In 2737 B.C., a Chinese emperor named Shen Nung was boiling a pot of water over a fire. One of the leaves from the fire floated into the pot. When the emperor drank the water, he found that it tasted delicious. What kind of leaf was it that gave the water its flavour? The leaf came from an evergreen shrub called camellia sinensis – better known to us as tea! This story is only a legend. But tea was certainly discovered in china or neighboring lands thousands of years ago. It spread through the east, but for many centuries it was drunk only as a medicine. Coffee is so popular today that you might think people have been drinking it forever. But most of the world has been drinking coffee for only a few hundred years! Coffee plants first grew wild in East Africa and Arabia. Around the year 850, according to an Arab legend, a young goat-herd was tending his flock when he noticed that his goats began acting excitedly after they ate the berries of a certain shrub. The goatherd sampled the berries himself and liked the taste. Coffee soon became popular throughout Arabia, and finally spread to Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
0 comments:
Post a Comment