Tea
Tea bush in Sri Lanka
Wild tea bushes grew in southern China, where people first began in the Stone Age to make tea by drying tea leaves and then steeping them in hot water. By about 2000 BC, even before they were farming wheat, people in southern China were growing tea bushes on farms. Southern China seems to be the only place where people tamed wild tea bushes for farming, and everybody else got their tea bushes from those first tea farmers.
By the time of the Han Dynasty, about 200 BC, Chinese doctors used to tell sick people to drink tea as a kind of medicine. There was also a tradition of offering tea to guests when they came to your house. People who were too poor to buy tea offered their guests hot water.
Until the 1600's AD, people only drank tea in China; nobody else knew about tea.
When European travelers first began coming to China in the 1600's AD, Chinese people offered them tea to drink. The English word "tea" comes from the Chinese word "te" for tea. These Europeans took lots of tea back to Europe, where tea became very popular. But tea bushes won't grow well in Europe's wet, cold climate. Tea bushes need to be hot and dry. So the Europeans had to keep buying all their tea from China. To get around this problem, the British, who had conquered India, began to grow tea there, and soon a lot of the world's tea came from India.
For more information about tea, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Ancient Agriculture: From Foraging to Farming, by Michael and Mary Woods (2000). For middle schoolers, with plenty of information about how farming got started, and how it worked.
Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Cookbook, by Edyth Young Cottrell (1974).
Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World : Responses to Risk and Crisis, by Peter Garnsey (1988). By a leading specialist in Greek and Roman food and farming, and not too hard to read. Especially good on crop failure.
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