中国是茶的原产地,也是最早发现、利用茶叶的国家。茶最早是作为药用的。自古以来有“神农尝百草,日遇七十二毒,得茶而解之”的传说。一百多部中医名著上都有关于茶的药用功效的记载。茶从药用、食用到饮用经历了漫长的岁月。到了唐代茶的清饮成为主流,并传入朝鲜、日本等国。17世纪初叶,中国茶叶开始批量传入欧洲,曾风靡于欧洲的王室宫廷。到了20世纪90年代,随着科学的进步,人体衰老与自由基相关性理论的确立,茶的药用保健功能已越来越被医学研究而证实。因此,在西方国家又再次掀起了饮茶热,如美国从1992年开始,各种饮料消费呈下降趋势,而茶叶消费却一直稳步上 China is the country of origin for tea and is the first country to discover and use tea. Tea was first used as a medicine. Since ancient times, there have been legends that “Shen Nong tasted a hundred herbs and met seventy-two poisons on the day and got tea and solved it”. More than one hundred Chinese medicine masterpieces have recorded the medicinal effects of tea. Tea has gone through a long period of time from medicinal use to food consumption. Tea drinking in the Tang Dynasty became the mainstream and was introduced into North Korea, Japan and other countries. At the beginning of the 17th century, Chinese tea began to be introduced into Europe in batches, and it was once popular in the royal court of Europe. In the 1990s, with the advancement of science, the establishment of human aging and the theory of free radical correlation, the medicinal health care function of tea has been increasingly confirmed by medical research. As a result, tea drinking fever has once again set off in Western countries. For example, since the United States began in 1992, beverage consumption has been on a downward trend, while tea consumption has been steadily increasing.