirmation=1