From Shennong's Discovery to Gongfu Tea: A 5,000-Year Brew

On an evening in 2024, in a candlelit hall at the University of Cambridge, a hush fell over an audience of students and scholars as a Chinese tea master lifted a small clay teapot and began to pour. The stream of amber liquid fell in a thin, unbroken arc into a cup no larger than a thimble, and the scent of oolong tea mingled with the smell of old wood and books. It was part of a Chinese tea culture exchange that brought tea artists to Cambridge and to SOAS in London, where audiences were invited not merely to taste tea but to understand the rituals, philosophy, and history contained in a single cup. As the organizers put it, China did not simply give the world a drink; it gave the world a way of slowing down.

That claim has five thousand years of history behind it. Tea — the world’s most consumed beverage after water — began its journey in China, and the story of how a medicinal leaf became a philosophy of life is one of the great cultural epics of the ancient world.

The Divine Farmer’s Discovery

According to legend, the discovery of tea is credited to Shennong, the mythical Divine Farmer who taught the Chinese people agriculture and medicine some five thousand years ago. One version of the story says that Shennong, who tasted hundreds of herbs to test their properties, was boiling water beneath a wild tea tree when a few leaves drifted into his pot. He drank the brew, found it refreshing and restorative, and tea entered the world. The legend is recorded in the ancient herbal classic Shennong Ben Cao Jing, which describes tea’s medicinal virtues with a physician’s precision.

For many centuries, tea was consumed primarily as medicine and as food. Leaves were chewed, brewed, or mixed into porridge, and tea was valued for its ability to aid digestion, clear the mind, and counteract fatigue. Only gradually, over the course of the first millennium AD, did tea evolve from a tonic into a daily pleasure — and it was the Tang dynasty that completed that transformation.

The Tang Dynasty: Tea Comes of Age

The Tang dynasty (618–907) was tea’s golden age. The monk and poet Lu Yu wrote the Classic of Tea (Cha Jing) around 780 AD — the world’s first comprehensive treatise on the subject — covering everything from cultivation and picking to water quality and brewing vessels. Tea drinking spread from monasteries and courts to the wider population, becoming nothing less than a national habit. Tang poets celebrated the drink in verse; Lu Tong’s famous Seven Bowls of Tea describes how each successive bowl lifts the drinker toward enlightenment. By the end of the dynasty, tea was well on its way to becoming China’s national drink — a status it has never relinquished.

Commerce followed taste. Caravans carried compressed tea bricks along the ancient Tea-Horse Road, across snowbound passes into Tibet and beyond, where tea was traded for war horses — a traffic so vast that it shaped the economies and politics of western China for centuries. The Song dynasty refined the art further: emperors themselves composed treatises on tea, and the elegant whisked-tea ceremonies of the Song court would later inspire the tea culture of Japan. In the Ming dynasty, the practice of steeping loose leaves in hot water — the way most of the world drinks tea today — became standard, and the great tea-producing regions of China settled into the patterns they still follow.

Six Families of Tea

All tea comes from the same plant, Camellia sinensis; it is the processing that creates the astonishing variety of Chinese tea. Chinese tradition recognizes six main families. Green tea (lvcha), unoxidized and quickly heated, preserves the fresh, grassy character of the leaf — Longjing from Hangzhou and Biluochun from Jiangsu are among its most famous members. Black tea (hongcha, literally red tea), fully oxidized, yields the rich, dark liquor that Westerners call black tea — Keemun and Lapsang Souchong among them. Oolong tea, partially oxidized, sits elegantly between green and black, its complex aromas prized in Fujian and Guangdong; Tieguanyin and Da Hong Pao are legendary examples. White tea, barely processed, is delicate and pale. Yellow tea, rare and subtly sweet, undergoes a gentle yellowing stage. And dark tea (heicha), fermented and aged — most famously Pu’er — grows smoother and deeper with the years, a wine-like quality unique among the world’s teas.

Each family has its own terroir, its own vessels, and its own devoted connoisseurs. A Longjing drinker from Hangzhou can identify the slope where a leaf was picked; a Pu’er collector will age cakes of tea for decades as a European might age fine wine. But one ritual tradition stands above the rest as the emblem of Chinese tea culture: gongfu tea.

Gongfu: The Art of Slow Tea

Gongfu tea (gongfu cha), which originated in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong and in Fujian, is less a way of making tea than a way of being with it. The name means roughly tea made with skill and patience. The equipment is miniature: a small Yixing clay pot that absorbs the flavor of years of use, cups the size of walnuts, a kettle, and a tray to catch the overflow — the four treasures of the tea table. The procedure is a choreographed sequence: warming the pot, rinsing the cups, loading the leaves, pouring the first infusion to awaken them, then brewing successive infusions of seconds each, every round with its own character. Practitioners speak of pouring from a height to let the water breathe, of closing the gate to catch the moon as the last drops fall, and of a good leaf that can be brewed a dozen times or more, revealing a new face at every round.

Beneath the ceremony lies a philosophy. Gongfu tea demands attention: to the water’s temperature, the length of an infusion, the changing aroma of the leaf. In a culture increasingly ruled by speed, the tea table is a deliberate protest — a small, quiet republic where patience is the only currency. Guests are honored, silences are comfortable, and the conversation, like the tea, is allowed to develop slowly.

Chinese tea culture has long been summarized in four ideals: harmony (he), tranquility (jing), joy (yi), and truth (zhen). Harmony is the balance of water, leaf, and fire; tranquility is the stillness the tea table creates around it; joy is the pleasure of sharing a good brew with good company; and truth is the honesty of a leaf that cannot be faked. These four words, inscribed on the walls of tea houses from Fuzhou to Chengdu, are the closest thing Chinese culture has to a formal tea creed.

Tea Houses: The Living Rooms of China

Tea in China has always been a social art, and its natural home is the tea house. In Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, tea houses are open-air living rooms where customers lounge in bamboo chairs, sip jasmine tea, and chat for hours for the price of a single pot. In Hangzhou, tea houses look out over West Lake, where the best Longjing grows. In Guangzhou, the tea house merges with the dim sum restaurant in the ritual of yum cha — drinking tea — as families gather on weekend mornings over trolleys of dumplings and endless refills. And in Beijing, the old-style tea house stages opera and storytelling alongside the brew, preserving the world in which tea, talk, and art were one. Even at home, the first act of Chinese hospitality is a cup of tea: the guest has barely sat down before the leaves are in the pot.

A Leaf That Crosses Oceans

Modern science has caught up with the legends, confirming what Shennong’s descendants always claimed: tea is rich in antioxidants and compounds that calm the mind and protect the heart. Yet for most Chinese, the argument for tea was never merely medical. In 2024, that long tradition was on display in Britain, as Chinese tea artists carried the gongfu ceremony to Cambridge and SOAS in London, and similar exchanges took place in universities and cultural centers around the world. Coverage of the events, including in People’s Daily, emphasized what the artists themselves insisted: that tea is not a product to be exported but a culture to be shared.

The exchange ran both ways. British tea drinkers discovered that the leaf in their afternoon cup has Chinese ancestors; Chinese visitors to Cambridge sipped their own country’s tea in a foreign lecture hall and found it tasted like home. Tea, which traveled from China to the world by ship and caravan over two millennia, is now completing the circle — returning as a cultural ambassador, carrying with it the rituals of an entire civilization.

Five thousand years after Shennong’s accidental brew, tea remains what it has always been in China — a medicine, a pleasure, a ritual, a philosophy. It is the art of the pause, the science of patience, the hospitality of a people who believe that a good cup, properly made and properly shared, can hold the whole of civilization in its steam. China gave tea to the world; the world is still learning to drink it slowly.

Sources: People’s Daily; TravelChinaGuide