Loose Leaf Green Tea

Tang China, around 760. Lu Yu, the Sage of Tea, wrote the Classic of Tea, the first known book on tea: ten chapters on where tea comes from, the tools, the making, the boiling and the drinking. Tea sellers later kept pottery statues of him as a tea god. His history chapter begins with Shennong, the Divine Farmer, into whose boiling water, legend has it, the first leaves blew.

Green is the oldest form of the leaf, and the two countries on this shelf stop it browning differently. China once steamed its tea; after the early Ming it fired the leaf in a dry pan, and once the first Ming emperor ended compressed tea in 1391, loose leaf in a cup was what China drank. Japan kept the steam. Eisai landed in Kyūshū in 1191 with tea seeds from China, and in 1738 Nagatani Sōen of Ujitawara worked out the steamed, hand-kneaded method that made sencha.

Robert Fortune walked into the green-tea country of Anhui in 1848 and watched leaf sifted into the trade's sorts: twankay, hyson, young hyson, gunpowder. He also watched export tea dyed with Prussian blue and gypsum until the workers' hands were blue; foreigners paid more for it. Green tea went into Boston Harbor too: of the chests dumped on 16 December 1773, sixty were Singlo and fifteen Hyson.

From Japan, Sencha, Organic is the everyday cup, Genmaicha, Organic has its toasted rice, and Haru's Hōjicha, Organic is roasted for the evening. From China, Gunpowder, Organic is rolled into pellets, the tea of Moroccan mint tea and Kashmiri noon chai, and Precious Eyebrow, Organic is the curved chun mee leaf from Fortune's green-tea country.