The Chinese sources claim that the first person who drank was the emperor Shen-Nung who lived around 2700 BC. This emperor, reported to be quite careful about his health, used to drink his water after having it boiled. One day, while his water was being boiled again, some leaves from the tjigs burning in the fire underneath the pot was said to have fallen into the pot and the emperor who drank this tisane noticed that the aroma and taste was indeed wonderful. He inquired about where those leaves had come from and thus discovered the tea plant.

The Indians, on their part, claim that the discoverer of the tea was a bouddhist priest named Darma who had lived some 1900 years ago. He is reported to have decided to spend seven years of his life without sleeping for concemplating the grandeur of Buddha, but could withstand the sleeplessness for only five years and tried to overcome his drowsiness by chewing some leaves that he had picked up from some bushes and managed to complete thus his seven years. According to the Indians, the leaves which he had masticated were from a tea plant.

Another legend says that the warts on the face of a Chinese scientist could never heal and, finally the skin and flesh had started to fall off. As his face had become so ugly that he was being abhorred by the people around him, he decided to seclude himself from them and moved to an area with a mild climate and full of greenery. He was bating himself with the water from the neighboring springs and feeding himself with the grass and leaves from the adjacent forest. A while after, he observed that the wounds on his face had begun to heal. When he examined the matter, he had discovered that the area which he had selected as his abode was full of tea plants, of which the leaves were constantly falling into the spring constitution his bathtub.

The book titled "The Prose of tea" of Okakura Kakuza, translated by Ali Suha Delilbasi and published in the culture series, says that the tea was being used as a medicinal plant before being known as a beverage. The book goes on to say that the Japanese ennobled it in the fifteenth century and made a religion out of it: the chaism which was one based on the concept of admiring whatever is beautiful amidst the hidiousnesses and, as such, it penetrated into the wealthiest and the poorest homes alike, In fact, the Japanese people still say "chailess" for people who is impervious to both the serious and comical aspects of the drama of ; individual.

" There was a fine beauty prone to its idealization and idolisatino in the taste of the tea.

The despising pride of the wine, the conscious individualism and the smiling innocence of cacao are not encountered in the tea.

Tea is a beverage which entertains in the evening, consoles at midnight and salutes the sunrise in te morning.

Tea is a work of art and needs the hand of a master craftsman. Just like good and bad pictures, there are good and bad brews of tea.

A song poet marked with chagrine that the three worst things in the denaturation by a distorted education of an otherwise fine youth, in the observation of devaluation of fine paintings by the admiration of ordinary people and the bitterness of noting the wastage of a wonderful tea as a result of bad brewing. "