Chapter 14 Section 1 The Origin of Tea and Its Commodity Status

The earliest title of tea is "tea", which has been seen in oracle bone inscriptions. And mention, when it refers to bitter vegetables. "Mian": "Zhou Yuan  , pansy tea is like sugar", "Psyllium" is aconitum, which is Polygonatum. Polygonatum tastes slightly bitter and sweet, and it is a blood-tonifying medicine. Tea leaves are also slightly Bitter but sweet, it has the function of promoting fluid and clearing away heat. The "tea" mentioned here together with Aconitum should refer to tea. , that is, use tea dregs and Polygonum grass retting to make green manure.

Tea has many different names in ancient times. In addition to "tea", it used to have titles such as "槚", "茶", "蔎 [sheshe]", "荈 [chuan Chuan]" and so on. The sound of "槚" is "Jia", which is the homonym of tea;Yang Xiong's "Dialect" records: "People in Shu call tea "葮萌", "葮萌" is the homonym of "tea tea". "蔎" is an ancient Western Sichuan dialect; "荈" is probably also a dialect.After the Han Dynasty, the word "tea" with a minus one stroke was created, and it was commonly called "tea" from then on.

The earliest cultivation of tea in my country was in the southwest region. According to the "Huayang Guozhi" written by Changzhu (ququ) in the Jin Dynasty, after King Wu defeated Zhou, Ba was a feudal state, and tea, honey, dan, and lacquer from Sichuan were all perennial tributes.Today, there is an old tea tree in Bada Mountain in Menghai County, Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, which is more than 30 meters high. According to identification, it is more than 1,700 years old. This is the oldest tea tree known in the world.The earliest tea planting base found in the literature is Sichuan. "Huayang Guozhi" records: During the Han and Jin Dynasties, tea-producing places in Sichuan included Fuling County, Shifang County, Nan'an County, Wuyang County and Pingyi County (near Qianwei).It can be seen that during the Han and Jin Dynasties, Sichuan had tea production bases from the east, north to southwest. These bases were formed long before the Han and Jin Dynasties.In the list of burial objects (bamboo sticks) unearthed from the Mawangduihou tomb in Changsha, Hunan Province, there is a record of "(Zuo Mu You (upper accounted for the lower shell))", according to the identification, "(Zuo Muyou (upper accounted for the lower shell) ))" is a variant of "槚". It can be seen that tea has been the daily drink of Houmen in the early Western Han Dynasty, and it is still a funeral object after death.Sima Xiangru's "Fan Jiang Pian" mentioned "(上荈下木) [jiejie] Tuo" together with Chinese herbal medicines such as bellflower and coltsfoot. This is the earliest record of tea as a medicinal herb.Wang Bao's "Children's Covenant" stipulated that his domestic slaves had to perform many labors. There are records of "Buying tea in Wudu" and "All tea cooking utensils". Salt has also become a daily necessity.In Yang Xiong's "Shu Du Fu", "Hundreds of flowers (flowers) cast spring, and green tea is green" describes the emerald green of Sichuan tea gardens in the Han Dynasty.It can be seen that during the Western Han Dynasty, officials and officials in Sichuan and Hunan generally drank tea. "Three Kingdoms · Wu Shu · Wei Yao (yao Yao) Biography" records that Wei Yao attended the banquet held by Sun Hao, the last emperor of the Eastern Wu Dynasty. He was not good at drinking, so he used tea instead of wine. .

During the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Southern and Northern Dynasties, Yang Yuanmao, a famous literati in Hongnong County (now Shaanxi), said that the living habits of Yangzhou people (generally referring to Jiangnan and Lingnan) are "drinking tea for pulp", that is, people in the south drink tea and people in Xianbei in the north drink milk. Syrup is a daily drink.Lu Yu's "Tea Classic" listed the places where tea was produced in the Tang Dynasty, including forty or fifty counties south of the Qinling Mountains and the Huaihe River. It can be seen that by the Tang Dynasty, tea cultivation had spread over half of China.

The rumors of tea probably also started in the Tang Dynasty. The monk Jianzhen spread to Japan when he traveled east; the west spread to the west of Asia through Uyghur and Turkic businessmen; and it spread to Europe, America, Africa and Australia in modern times. Tea is a popular drink for thirst quenching, refreshing and health care, and it is a daily commodity consumed in large quantities, so it is also a large taxpayer.Tea has always played an important role in China's national economic life since the middle and late feudal society until now.The Tang Dynasty began to levy tea tax, and also opened up a large number of state-run tea gardens, and implemented tea monopoly, which is called "Guoyan". The court also collected a large amount of tribute tea as reserve materials.Throughout the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, the tea tax was second only to the tax on salt and iron, and became one of the pillars of the country's fiscal revenue.

In the late feudal society, tea was an important export material, and silk and ceramics became the three traditional products exported by China, and this is still the case until now. Tea is closely related to the horse administration of the feudal regime.In the Tang Dynasty, tea was exchanged for hundreds of thousands of war horses from ethnic minorities in the west and north.Before the emergence of new firearms, horses were an important strategic material. Throughout the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, tea was exchanged for war horses of the Bian tribe. In the 17th century, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom successively established the "East India Company" in their colonies Indonesia and India to traffic a large amount of opium to China and a large amount of Chinese tea to Europe for huge profits.With the prevalence of tea drinking in Europe and the United States, the export of Chinese tea has increased greatly. According to statistics, in the 16th year of Guangxu (AD 1890), the amount of exported tea reached 1.34 million quintals, worth 52.2 million taels of silver, accounting for the total export volume at that time. 60% of the value.Dutch and British merchants trafficked Chinese tea for profit, and planted tea extensively in their colonies. From the 18th to the 19th centuries, the colonial governments of India and Indonesia sent people to China to introduce tea seeds and tea seedlings, recruit tea planters and tea producers. Technologists, large-scale production, to compete for the world tea market.Before 1903, China's tea export was still the world leader, but it has been in decline since then.The tea exports of India, Indonesia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Japan and other countries have caught up one after another. With the corruption and incompetence of the Qing court and the government of the Republic of China, the world market of my country's tea is dying. It was not until the founding of the People's Republic of China that it gradually recovered.It has developed rapidly in the past 10 years. In 1992, the output reached 540,000 tons, and the export volume accounted for about 45% of the total output. It has been exported to 83 countries and regions. The daily consumption of tea in Hong Kong alone reached 20 tons. In 1992, the total export volume The volume is nearly 200,000 tons.Foreign exchange earning more than 400 million US dollars.At present, my country has 60 million mu of tea gardens and more than 80 million tea farmers.In the past 10 years, the average annual growth rate of exports has been 5.7%, and it is currently the second largest tea exporter in the world after India.