Tea in history

Right now I am reading the Tale of Genji: and it got me interested in medieval Japan.

Aside from seducing lovely ladies, and playing music at parties there is not a lot of discussion about the food they ate.

one thing I noticed: they didn't live very long, making me wonder why (discussed here). Yup. Low protein diet so unable to fight off TB and other infectious disease was my take too.

Now, if you read about the history of infectious disease, the introduction of tea helped increase the life span in Europe, and I seem to recall a lecture that mentioned a similar decrease in certain diseases in Japan in the 1300 or later and again attributed it to the spread of tea drinking.

 Is it the medicinal value of the tea itself, or is it because you have to boil water to make it, and of course boiling water kills germs.

One thing modern folks forget is that drinking water was deadly because contaminated water spread diarrhea, cholera, typhoid, etc. This is why Paul warned Timothy to add a little wine to his water "for his stomach's sake", and it's why wine and beer were the beverages of choice in ancient and medieval days (although the wine was usually mixed with water, and the beer was often low alcohol beer).

I didn't run across a lot of tea drinking in the Tale of Genji, so I started checking on line for articles about food customs. Because of Buddhist beliefs, meat was supposed to be shunned, but the Wikipedia article notes that in the Heian period, the nobility did eat meat and seafood...

But there is no mention of what they drank. 

Then I ran across a book about how Tea was introduced into that country

A Bowl for a Coin is the history of tea cultivation and drinking in Japan.

Originally introduced by Buddhist monks via China, but it was originally only for meditation or for medicine, but gradually the farmers learned to roast it (and later steam the leaves) so they would not be so bitter. And gradually drinking this brew spread from the nobility to ordinary people.

So anyway, Kuya was wondering if we could grow tea here. Presumably we could, so it made me look into tea growing etc.

a Wikihow article on tea leaf growing and processing the tea is found HERE.

most of the how to grow tea videos are wide eyed new agey ladies who don't look as if they ever had to make a living running a farm instead of a small garden, but here is a good old boy instructing you on how to grow and process your own tea.

What is interesting is how he instructs several ways on how to process the tea leaves, and it sounded vaguely familiar: because it is similar to how the medieval farmers in Japan processed tea.