Hi there! I’m John Green, and welcome to my salon. Today, we’re diving into the world of tea with some fascinating facts. Did you know that tea is the second most popular drink on Earth, right after water? That’s right! It’s even more popular than coffee and soda. Tea has been a favorite drink worldwide for centuries, and I’m excited to share some fun facts about it with you.
Tea comes from a plant called Camellia sinensis. Although there are different types of tea, they all come from this one plant. If you’re drinking something made from herbs or spices that aren’t from Camellia sinensis, it’s called a tisane. But for today, we’ll call everything tea!
There are four main types of tea: black, white, green, and oolong. Black tea is the most oxidized, giving it a strong flavor. White tea is the least processed, keeping it close to its natural state. Green tea is often steamed or fired to enhance its flavor, and oolong is a lightly oxidized Chinese tea. There’s also a fifth type called pu-erh, which is fermented, but it’s not as well-known.
The story of tea’s discovery dates back to 2737 BCE in China. Legend has it that Emperor Shen Nung was sitting with a cup of boiling water when some leaves fell in, creating the first cup of tea. When tea made its way to the West, it was called “tea” by the Dutch East India Company. Interestingly, “chai tea” is a bit redundant because “chai” means tea in Mandarin and Cantonese.
There’s a myth that Thomas Sullivan accidentally invented the tea bag in 1908, but actually, two women named Roberta Lawson and Mary McLaren patented a similar invention in 1901. So, the tea bag was invented on purpose!
Did you know that tea was once used as money? In places like China, Tibet, and Russia, tea was compressed into blocks and used as currency. This practice continued in some parts of Asia until the early 20th century.
Even pirates loved tea! Black Bart, a famous pirate, only drank water and tea. Pirates often stole tea from ships and sold it on the black market. Tea is typically grown at high altitudes, between 3,000 and 7,000 feet above sea level, in countries like China, India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka.
Root beer was originally called root tea. It was created by Charles Elmer Hires in the late 19th century. Tasseomancy, or reading tea leaves to predict the future, became popular in England in the 17th century. It’s a fun and safe way to practice fortune-telling!
In 18th century England, tea was heavily taxed, leading to smuggling. Gangs would steal tea and sell it illegally. There’s also a legend that monkeys were trained to pick oolong tea leaves in China, but today, “Monkey Picked” tea is just a fun name.
Tea parties became popular in England in the 1840s, thanks to the Duchess of Bedford. In Japan, Zen Buddhist tea ceremonies have been around since the 16th century. Surprisingly, Turkey has the highest tea consumption per person, with the UK, Japan, and China trailing behind.
Tea is often linked to health benefits like reduced risks of depression and heart disease. However, experts say you should drink tea if you enjoy it, but there’s no need to force yourself if you don’t.
Just like wine sommeliers, there are tea sommeliers who specialize in pairing tea with food. You can even take classes to become one!
Thanks for joining me on this tea adventure. Let me know if you’re more like John Lennon, who loved tea, or David Bowie, who wasn’t a fan. Remember, don’t forget to be awesome!
Gather different types of tea such as black, green, white, and oolong. Brew each type and taste them. Write down your observations about the flavor, color, and aroma of each tea. Discuss with your classmates which type you prefer and why.
Create a timeline that highlights significant events in the history of tea, from its discovery in 2737 BCE to the invention of the tea bag in the early 20th century. Use drawings or digital tools to make your timeline visually appealing.
Imagine you are living in a time when tea was used as currency. Role-play a market scene where you trade tea blocks for goods. Discuss how this form of currency might have affected trade and daily life.
Using materials like paper and string, design and create your own tea bag. Think about what type of tea you would put inside and why. Share your creation with the class and explain your design choices.
Learn about the art of tasseomancy, or tea leaf reading. After drinking a cup of loose-leaf tea, try to interpret the patterns left by the leaves. Write a short story or prediction based on what you see.
Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:
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Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is a Mental Floss video, and did you know the only beverage on Earth more popular than tea is water? That’s right! Tea is bigger than coffee, bigger than Coca-Cola, and even bigger than diet drinks. It’s been a very popular drink all over the world for centuries, and that’s the first of many fun facts about tea I’m going to share with you today in this video brought to you by our friends at Geico.
So, I guess we’ll start simple with what tea is. Basically, tea leaves come from a plant known as Camellia sinensis. Although there are different varieties of the plant as it’s grown all over, all tea comes from that one plant, Camellia sinensis. Now, you might think you’re drinking tea from a variety of plants, but if it doesn’t have leaves of Camellia sinensis, it’s actually known as tisanes. Tisanes are just any beverage infused with herbs or spices in hot water, but we’re going to refer to all of it as tea for the purposes of this episode because we are not pedantic here at Mental Floss. Nah, who are we kidding? We’re a little bit pedantic.
There are four basic types of real Camellia sinensis, depending on who you ask: black, white, green, and oolong. Oolong is a type of tea that is slightly oxidized. There are hundreds of varieties within those categories, and technically there’s a fifth category, pu-erh, which is fermented tea but doesn’t reach mainstream popularity yet. Black tea is the most oxidized with a more powerful flavor, while white tea is usually leaves in their natural unoxidized form. Green tea has been prepared in a way to bring out a lot of flavor, like it’s been fired or steamed, and oolong is a Chinese tea that’s very slightly oxidized.
But let’s back up a bit and talk about the history of tea. The story goes that it was discovered in 2737 BCE. You can tell that is probably a fictionalized account because anything involving a specific year in the 28th Century BCE is likely fictional. Anyway, it is said that the emperor Shen Nung of China was sitting with a boiling cup of water, and some leaves fell into it. He drank the concoction, and the rest is history.
When the beverage was introduced to the West via the Dutch East India Company, it was called “tea.” We don’t know exactly when or why the pronunciation changed to “tea.” Speaking of tea etymology, it turns out that “chai tea” is kind of a redundancy. Basically, when it first became popular in China, there were two different words for it: “te,” which was the non-Chinese term, and “cha,” which meant tea in Mandarin and Cantonese. So while the Dutch East India Company was selling it as “tea,” there were Portuguese merchants selling it as “cha.” Eventually, “chai tea” became its own beverage, but the name itself kind of means “tea.”
There’s a common misconception that a man named Thomas Sullivan invented the tea bag by accident. It’s said that in 1908, he started transporting tea in silk bags, and customers just took the bags and put them directly into hot water. However, in 1901, two women named Roberto Lawson and Mary McLaren of Wisconsin filed a patent for an invention similar to the modern tea bag, so it was invented on purpose by women.
Then there’s the controversial origin story of Lipton, named after Sir Thomas Lipton, who lived in Glasgow in the late 19th century and packaged and sold tea from modern-day Sri Lanka. Eventually, the company moved to New Jersey. You can compress tea into molds and make big blocks, and throughout history, these have been used as currency in multiple locations, including China, Tibet, Siberia, Russia, and Mongolia. In fact, in some parts of Asia, tea blocks were still used as currency as late as the early 20th century.
Surprisingly, considering their reputation, pirates were really into tea. In fact, one famous tea drinker was the pirate Black Bart, who only drank water and tea—no rum. Pirates also stole a lot of tea from ships and sold it on the black market. Tea is typically grown between 3,000 and 7,000 feet above sea level, and some of the countries that produce the most tea are China, India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka.
Root beer was originally called root tea. It was invented by a pharmacist named Charles Elmer Hires in the late 19th century, and he originally brewed it much like tea. The story goes that he had trouble selling it to the coal miners who made up much of the clientele in his Pennsylvania town, so he switched the name to root beer, and it became wildly popular.
Trying to read the future in tea leaves is known as tasseomancy. “Tasse” means cup in French. Other beverages that are sometimes used include coffee and wine. We don’t know the exact origin of tasseomancy, but it probably came from England around the 17th century when lower classes started having more access to tea. It likely became popular because it was an easy and relatively safe way to practice divination, unlike other popular methods.
Even though lower-class access to tea increased, tea was taxed pretty heavily in 18th century England, leading to a lot of tea smuggling. Various gangs and cartels formed to make this possible. For example, in 1747, a ship operated by the Hawkhurst gang had its contraband, including tea, confiscated by customs officials. The gang stole their tea, leaving all the alcohol from the customs house.
There’s a legend that in ancient China, monkeys were trained by Buddhist monks to pick oolong tea leaves. You can still buy tea described as “Monkey Picked,” but just to be clear, it isn’t. In 1922, a service station was built near Zillah, Washington, in the shape of a teapot, which was supposed to evoke the Teapot Dome scandal involving President Harding and bribery. You can still visit it in Zillah today.
In early 2016, researchers found the world’s oldest tea in a Chinese tomb. They were tea leaves from the tomb of Han Dynasty Emperor Jing, who was buried around 141 BCE. The London tea auction was a major center for the international tea trade for over 300 years, from 1679 through 1998. Every quarter, there were tea auctions, and by the 1950s, about a third of all tea sold in the world went through the auction.
So, I think we’ve made it pretty clear that the British take their tea quite seriously. The British Standards Institute regularly releases a guide on how to prepare tea. One released in 2016 was six pages long and covered everything, including the ideal teapot, tea-to-water ratio, and temperature. In fact, some British tanks even have a way to brew tea on board. It’s a requirement that these have a way to boil water onboard, mostly so that armies can have tea and other rations.
If you ever go to war with the United Kingdom, just remember to attack at tea time. They’ll be like, “Oh God, what do we do? How do we get to the guns of the tank?” No, I’m reading through my six-page manual. It takes 40 minutes just to drink the tea!
Speaking of transportation, you may have noticed that tea tastes weird on planes. Basically, the boiling point of water on a plane is about 18°F lower than it is on the ground due to air pressure, which makes the brewing process more difficult. That’s why your coffee and tea taste different.
Tea parties became a tradition in England around the 1840s. Anna Maria Russell, the Duchess of Bedford, often gets credit for their popularity. She noticed that around 4 p.m., between meals, she’d get a little hungry and restless, so she started hosting tea and snacks. Her friend Queen Victoria attended a few of these events, and they then became very fashionable.
However, the English aren’t the only people with their tea traditions. Japanese Zen Buddhist tea ceremonies have been going on since the 16th century and are quite serious, with a specific dress code, decor, and way to prepare tea. But neither Japan nor the United Kingdom has the highest tea consumption per capita; that would be Turkey. The United Kingdom is fifth on the list, Japan 24th, China 33rd, and the United States all the way down at number 69.
Speaking of tea consumption, I was told that you’re supposed to put the tea bag in first and then pour the hot water over it so the tea wouldn’t get cold. I thought it was logical and followed it for quite a few years until I made a mistake and put the tea bag in after the hot water. He later told me that he was wrong about that whole thing.
To contrast, David Bowie reportedly hated tea. It’s said that he had a gross cup of it when he was five years old, although that may just be a rumor. On his first date with Iman, they went out for tea, and she later recalled that it was odd because of his distaste for the drink.
Now, you’ve probably heard many different health benefits of tea, like its association with lower risks of depression, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. But of course, this is all correlation, not necessarily causation. Experts say if you like tea, drink it; if not, don’t feel the need to pick up the habit.
Finally, I returned to my salon to tell you about tea sommeliers. Yes, they exist! Just like wine sommeliers, you can take classes at the rhyming named P.D. in Paris, and some restaurants work with these sommeliers, like Eleven Madison Park and the Atara in New York City, so they know what food to pair with different teas.
Thanks for watching this Mental Floss video, which is made with the help of all these nice people, and thanks again to Geico for making today’s video possible. Let me know in the comments if you’re more of a John Lennon or a David Bowie when it comes to tea. I myself was long a Bowie, but I find myself working toward becoming a Lennon. Anyway, as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome!
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This version removes any inappropriate or sensitive content while maintaining the informative nature of the original transcript.
Tea – A beverage made by steeping the dried leaves of the tea plant in boiling water. – In the 18th century, tea became a popular drink in Europe, leading to significant trade with China.
History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs. – Learning about the history of ancient civilizations helps us understand how modern societies developed.
China – A country in East Asia, known for its rich history and contributions to science and culture. – The Great Wall of China is one of the most famous landmarks in the world, showcasing the country’s historical significance.
Currency – A system of money in general use in a particular country. – The invention of paper currency in China revolutionized trade and commerce.
Pirates – People who attack and rob ships at sea. – During the Golden Age of Piracy, pirates like Blackbeard were feared across the Caribbean.
Health – The state of being free from illness or injury. – Advances in medical science have greatly improved public health over the past century.
Types – Categories or kinds of something. – There are different types of governments throughout history, including monarchies and democracies.
Consumption – The using up of a resource or the act of consuming something. – The consumption of fossil fuels has increased dramatically since the Industrial Revolution.
Invention – A new device, method, or process developed from study and experimentation. – The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg changed the way information was shared and preserved.
Traditions – Customs or beliefs passed down from generation to generation. – Many cultures have unique traditions that are celebrated during festivals and holidays.
