Origin of Tea – A legend of Shen Nong from China

China is the homeland of tea, taking a leading position in the planting, producing, and drinking of tea. The discovery and usage of tea have a history of four to five thousand years in China  This is based on a legend about Shen Nong.

It is said that Shen Nong is the first man to discover tea. He is called the father of agriculture and herbal medicine in China. In Remote Antiquity, people knew very little about plants. Sheng Nong tasted various kinds of plants to find out their features as food or as medicine. Fortunately Shen Nong had a transparent stomach, which made it possible for him, to observe the reactions in his stomach after eating the plants. It is said that Shen Nong tried 72 different kinds of poisonous plants in a day and he lay on the ground, barely alive. At this moment he noticed several leaves dropping from the tree beside him, giving off gusts of fragrance. With curiosity and with habit, Shen Nong put the leaves in his mouth and chewed them. After a while, he felt well and energetic again. So he picked more leaves to eat and thus cleared all the poison in his body. The magic leaves were tea.

The period Shen Nong lived was four to five thousand years ago, so it is said that the history of tea in China is 5000 years long. This legend was recorded in the book “Shen Nong’s Materia Medica”. However, neither the author nor the age of this book can be verified.

Based on reliable historical material, as early as the 2nd century BC (Western Han Dynasty), Sima Xiangru in Sichuan recorded 20 kinds of medicines at that time in his “Fan Jiang Chapter”, among which tea was included.

According to the records of the “state of Huayang · records of Ba” written by Chang Yu of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, among the tribute of the state of Ba Zi, there was tea, which was not collected in the wild, but planted in the garden. This statement shows that the ancient Ba people living in the south of Shaanxi have used and planted tea for at least 3,000 years.