BOTANICAL ORIGINS

Most theories concerning tea’s botanical origins seem to focus on the Monsoon region of South East Asia, specifically around the sources and high valleys of the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween and the Mekong rivers. The evidence for these theories is drawn from two fields of research.

The Three Pagoda Pass, the border of Thailand and Burma, from a field trip in the late eighties.

The first area of study is the search for "wild tea"- uncultivated plants of botanical strains that preceed man’s earliest use of the plant as a crop. This quest was explored and recorded by several early botanists such as Dr. C.P. Cohen Stuart in his "Basis for Tea Selection" of 1918. [More documents in preparation].

In South China tea propogation has been a village industry for many centuries. As a result very few wild tea plants have been found. The cutting, burning and planting of the jungle by hill tribes has affected the botanical selection in many other parts of the region. In 1896 wild tea was found near Mengzi during a botanical survey of Yunnan in and was also found in 1922 in the Dawna range of "Myanmar" around Moulmien. Since then, specimens have been found throughout the Annamite Range as far south as 11 degrees north of the equator.

The second, perhaps more "scientific", field of study is paleobotany. This uses the study of pollen traces in core samples taken from the soil. [Documents in preparation].