Green tea, the freshest of tea leaves

Lü Cha simply reads “green tea”: the name refers to the product, not the plant. A single species, Camellia sinensis, gives all teas, and what sets green tea apart from the others is what is not done to it: its leaves are heated very soon after picking to stop oxidation, and they stay green. The first pickings make the best teas, before the Qingming festival in early April. Among its reference growing regions, Long Jing, “the dragon’s well”, from the shores of West Lake in Hangzhou, is held to be the finest of all. Chinese tradition first drank it for its uses, and only later as a beverage.

Bringing down what rises to the head

In traditional Chinese medicine, green tea is cool, bitter and sweet: bitterness makes things descend, sweetness restores the Fluids. It is associated with the Heart, which houses the Shen, the Lung and the Stomach. Li Shizhen gives the most concise definition: it is the best at bringing down Fire. Tradition credits it first with clearing the head and brightening the eyes, by drawing down the Heat that rises there, and this is also what keeps drowsiness away. It clears Heat from the Heart and the Lung, and its sweetness brings back the Fluids: it quenches thirst, and the mind, says tradition, becomes sharp again.

The after-meal tea

Its bitterness revives the downward movement of digestion and cuts through richness: this is the reason for the after-meal tea, a pillar of the Chinese table, and tradition credits it with undoing food stagnation. It is not decocted: it is infused briefly in hot, not boiling, water, and drunk hot, freshly made. With mandarin peel, warm and aromatic, it forms a pair that moves the Qi while tempering its coolness. A black or fermented tea does not replace it: fermentation makes the leaf warm.