Let's Talk Tea (Part One)

Howdy, tea friends! I’m going to create a multi-part series, as I have no idea what to blog about. So, let’s start with tea in general, and then we will continue with some information about each type.

So, to start...what is tea? Seems like a simple question, but many beverages that go by tea aren’t really tea at all.

Tea is one type of plant, scientific name of Camellia sinensis. Herbal teas are not tea, because they don’t contain actual tea. Chamomile, Rooibos, Ginseng...they are all sold under the name of tea, but they are what is known as tisanes. It’s important to understand the difference as we talk about tea.

Tea has been consumed for thousands of years, in one form or another. Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world to this day, after water. It wasn’t just a tasty beverage, tea was a matter of life or death for many people . To the north and west, the nomadic tribes of Tibet and Mongolia bred the best horses and hardy livestock. While the areas they lived in are great for grazing livestock, not so great for the dietary needs of humans.

It’s not possible to grow much in the arid steppes of that part of the world, so they needed a source of vitamins and minerals to stay healthy. Imperial government has tea (which is LOADED with vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients), needs horses. Nomadic peoples have horses, needs tea. Hmmmm…

“But, we can’t buy horses with piles of dried leaves, we need something fungible, that all parties can agree on a value”. Thus the “bing” was created.

A modern tea bing.

A bing (Chinese for “disc” or “cookie”) of tea weighs 357 modern grams, although at the time it was probably a round number for weight.

It is created by taking the tea leaves in a cloth bag, steaming them a bit to make them pliable, putting them into a hollowed out stone mold, put the top stone on the mold and stand on it. This creates the traditional “stone pressed pu’er tea”. Tea for livestock trading was always raw pu’er tea.

If you stack seven bings together and wrap it up in bamboo, you have a “tong”. If you group twelve tongs together, that makes a “jian” of tea. And one jian is worth one horse.

On the next blog post, we’ll talk about the different regions, and why there are so many variations of tea, when it all comes from the same plant.

As a little teaser, I’ll leave this picture here, mostly because it includes the Ancient Tea Horse Road. We’ll reference it again, I’m sure.

So, get out there and see what the world has to offer! And take some tea with you!