Academic Reading — All-Types Test 9

Reading passage

The History of Tea Cultivation A Few beverages can claim a lineage as long or as contested as that of tea. According to a tradition recorded in later Chinese writings, the drink was discovered by accident when leaves from a wild shrub drifted into a pot of water being boiled in the open air. Whatever the truth of such stories, botanists agree that the plant now known as Camellia sinensis originated in the highlands where present-day southwestern China meets the northern reaches of Southeast Asia. There, at elevations that offered cool nights and generous rainfall, the shrub grew wild long before anyone thought to gather it deliberately. B The transition from foraging to farming was gradual. For centuries the leaf was treated chiefly as a medicine, chewed or steeped to relieve fatigue and aid digestion, and only slowly did it acquire the status of a daily refreshment. By the early centuries of the first millennium, small plots devoted to the shrub were being tended in the river valleys of the region, and growers had begun to notice that plants raised on misty slopes yielded a more delicate flavour than those grown on the plains. This observation, passed from one generation of cultivators to the next, laid the foundation for the elaborate grading systems that would emerge much later. C It was under the Tang dynasty that tea drinking became a genuinely national habit and, with it, an object of serious study. A scholar of the period compiled a celebrated treatise that described how the shrub should be planted, when the leaves ought to be picked, and the correct manner of preparing the finished drink. The work did more than record existing practice; by circulating widely it standardised techniques across a vast territory and encouraged landowners to convert marginal hillsides into orchards of neat, clipped bushes. Taxes levied on the trade soon became an important source of revenue for the state, a fact that ensured official interest in the crop for centuries to come. D Cultivation did not remain a Chinese monopoly for long. Monks returning from study abroad are thought to have carried seeds to Japan, where the shrub was established in temple gardens and, in time, woven into the refined ritual of the tea ceremony. The plant travelled by land as well as by sea: caravans crossing the mountain passes traded compressed bricks of tea for the horses of Central Asia, and along these routes the habit spread to peoples who had never seen the bush growing. Each region that adopted the leaf adapted it to local taste, adding butter and salt in one place, spices in another, so that a single plant gave rise to a remarkable diversity of drinks. E European traders encountered tea only in the seventeenth century, and their appetite for it transformed the geography of cultivation. Demand in the West grew so rapidly that the imbalance of trade alarmed the governments whose merchants paid for every chest in silver. In an effort to break their dependence on a single supplier, these powers set about establishing plantations in territories they controlled. Seeds and, more importantly, the closely guarded knowledge of how to process the leaf were smuggled out at considerable risk, and within a few decades vast estates had been planted on the hillsides of South Asia and on the island then known as Ceylon. The industrial methods introduced there, with their emphasis on volume and uniformity, produced a beverage quite unlike the artisanal teas of its homeland. F Today the shrub is grown in dozens of countries across several continents, and the leaf ranks among the most widely consumed drinks on earth after water itself. Yet for all the mechanisation of the modern estate, the essentials of good cultivation have altered surprisingly little. The finest crops still come from cool, high ground where the plant grows slowly; the youngest leaves and the unopened bud are still the most prized; and the moment of picking still determines much of what ends up in the cup. In this respect the grower of the twenty-first century remains bound to the same natural rhythms that guided the first farmers on those misty Asian slopes.