L. Golender, Bouquet, 2003
This site has been moved to http://www.gol27.com/HistoryTeaBotanics.html
For several centuries Europeans drank tea without ever having seen a tea
plant, because their traders were not allowed to travel inside China, the unique
source of imported tea at that time. The first detailed study of tea published
in Europe was written by Dr. Wilhelm ten Rhyne (1649-1700), a celebrated
Dutch physician and botanist who also wrote the first account of
acupuncture.
He lived in the Dutch 'factory' (trading post) on the artificial island of
Deshima
in the harbor at Nagasaki from 1674 to 1676. He was a physician for the Dutch East India Company.
His text on tea (written in Latin) was published in
Danzig in 1678,
as an appendix to Jacob Breyn's Exoticarum plantarum centuria prima
(First Century of Exotic Plants). It seems never to have been translated into English.
Some years later, in 1683, the great German scholar
Engelbert Kaempfer
set out on a journey through Russia, Persia, Arabia and India. From there he
took ship to Java, Siam, and finally Japan, where he too lived for a time on
Deshima before returning to Europe in 1693. Kaempfer wrote his own account of
Japanese tea to complement that of 'my much honored friend' ten Rhyne. It was
published in the third fascicle of his Amoenitates Exoticae (Exotic
Pleasures; 1712).
An English version of this has recently been published,
translated and edited by Robert W. Carrubba in The Library of Renaissance
Humanism. The library is a series of translations (and new editions of the texts that are not readily accessible)
with scholarly introductions and notes of important works written in Latin during the Renaissance.
Humanism was a Latin-based, international super-culture that dominated Europe from the late fourteenth
through the seventeenth centuries. During this period most published literature was in Latin,
and only gradually did the vernaculars become predominant.
Almost all of the great vernacular writers composed in Latin as well as their native languages
(from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Milton), and many great writers composed exclusively or mainly in Latin
(Poinano, Erasmus, Lipsius, Secundus, and hundreds more), in part because of the vastly wider, international readership.
The book of Kaempfer covers every aspect of tea growing, making, and brewing. Kaempfer's
work in making Japan, and especially its botany, known in Europe, was hailed by
the great botanist Linnaeus. The first edition of Linnaeus's Species
Plantarum published in 1753 suggested calling the tea plant Thea
sinensis, taking the Latin name for tea from Kaempfer.
Chinese tea was basically divided between green tea and black
tea (often called bohea) in the European mind. Bohea is from Wu-i,
pronounced by the Chinese bu-i, the name of the hills where this kind of tea is grown.
Bohea tea, an inferior kind of black tea. The name was formerly applied to superior kinds of
black tea, or to black tea in general. A rather fanciful
English writer of the mid-18th century, John Hill, declared in his Treatise
on Tea (1753), quite without proof, that they came from different varieties
of plant.
Carl Linnaeus
in the second edition of his Species duly distinguished between
Thea viridis (green) and Thea bohea (black).
Neither Kaempfer nor Linnaeus seem to have suspected that there might be a link
between Thea and the genus later named Camellia after a Moravian
Jesuit called Kamel
who studied Asian plants.
Georg Jeoseph Kamel
,whose name in Latin was Camellus was missionary to the Philippines, died in Manilla in 1706. It is speculated that he never saw a camellia.
Camellias were named in posthumous honor of George Joseph Kamel by Carolus Linnaeus.
It was only in the early 19th century that tea plants and seeds were
obtained, after the English decided to challenge China's monopoly by trying to
grow tea in India. Then it was found that in fact tea trees already grew wild,
unrecognized, in the hills of Assam. A fierce debate raged as to whether these
were identical with the Chinese variety, and whether Thea was a separate
genus or part of the genus Camellia. It was finally settled by the
International Code of Botanical Nomenclature in 1905 that the tea tree's correct
name, no matter where it grows, is Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze. The tea tree is native to the whole monsoon area of
southeast Asia: Thailand, Burma, southwest China, Assam.
Camellia Thea
Tea Plant : Camellia japonica
The International Camellia Society