Chinese tea has always been well-known around the world. Chinese people have been making great contribution to improve people's life.Based on this, tea culture comes out.According to the history of "Shennong (the Chinese god of medicine) ate 72 poisons plants a day, consequently he was poisoned. Occasionally he tasted some leaves and he felt better and turned to normal." The leaves are tea!!
Tea planting and production and drinking tea have had a long history of five thousand years in China.
The elegant tea culture has added much more charm to Chinese long history civilization. Chinese tea, elegant and fragrant, is a fabulous carrier of both material and spiritual civilization. The richful tea culture influenced society, human culture, philosophy, history, literature, art, medicine, health care, craftwork and other fields. It suits all people’s tastes whether they are high-class or poverty people. In the history of China, tea was highly appreciated by the aristocracy, court officials, intellectuals and the ordinary people. People from different provinces, different classes and various nationalities interweave each other into the colorful Chinese tea culture.
Chinese tea culture is the marvelous combination of social science and natural science on tea, has been made up to the holy spirit of truth, kindness and beauty throughout its evolution course.
There is a Chinese poem, THE TEA, that writing “Clean and filth-free,/Is for clear away wordy annoyance./It is a miraculous soul,/Coming out from mountains."
The naturalness and trueness of tea are assimilating to "purity and simplicity" and "returning to trueness and simplicity" of human nature. And then people develop the thought of serving and entertaining guests with tea, making friends with tea, showing respect, geniality, politeness, though simple but elegant interpersonal relationship with tea. Above all, from the nature of tea and tea-involved affairs, people put aesthetic feeling, psychic satisfaction, and cultivation of values and the real gusto of life together and then comprehend.
The famous poem, A POEM ON TEA fully depicts the magic nature of tea: "The first cup helps to moist the throat and the second breaks loneliness. But one cannot find an appropriate word to express his or her feeling after drinking the third cup. The fourth cup induces a little perspiration, which makes drinker forget all the dissatisfaction. The fifth cup helps to clean up human body. The sixth makes the soul sense immortality. So one has better not drink the seventh cup, otherwise he or she will feel coolness in the armpits, and feel like to fly."
In the information era, people experiencing a rapid-paced life in changeable and complicated situation are in bad need of relaxing, adjusting and spiritual advancing. Tea that is highly being praised as "drink of the soul", is a special nurture for our minds. The tea culture will be helpful and useful for people to "explore the natural property of tea, to discover the advantage of tea and to understand the aesthetics of tea."
