How To Distinguish The Different Kinds Of Chinese Tea?

If one drinks Chinese tea beverage just for its aroma and its taste, it might not be important. However, it is very important if one wants to drink tea for health protection because green tea has the highest level of tea antioxidants, and the black tea almost none, with the oolong tea level in-between.

In the past five years, most laboratory and experimental animal studies that supported the conclusion of a health benefit of Chinese tea drinking, especially in chemoprevention against cancer and obesity, have used fresh high-antioxidant green tea or the green tea antioxidant, (-)- epigallocatechin gallate, EGCG in short, as the bioactive testing material to conduct the research. Black tea is not that effective. While the epidemiological evidence is supportive of the benefits of drinking high-antioxidant green tea for cancer prevention, the data on black tea and oolong tea drinkers are not supportive of the benefits of tea drinking for this purpose.

There are three major kinds of Chinese tea, namely green tea, black tea and oolong tea, all derived from the same species of tea tree, commonly known as Camellia sinensis or as Thea sinensis on the FDA list of generally recognized as safe (GRAS) substances. Tea originated in China. As written in ancient medical texts, it was used as a health aid in 2737 BC. Tea became a major commodity in Tang Dynasty (617- 907 AD) when tea drinking gradually evolved into a form of art, but was still largely confined to the privileged elite of the society.

In the old days, fresh leaves directly plucked from the tea tree were boiled journey with constant agitation over the choppy warm ocean water in humid hot weather, the high quality "Pekoe" green tea probably had turned into half-black tea with its characteristic bitter taste as a result of oxidation and degradation when the ship arrived in Holland. It is no wonder that some Europeans would put sugar and milk into the bitter tea from China.

Shortly before and after the downfall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644,oolong tea that was purposely briefly oxidized (half-black tea) and the fully oxidized black tea were introduced for the often hungry peasants in the South as a calorie-preserving beverage and for foreign exports, in about 1650 A.D. As the society turmoil in China led to repeated famines, the poor peasants learned quickly that they should avoid drinking green tea which is an irritant to an emptystomach, and started to drink the half-degraded oolong tea or the fully oxidized black tea instead, in order to preserve the badly needed body fat tosurvive.

The fat-depleting effect of green tea was onlyrecently re-discovered in animal experiments. Theterms of oolong tea and black tea (red tea in Chinese)were introduced to the Chinese vocabulary in the mid 1600’s A.D. The Western tea drinking habit of adding sugar and milk into black tea was initiated by the British in about 1657 A.D. The Japanese and  Chinese tea drinkers never put sugar or milk into their green tea.