Break the Routine Beat the Heat Strike a Deal Club with a meal All's done with a Brew That's tea for me and you!

WHAT THE SAGES SAID... Singing the praise of a natural drink Over the centuries poets and writers, diarists and philosophers including Confucius, Samuel Pepys, Samuel Johnson, William Cowper and Rabindranath Tagore sang the praise of tea.   Rabindranath Tagore wrote: Come oh come Ye tea-thirsty Restless ones The kettle boils Bubbles and sings Musically.

Poet Edmund Waller's combined tribute to tea and Queen Catherine of Braganza (reputed to have brought tea to England) ran as follows : The Muse's friend tea does our fancy aid, Repress those vapours which the head invade, And keep the palace of the soul serene, Fit on her birthday to salute the Queen. In this poem tea was described as "the best of herbs" and, for good measure, Catherine as "the best of Queens". Samuel Pepys, diarist of his times, made his first reference to tea on September 25, 1660, fairly non-committal ! "...And afterwards did send for a Cup of Tea... which I had never drunk before." Sevenyears later, however, he entered in his diary of June 28, 1667 : "... Home and found my wife making tea, a drink which the (a)pothecary tells her is good for her cold and defluxions." Shelly's invitation for a tea party went thus: "Yet let's be merry : we'll all have tea and toast; Custard for supper, and an endless host Of Syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies, And other such lady-like luxuries." Rumer Godden, while spending a winter during World War II in a Darjeeling tea garden, wrote : "Happiness when you are miserable is to drink very good tea out of a thin Worcester cup of a colour between apricot and pink shell."

If that's contemporary Tea, check out on the traditional!

A range of human moods ......
Revelations, Revolutions, rituals and revelry .......
are associated with tea

Jan Lee, a gentle, enthusiastic young man who is an apprentice tea master, serves tea in his family's Chinese antique store on Mott Street in New York's Chinatown. Amid the ancient vases and jars, figurines, furniture, lanterns and bird cages, at a small marble and carved wood table, Jan performs the gracious and sensuous Chinese tea ceremony. "The Chinese tea ceremony, unlike the Japanese tea ceremony, emphasizes the tea, rather than the ceremony," says Jan. What the tea tastes like, smells like, and how one tea tastes compared to the previous tea, or in successive rounds of drinking -- that is what participants of the Chinese tea ceremony are most concerned with. "In China, when you see someone on the street, before you even say 'hello,' you say 'have you had tea yet?'"

.......In Japan, tea service is associated with an elaborate ritual. The first tea seeds were brought to Japan by the returning Buddhist priest Yeisei, who had seen the value of tea in China in enhancing religious mediation. Tea in Japan has always been associated with Zen Buddhism. It received almost instant imperial sponsorship and was elevated to an art form resulting in the creation of the Japanese Tea Ceremony ("Cha-no-yu" or "the hot water for tea"). The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.

The first European to personally encounter tea and write about it was the Portuguese Jesuit Father Jasper de Cruz in 1560. It was as a missionary on that first commercial mission to China that Father de Cruz had tasted tea four years before.

The first samples of tea reached England between 1652 and 1654. Tea quickly proved popular enough to replace ale as the national drink of England.
Historically, tea gained significance in none less than a Revolution for independence. Remember the Boston Tea Party?
Tea parties round the world set the stage for Chai Choice in the new millennium.

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