The World of Caffeine (8 page)

An evocative etymology provided for the word “coffee” links it to the region of Kaffa (now usually spelled “Kefa”) in Ethiopia, which is today one of Africa’s noted growing districts.
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Some say that because the plant was first grown in that region, and was possibly first infused as a beverage there, the Arabs named it after that place. Others, with equally little authority, turn this story on its head and claim that the district was named for the bean.

But perhaps the best fabulous etymology combines two of these theories and throws in a prototypical Arabian fantasy of the divine, the demonic, and the marvelous. It accepts that coffee was named for Kaffa and at the same time links the word
“qahwa”
in the sense of “wanting no more,” to the name of the district. The idea is based on several Islamic tales that derive the name “Kaffa” from the same Arabian root for “it is enough” as mentioned above:

There, of course, the priest promptly discovered a coffee tree laden with red berries, which berries he immediately boiled, naming the brew after the place to which Allah had led him.

From ancient times, the Chinese have elaborated a pretense of tradition and descent that can best be described as a dream of antiquity in a time that never was. Affecting to trace her customs, philosophies, and pedigrees to a more venerable age than those of other nations, the Chinese culture has, in the mirror of mythological history, assumed the cloak of dignity that accords with precedence. Because tea has long been uniquely prominent in Chinese life, an effort to locate its origin in the remote past became inevitable.

Such an effort was realized in the legend of Shen Nung, mythical first emperor of China, a Promethean figure, honored as the inventor of the plow and of husbandry, expositor of the curative properties of plants, and, most important for our story, the discoverer of tea. According to the legend, Shen Nung sat down in the shade of a shrub to rest in the heat of the day. Following a logic of his own that would have appeared mysterious to an onlooker, he decided to cool off by building a fire and boiling some water to drink, a practice he had begun after noticing that those who drank boiled water fell sick less often than those who imbibed directly from the well. He fed his fire with branches from a tea bush, and a providential breeze knocked a few of the tiny leaves into his pot. When Shen Nung drank the resulting infusion, he became the first to enjoy the stimulant effect and delicate refreshment of tea.
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Shen Nung, true to his cognomen, “Divine Healer,” details the medicinal uses of
ch’a,
or tea, in the
Pen ts’ao,
a book-length compilation of his medical records, dated, with daunting precision by much later scholars, at 2737 B.C. The entries in this book include unmistakable references to the diuretic, antibacterial, bronchodilating, stimulating, and mood-enhancing effects we now attribute to caffeine:

In fact, the earliest edition of the
Pen ts’ao
dates from the Neo-Han dynasty (A.D. 25 to 221), and even this book does not yet mention tea. The tea reference was interpolated after the seventh century, at which time the word
“ch’a”
first came into widespread use.

Another traditional account purporting to tell about the early use of tea by an ancient emperor says that, as early as the twelfth century B.C., tribal leaders in and around Szechuan included tea in their offerings to Emperor Wen, duke of Chou and founder of the Chou dynasty (1122–256 B.C.). Wen was a legendary folk hero and purported author of the
Erh Ya,
the first Chinese dictionary. However, because the earliest extant source for this tea tribute is the
Treatise on the Kingdom of Huayang,
by Chang Ju, a history of the era written in A.D. 347,
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the story is not very helpful in establishing that tea was used in China before the first millennium B.C.

To Lao Tzu (600–517 B.C.), the founder of Taoism, is ascribed, by a Chinese text of the first century B.C., the notion that tea is an indispensable constituent of the elixir of life. The Taoist alchemists, his followers, who sought the secret of immortality, certainly believed this, dubbing tea “the froth of the liquid jade.” (Unlike their Western counterparts, who searched for both the secret of eternal life and the power to turn base metal into gold, the Chinese alchemists confined their quest to improving health and extending life.) The custom of offering tea to guests, still honored in China, supposedly began in an encounter that occurred toward the end of Lao Tzu’s life. An embittered and disillusioned man, the spiritual leader, having seen his teachings dishonored in his own land and foreseeing a national decline, drove westward on a buffalo-cart, intending to leave China for the wild wastes of Ta Chin in central Asia, an area that later became part of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. The customs inspector at the Han Pass border gate turned out to be Yin Hsi, an elderly sage who had waited his entire life in the previously unsatisfied expectation of encountering an avatar. Recognizing the holy fugitive and rising
to the occasion, Yin Hsi stopped Lao Tzu, served him tea, and, while they drank, persuaded him to commit his teachings to the book that became the revered
Tao Te Ching,
or
The Book of Tao.

Probably what was genuinely the earliest reference in Chinese literature adducing the capacity of tea, through what we now know is the agency of caffeine, to improve mental operations is found in the
Shin Lun,
by Hua Tuo (d. 220 B.C.). In this book, the famous physician and surgeon, credited with discovering anesthesia, taught that drinking tea improved alertness and concentration, a clear reference to what we today understand as caffeine’s most prominent psychoactive effects: “To drink
k’u
t’u
[bitter
t’u
] constantly makes one think better.”
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Awareness of caffeine’s efficacy as a mood elevator was also evidenced in Liu Kun, governor of Yan Chou and a leading general of the Qin dynasty (221–206 B.C.), who wrote to his nephew, asking to be sent some “real tea” to alleviate his depression. In 59 B.C., in Szechuan, Wang Bao wrote the first book known to provide instructions for buying and preparing tea.
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The volume was a milestone in tea history, establish ing that, by its publication date, tea had become an important part of diet, while remaining in use as a drug.

One of the most entertaining stories about tea to emerge from Oriental religious folklore is a T’ang dynasty (618–906 A.D.) Chinese or Japanese story about the introduction of tea to China. This story teaches that tea’s creation was a miracle worked by a particularly holy man, born of his self-disgust at his inability to forestall sleep during prayer. The legend tells of the monk Bodhidharma, famous for founding the school of Buddhism based on meditation, called “Ch’an,” which later became Zen Buddhism, and for bringing this religion from India to China around A.D. 525. Supposedly, the emperor of China had furnished the monk with his own cave near the capital, Nanging, where he would be at leisure to practice the precursor of Zen meditation. There the Bodhidharma sat unmoving, year after year. From the example of his heroic endurance, it is easy to understand how his school of Buddhism evolved into
za-zen,
or “sitting meditation,” for certainly
sitzfleisch
was among his outstanding capacities.
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The tale is that, after meditating seated before a wall for nine years, he finally fell asleep. When he awoke and discovered his lapse, he disgustedly cut off his eyelids. They fell to the ground and took root, growing into tea bushes containing a stimulant that was to sustain meditations forever after.

Tea, despite these legends of its antiquity, is, in the long view of things, but a recent introduction to China. The Chinese probably learned of it from natives of northern India, or, according to another account, from aboriginal tribesmen living in Southeast Asia, who, we are told “boiled the green leaves of wild tea trees in ancient kettles over crude smoky campfires.” Some Chinese histories report that tea was brought to China from India by Buddhist monks, as the Arab accounts tell us that coffee was introduced into Arabia from Abyssinia by Sufi monks, although, as with the Arab stories, we have no unequivocal proof these stories are true. Nevertheless it is clear that, though in the West we strongly associate tea with China in the way that we associate coffee with Arabia, each was regarded as an exotic drink when introduced into its respective “region of origin” within historical times. The details of tea’s pre-Chinese history, like the details of coffee’s pre-Arabian history, are unfortunately lost.

From the time tea arrived, however, the Chinese words for tea provide a kind of chronological map which reveals the contours of the plant ‘s history there. The Chinese character
“ch’a”
the modern Mandarin word for tea, is, except for a single vertical stroke, identical with the character
“t’u.” “T’u”
is used in the
Shih Ching,
or
Book of Songs,
one of China’s oldest classics (c. 550 B.C.), to designate a variety of plants, including sowthistle and thrush and probably tea as well. Typical phrases in which the word occurs: “The girls were like flowering
t’u,”
“The
t’u
is as sweet as a dumpling.”
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Although the choice of renderings of
“t’u”
into English are somewhat arbitrary and fanciful, it is clear that the word referred to a drink of some sort at least as early as the sixth century B.C. From that time forward, one or another of the words for tea was included in every Chinese dictionary.

The “tea change” in terminology occurred during the Early Han dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 24), as recorded in the seventh-century work
The History of the Early Han,
by Yen Shih-ku, who notes that at that time the switch occurred from
“t’u”
to
“ch’a”
when
“ch’a”
when the tea plant was being specified. This change was even read into the names of places. For example, “T’u Ling,” the “Tea Hills” in the Hunan province, an important and ancient tea-producing region, was redubbed “Ch’a Ling” during the Han dynasty.

Another dictionary, the
Shuo Wên,
presented to the Han emperor in A.D. 121, defines
“ming”
as “the buds taken from the plant
t’u,”
which strongly suggests that the Chinese were already aware that the bud is the best part for making the beverage and that carefully plucking it forces the plant to produce new flush.

The shift to
“ch’a”
is confirmed in the edition of the
Erh Ya
prepared by Kuo P’u, an A.D. fourth-century redactor who completely recast the lexicon, dividing it into nineteen parts. Despite the tradition attributing the
Erh Ya
to the Emperor Wen in the twelfth century B.C., it was written much later, probably around the third or fourth century B.C. Tea appears in P’u’s edition seven hundred years later as
“chia”
defined as “bitter
t’u,”
“and the text explains, “The plant is small like the gardenia, sending forth its leaves even in the winter. A decoction is made from the leaves by boiling.”
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This drink was strictly
a medicinal preparation, used to alleviate digestive and nervous complaints, uses strongly suggesting the pharmacological actions of caffeine, and it was also sometimes applied externally to palliate rheumatic pains. By A.D. 500, the
Kuang Ya,
yet another dictionary, defines
ch’a
as an enjoyable drink, and it was in this period that the use of tea as a comestible became predominant over its pharmacological applications.
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In a striking parallel with the evolution of the word
“qahwa”
the Arabic word for coffee, which, as we have seen, began as an old Arabic word for wine and a variety of stimulating infusions, the word
“cha”
originally designated a panoply of decoctions from herbs, flowers, fruits, or vegetables, some of which were intoxicating. This old generic sense survives in contemporary Mandarin, in which any cooling liquid comestible, from bean soup to beer, is called
“liang cha”
or “cooling tea.” It was only in the time of the T’ang dynasty and the publication of Lu Yü’s
Ch’a Ching
that
ch’a’s
meaning underwent the pattern of change linguists call “specialization,” and the word
“cha”
came predominantly to designate
Camellia sinensis,
the plant that carried caffeine, and the beverage infused from its leaves.
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The English word “tea” and its cognates in many languages derive from the Chinese Min form,
“te,”
which may itself be one of China’s most important contributions to the story of the beverage worldwide. In a linguistic transformation opposite to that of the Chinese
“ch’a,”
the English the word “tea” has undergone “generalization,” and the word, which when it first entered our language designated a single species of plant and the brew made from it, now refers to virtually any infusion of leaves or herbs.

From the time of the Han dynasty tea as a drink grew steadily in popularity. During succeeding dynasties, it spread quickly in the south and more slowly in the north, until, by the Jin dynasty in A.D. fourth-century tea was acknowledged widely as a medicinal and was also generally used as a beverage. Records indicate that it was prescribed by a Buddhist priest to relieve a Jin emperor’s headache. It was from this time, when demand had so increased that it could no longer be met by harvesting wild tea trees and stripping their branches, that the first cultivation of tea is dated.
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In A.D. 476 Chinese trade records reveal that it had already been used as barter with the Turkic tribes.
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In the Sui dynasty (A.D. 589–618) tea was introduced by Buddhist monks into Japan.

We have already noted three of the most interesting parallels between the apparently unconnected histories of coffee and tea: Each was first harvested as a wild leaf or berry and used only as a stimulant and a medicine; each was first cultivated and used as a beverage relatively recently; and each was brought into the regions that today are associated with its origin by religious devotees returning from a nearby country, who initially used it to stay awake during their meditations. Another parallel is the way the Chinese tried to keep tea cultivation to themselves, just as the Arabs tried to do with coffee. Finally, almost from its first appearance in China, tea leaves were used as a medium of exchange, as were coffee beans in Arabia, cola nuts in Africa, and cacao pods and maté leaves in the Americas. Bricks pressed from dried tea leaves served as currency among the peasantry of the interior, who preferred them to either coins or paper money, which diminished in value as one traveled farther from the imperial center.
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