What changes have taken place in tea-making technology in China since its birth?

Tea is indispensable in our daily life. Some people still know how to drink tea, but few people really know how to make tea. In our country, the method of making tea has gone through the development process of chewing fresh leaves, drinking original soup, drying and collecting green tea, steaming green cakes and frying green tea, which is a process that develops slowly with the development of society and the in-depth understanding of tea.

The earliest use of tea can be counted from the legendary Shennong tasting a hundred herbs. At that time, it was mainly raw chewing fresh leaves (because there was no habit of roasting with fire at that time), and then raw cooking soup. It is recorded in Yanzi Chunqiu that Yanzi "eats tea" is this way of utilization. Later, people found that tea can be dried and collected, so that it can be preserved for a long time and used at will. Next, the leaves are picked to make cakes. During the Three Kingdoms period, Zhang Yi recorded in Guangya: "Leaves were picked between Beijing and Pakistan to make cakes, and leaves were made from rice paste. If you want to cook tea, fry it until it is red, mash it and put it in porcelain, cover it with soup and simmer it with onion, ginger and orange. You can't sleep when you drink and sober up. " These are the early tea cakes and drinking methods.

After the middle Tang Dynasty, the tea-making technology of picking tea to make tea cakes was gradually improved. In the Tang Dynasty, steamed green cake tea was the main tea-making method, and its production steps were as follows: steaming the newly collected tea leaves until they were soft, mashing them, flattening them into cakes in special containers, and drying the cakes.

Tea-making technology in Song Dynasty was improved on the basis of Tang Dynasty. First, some tea juice was squeezed out after steaming, but the pattern was fine. Due to the tribute tea system, there will be dragons and phoenixes on the decorative patterns. In addition, there is also the production of loose leaf tea, which is directly steamed until it is loose.

After the Song Dynasty, loose tea developed further, and in the Yuan Dynasty, loose tea and end tea were the main products, but cake tea still occupied a considerable proportion. After the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang stopped paying tribute to tea in the early years of Hongwu. Since then, except for tea and horse trading, some cakes and teas are still steamed or fried, and this form has been developed until now.