Health tea has a long history, which has been in China for thousands of years.
In the history of China, tea first appeared as a medicine. It is recorded in Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica: "Shennong tasted a hundred herbs, and when he encountered seventy-two poisons, he removed them with tea." At that time, "tea" was wild tea, which was the first time that human beings realized the medical function of tea, but it was tea, not tea. Judging from the existing ancient documents, it should be the Bashu people in the Spring and Autumn Period who first used tea as a drink. Because Gu, a famous scholar in the Qing Dynasty, put forward in the Record of the Day: "After Qin people took Shu, they only had tea." Thus, the earliest history of health tea can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn Period.
By the Western Han Dynasty, drinking tea had become a part of the daily life of the upper class at that time. According to Wang Bao's book Tongle in the Western Han Dynasty, there was a custom of "making tea at home" among scholars at that time. At this time, drinking tea was limited to the upper class, but it was not popular. The main way was to boil tea.
The real popularity of drinking tea was in the Tang Dynasty. At that time, not only the upper class liked to drink tea, but also the common people drank tea. Lu Yu, a Cha Sheng, described the grand occasion of tea popularity at that time in The Book of Tea: "... Xie An, a follower of Zuo Si, seemed to be drinking tea, which was based on that time, immersed in the secular world and flourished in the national dynasty. Whether it is Jingzhou or Yuzhou, it has become a must for every family. "
During Song and Yuan Dynasties, tea became more and more popular. With the participation of literati, drinking tea for health has become more elegant. At that time, people attached great importance to tea products, temperature, cooking methods and drinking effects. The expansion of the Yuan Empire spread the wind of drinking tea to the places where Mongolian fighters went.
The Ming and Qing dynasties were the heyday of the development of health tea, and the way of drinking tea changed from boiling tea to making tea, which appeared in the modern sense. People in the Ming Dynasty began to add milk, lemon and sugar to tea. Tea drinking became a common practice in the Ming Dynasty, which was mainly manifested in literati chanting romantic charm and often enjoying tea for entertainment, so there were countless works about tea in the Ming Dynasty. Scholars and gifted scholars often take "tea" as the topic in their paintings and calligraphy, such as Wen Zhiming's tea tasting map, Tang Yin's tea tasting map and Chou Ying's Songting Spring Trial map. In the Qing Dynasty, the cultural nature of tea drinking was greatly weakened, and it was more practical and utilitarian.