Tibetan milk-butter tea is most
certainly an acquired taste. It is oily, very salty, and frankly does
not taste much like tea. However, to the accustomed drinker, the
yellowish-grey liquid can come to take on almost magical properties,
especially after a stout hike at 4000 meters. The magic is simply that
the fatty yak's butter is extremely protein and nutrient rich, salt is
rather critical for survival, and the tea is very nicely caffeinated.
But it turns out that the benefits don't stop there: the Tibetans'
preferred tea leaves produce some of the healthiest, if most unlikely,
varieties of tea on the market. So how, then, did tea come to Tibet in
the first place (where it most certainly cannot grow), and perhaps more
interestingly, how did this particular type of tea become the secret
ingredient in one of the world' earliest and most effective energy
drinks?
Tea
trees have been cultivated in southern Yunnan for thousands of years by
numerous ethnic groups. By the time Tibetan nobles are first mentioned
in written sources as enjoying a cup of tea (around 600 A.D.), the crop
was already growing in several regions throughout China. Thus, it is
difficult to say exactly when and from where tea was introduced to
Tibet. One thing we can be certain about, however, is that it quickly
caught the fancy not just of the nobility, but of the monks and common
folk as well. Then as now, Tibetan traders were highly valued business
partners: their woolen products, horses, and access to numerous markets
throughout the region were prized commodities. To have something a
Tibetan merchant valued was to have something valuable indeed. The tea
trade between western Sichuan and the eastern Tibet became so lucrative
that during the Song dynasty an imperial monopoly was declared in order
to ensure the army's stables remained well-stocked with Tibetan horses.
By that time, Han merchants had long worked
with local Dai lords (imperial-era rulers of the Dai people, an ethnic
group speaking a language similar to Thai) in southern Yunnan to secure
tea harvests from the surrounding low, sub-tropical mountains ideal for
growing green tea leaves. This region eventually came to be known as
Pu'er (普洱). The merchants there would ship the dried and processed
leaves to many areas in northern and eastern China. With increasing
demand to send tea to the northwest for sale in Tibet, rather than cut
into already profitable stock, the merchants simply compressed and
packaged leftover, broken or otherwise unseemly leaves from the year
before. Compressed into bricks, this type of tea was sometimes aptly
called zhuancha or "brick tea," but it came to be more
commonly referred to as Pu'er tea. Because much of these second-rate
offerings had been sitting in dank rooms in the hot, humid climate of
southern Yunnan, they had often begun to ferment, turning a desultory
brownish color and emitting a heavy, musty smell.
The climb from
southern Yunnan to the Tibetan plateau, ascending some 3000 vertical
meters and sometimes traversing over 1000 miles from end to end, was no
simple task. The horses, mules, and even yaks called into service to
transport the tea understandably did a fair bit of sweating. This
moisture, combined with their own body heat furthered the fermentation
process, so that when the tea finally reached its destination, it
looked more like flaky dirt than the key ingredient in the beverage of
choice for thousands. The Tibetans, who intended to mix it with still
more ingredients did not appear to mind the color. Indeed, they seemed
to prefer it. In the 19th Century, British merchants tried, and failed,
to convert Tibetans from Yunnan tea to the Indian variety.
What
has not been fully understood until recently is that the fermentation
process not only yields a highly distinctive flavor (a deep, earthy
tone with a nicely baked aroma), but converts certain compounds within
the leaves so that the resulting list of health benefits may yet
surpass even those of (unfermented) green tea. Several studies
sanctioned by the P.R.C. have shown long-term effects of regularly
drinking Pu'er tea (with or without yak butter) include decreased
cholesterol and lower blood pressure. Most of the nutrients found in
green tea are conveniently not lost in the fermentation process.
Caffeine drinkers will appreciate that the
fermentation, however, does tend to increase the concentration of the
chemical, which may explain that extra burst of energy one gets. Such
results remain preliminary, but they do suggest that perhaps those
Tibetan merchants knew a good brick of dirty brownish tea when they saw
one.
