Read enough about tea and you'll come across the legend of Shennong, sometimes presented as a mythical god, 'The Divine Farmer' who gave humans the gift of agriculture, sometimes as an ancient emperor, 'The Medicine King' who discovered the properties of various medicinal plants.
Shennong was an intensely curious guy, so the story goes, and to attain an understanding of plants he would eat them. On one of his excursions he consumed a disagreeable flower, so he sat down under a tree and started to boil some water to recover. Into that water fell a tea leaf from a nearby tree. Being prone to experiments, Shennong drank the brew anyway and felt much better, attributing his revived state to tea.
While Shennong's story is probably closer to myth than fact, archaeological evidence suggests tribes along the geographical belt where tea originated—Yunnan province in southwest China through the present northern borders of its neighbours India, Burma, Laos and Vietnam—consumed tea with other plants, seeds and barks as remedies.
Chinese records also show that tea was a medicine before it was a beverage; recipes that include tea in various herbal concoctions to relieve a variety of ailments pre-date art that depicts tea as a libation in teahouses.
When tea arrived in Europe it was also considered a health beverage at first. Dutch physician Dr Nikolas Dirx, who wrote as Nikolas Tulp* in the 1641 book Observationes Medicae, said that tea drinkers are “exempt from all maladies and reach an extreme old age” and that tea cures “headaches, colds, ophthalmia, catarrh, asthma, sluggishness of the stomach, and intestinal troubles”. A 1658 newspaper advertisement by the Sultaness Head Coffee House in London called tea 'That Excellent and by all Physicians approved China drink'.
Today you won't go a month without a media story relating tea to health, from tea that prevents cancer to tea that cures diabetes, helps you lose weight and brings you back from the dead. (Just kidding about that last one, though the 'Tea revives you' ads always made me think that.)
Half the battle is cutting through the spin and medical illiteracy in the media to find out what a study has really found and under what parameters, because I can tell you now I will not be microwaving teabags to boost the bioactives in my cuppa.
And the other half is that the link between tea and health is not always one that is (or can be) scientifically measured and studied. Empirical evidence suggests, for example, that making tea improves your mental health. How much of this is the beverage and how much of this is the act of self-care has not been thoroughly examined, nor can it be when those rituals and feelings are so personal.
Is tea a health beverage? A medicine? That's for your body to answer. But I'll drink to that.
* Not to be confused with the contemporaneous surgeon Dr Nicolaes Tulp, mayor of Amsterdam and subject of Rembrandt's painting 'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp', though the chosen pseudonym may have been deliberately similar.
