An old industry

Since when people have been drinking tea is hard to say. It is for sure a very long time ago since the first person let a tea leave drop by accident in a cup of hot water and enjoyed the result. Legend has it that it was Shennong (神农); but of course he is a mythical figure. Saying that Shennong discovered tea amounts to saying that people in China have been drinking tea since ever. Even if that is true, it can only be for a small amount of persons: those who by chance lived near wild tea bushes. Until the development of tea cultivation, trade and distribution, it remained  like this. In this article a contract written in the year 59 BC between a man of letters and his servant is used as an indication that there was some kind of tea industry as early as the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-24).

In his contract, which enumerates all the tasks his servant has to fulfil, Wang Bao (王褒) writes among many others tasks “武阳买茶”, which means “buy tea in Wuyang”. Wuyang  is a place near Chengdu, the city where Wang Bao lived. The fact that buying tea is listed among other tasks a servant has to do for his master, shows that at that time there was a tea market with Wuyang as its center and that the product was popular among the upper class. Maybe tea was already being used as a beverage rather than as a medicine, which was its original use. Since tea bushes originally grew in the region of the actual Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, it seems logical that this was the region where the trade of tea emerged first.

Chinese source: “武阳买茶” 茶叶买卖史提前5世纪