World’s Oldest Tea Found in China

Recently, archaeologists discovered the oldest tea in the world buried in a Chinese Jing Emperor Liu Qi’s  tomb. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences retrieved the remains, which are believed to be 2100 years old, from burial pits in Xi’an, .The stash of fine tea tips was spread 42 feet wide and eight inches thick. The oldest written reference to tea is from the year 59 B.C. In another tomb, the Gurgyam Cemetery (built approximately in 200 A.D.) in the Ngari district of western Tibet, archeologists found remains of millets, rice, and a kind of spinach and tiny leaf buds. Researchers believe that the tea must have been  very important since it was buried with emperors  and the discovered tea consisted solely of tea buds, the small unopened leaves of the tea plant usually considered to be of superior quality to ordinary tea leaves. Although the plant remains were too damaged to be identified as leaves and buds, they were mostly likely from the Camellia plant. Tea does not grow in Tibet or Xi’an, and therefore this discovery shows that the trade of tea products occurred in Xi’an as early as 141 years B.C., and westwards into Tibet by the second century. The researchers claimed that,"These data indicate that tea was part of trade of luxury products, alongside textiles, that moved along the Silk Road around 2,000 years ago and were traded up into Tibet.” Tea today is considered the most popular drink after water —drunk regularly by three-quarters of the world's population. While these details help paint a clearer picture of how tea became so popular, for now its origins are still shrouded in mystery.