Green Tea

Green tea means non-oxidized or unfermented tea leaves.

When tea first became a commodity in Tang Dynasty (617-907 AD), freshly plucked tea leaves were smashed to brew tea. The upper-class intellect elite had their own tea garden as depicted in the poem written on a classic Ming dynasty Chinese painting titled “Drinking Tea” (By Tang Yin, ca. 1,500 AD) now on display in the Palace Museum, Beijing. By definition, all teas in ancient China were 710EGCG® green tea by our definition

As tea became a commodity for trading, it was necessary to preserve the quality of the fresh tea leaves by a brief heating and drying process for transportation and for storage. The fresh tea leaves must undergo an initial heat treatment for quality preservation. Now, we know its purpose was to inactivate the polyphenol oxidase in tea leaves to stop the oxidation process in order to preserve the antioxidant tea catechins. The tea leaves which were not processed immediately would turn brown, just like a sliced apple undergoing discoloration when exposed to the air. The tea leaves which became brown were dried at high temperature and pressed into cakes and bricks as salvage products, which were considered of low-grade teas and were mostly sold to the minority Chinese living in the North/West or to foreign traders. Historically, “tea” always referred to green tea in the ancient China and in Japanese until now.