TED-Ed, an initiative aimed at young people and the educational world, in collaboration with Shunan Teng, an expert on the history of tea and founder of the New York-based tea house Tea Drunk, has created a 5-minute film chronicling as many as five thousand years of the history of the world’s first most consumed beverage, after water.
Like many TED-Ed videos, The History of Tea is a fun and brilliant film that illustrates with simple and clear animations the most salient moments in the history of tea.
Some trivia and historical facts: did you know that?
- That fateful afternoon when the divine Emperor Shen Nong discovered tea, he had accidentally poisoned himself be 72 times! But before the poison took its deadly effect, a leaf fell into Shen Nong’s mouth: by biting it, the emperor was cured and…saved!
- During the Song Dynasty, tea became the emperors’ favorite beverage, but also a means of artistic expression! Indeed, on the foam of the tea-which at that time was prepared in the style of Matcha-it was customary to make sophisticated drawings, a bit like today’s baristas doodling little hearts on the foam of cappuccino.
- In the 1700s, the price of tea amounted to 10 times the price of coffee.
- In 1839, a sort of Boston Tea Party was organized in China, only instead of tea there was opium: a Chinese official ordered his men to destroy large quantities of Britain’s opium in a grievance against British influence over China. The event, of course, started the first opium war.
- Robert Fortune, the British botanist better known as the “tea thief,” managed to bring not only tea plants but also some Chinese experts to India’s Darjeeling.
Source
The History of Tea – Shunan Teng, TED-Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing