While I’m taking a brief break from The Tale of Tea by George van Driem to reread the other books about tea I own, I wanted to share something that I’ve learnt from what I read so far! One thing that I’ve read a couple of times[1] is that it was Robert Fortune’s 1843 trip to China that he made the important discovery that black tea and green tea come from the same tea plant. But as van Driem meticulously shows, the idea that green and black tea were thought to be from different plants until Fortune’s trip is not entirely accurate.

I’ll be sharing what I learnt about the classification of the tea plant from van Driem, starting in the mid-16th century and stopping when the term “Camellia Sinensis” was coined. But as van Driem goes on to discuss, the controversy didn’t stop there – I’m just narrowing the scope so that it fits into one blogpost!

In the beginning… what is tea?

Although Carl Linnaeus is known as the “Father of Taxonomy,” he wasn’t the first to try to use binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming things. As early as 1554, Rembert Dodoens of Mechelen “employed the binomial system of nomenclature to label species”[2]. Another botanist who did the same was the Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin, who published his manual of plant species in 1623. One of the plants in this manual was tea and “this first attempt at a taxonomical classification of the plant was based on the description which had appeared in Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s work.” Sadly, Bauhin mistakenly classified tea as a species of fennel or Foeniculum under the Embelliferae based on his knowledge of ptsiana, a “warm barley-based beverage”.

This wrong classification of tea continued. In 1665, Dutch traveler Johan Nieuhof was “quite adament about the idea that tea was a kind of sumac based on the shape of the leaves” and made the point that tea plants were bushes. He was partly wrong but he got one thing right. Nieuhof treated the tea as a single species which “yielded various types of tea.”

The idea that tea comes from one plant is established

Although Western botanists didn’t classify tea correctly, there was one thing that they were right about – the fact that different types of tea come from the same plant. Dutch physician and Botanist Willem ten Rhijne stayed in Dejima,Japan from the summer of 1674 to the autumn of 1676 and even went to Edo twice. After he returned to Batavia in 1677, he “wrote an essay on tea which he dispatched to one of the prominent regents of the United Provinces, Hieronymus van Beverningh of Gouda.” His essay, ‘De Frutice Thee’ (On the tea bush) was published 1678 and “pointed out that Japanese tea and the Chinese tea from Amoy derived from one and the same plant, and that even in Japan different grades of tea derived from this same plant.” [3]

Rhijne was not the only one who thought that all tea came from the same plant. Engelbert Kaempfer “treated the tea plant known both in China and Japan as a single plant species”, as did James Cunningham, who reported from Chusan in 1702 that the three types of tea [4] were all made from the same plant.

The misconception starts

As we have seen, from the mid-17th century to the 18th century, botanists and people familiar with tea recognised that the different types of tea all came from the tea plant [5].

But, Francois Valentyn writing influences Linnaeus. Specifically this passage about the different types of tea: “each of which grows on its own particular tree.” – First to make this claim but was apparently not awarded credence by botanists familiar with the claim.

However, the start of the misconception regarding the types of tea and the plant that they come from was ignited by Dutch minister, naturalist, and author Francois Valentijn [6], who wrote in 1726 that:

“First of all, one must know that the main kinds constitute distinct species of tea tree, which can readily be distinguished one from the other, and just as these trees produce leaves that differ markedly from each other, so too do leaves differ from particular sub-varieties of a particular main sort; yet the special leaves are not what determines the distinction between the principal types of tea, as some are given wrongly to opine.”

Valentyn, 1726, Derde Boek

He also wrote, in that work that “each of which [tea] grows on its own particular tree.” Although this claim was not given much credence by botanists familiar with tea at the time, Jonas Hanway continued this argument in 1756 in his “Essay on Tea”, where he asserted that “the shrub and leaf of green tea are so much like those of bohea, that it requires the skill of a botanist to distinguish them.“ [7]

Three years later, in 1759, botanist John Hill wrote that “his bohea tea specimen has smaller darker leaves and flowers of six petals, whereas the specimen yielding green tea had longer paler leaves and flowers of nine petals.” Although they never met, Hill and Linnaeus also knew each other as they wrote to each other and exchange books, and Hill “helped to popularise Linnaeus’ work in England.”

Linnaeus makes a (wrong) conclusion

Misled by Valentyn, Hanway, and Hill [8], when writing about tea in his Species Plantarum (1762), “Linnaeus wrote that one species, Thea Bohea, yielded black tea, whereas the other species, which he labelled Thea Viridis, produced green tea.” It’s important to note here that Linnaeus had never seen a live tea plant when he makes his erroneous conclusions.

Linnaeus student Petrus Tillaeus continues his teacher’s views on tea, as we can see on his “dissertation on tea in Uppsala on 7th December 1765” where he defended the idea that “two distinct species must be recognised, the Bohea tea and the green tea.“

This mistake by Linnaeus is especially lamentable given the fact that he was also corresponding with the English botanist John Ellis [9], who in 19th August 1768 wrote to Linneaus that a “Mr. Thomas Fitzhugh, who had served for many years in China as a factor of the British East India Company, could vouch for the fact that ‘green and bohea’ came from ‘one and the same plant’, and that Ellis had surmised that Linnaeus ‘must have been imposed on by Dr Hill’.”

This misconception continued when William Atom at Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, in 1789, “split the species Thea Bohea into a narrow leaved variety Thea Bohea Stricta and a broad leaved variety Thea Bohea Laxa.” Furthermore, in 1790, the Portuguese Jesuit and botanist Joao de Loureiro “proposed dividing tea into three species, Thea cochinchinesis, Thea cantoniensis and Thea oleosa.”

Between Linnaeus and Fortune

But we all know how this story ends. Linneaus and those who agreed with him didn’t get the final say. Dissent occurred as early as 1772, when John Coakley Lettsom declared in his book “The Natural History of the Tea-Tree” that there is only one species of tea plant.

By 1808, English Botanist John Sims wrote that “there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the varieties of this celebrated plant, sold by our nurserymen, under the names Thea viridis and Thea Bohea, are really distinct. Indeed, it is not ascertained that all the different sorts of tea, prepared in China, are the produce of the same species.”

And as we know, after Robert Fortune made his trip to China in 1843, the idea that the different types of tea came from different species was finally put to rest. The question that remained, then, was one of naming – what should the scientific name of the tea plant be?

Moving towards ‘Camellia Sinensis’

In 1818, English botanist Robert Sweet “grouped the various species of Thea under the heading of the genus Camellia.” Six years later, in 1824, Swiss Botanist Augustin Pyrame de Candolle “grouped the genus Thea within the order Camelliae.”

We’re moving towards the name ‘Camellia Sinensis’, but then in 1832, Philipp Franz von Siebold “resolutely restored Linnaeus’ original species name: ‘Thea sinensis, Linn,”[10].

Despite this brief setback, everything is more or less resolved in 1905 when the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature decided to “officially adopt the proposal made by Sims in 1808 and merge the genera Thea and Camellia, thereby deciding on the label Camillea sinensis as the official scientific name for the species.” As the book explains, “Thea has therefore been abandoned as a genus designation, and tea is classified as a species of the genus Camellia within the family Theaceae, rather than a species of the genus Thea within the family Camellieae.”

Like I mentioned earlier, the discussion on whether “camellia sinensis” is the appropriate term for the tea plant didn’t stop in 1905! It’s quite fascinating to look at the debate that has brought us to this point, although I should point out that all this took place in the Western world, with no contributions from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or other Asian (including South Asian) tea scholars. I wonder if the name of the tea plant would be different if there had been more international voices – at the very least, I’m pretty sure we would have avoided all the debate about whether the different types of tea came from one or two types of plants!

Notes

[1] Such as from this Smithsonian article

[2] This quote, and all others in the post, come from The Tale of Tea by George van Driem.

[3] Based on tea specimens sent from Japan and a sketch provided by Rhijne, Jacobus Breyne drew the first depiction of a tea plant in his 1678’s botanical compendium of exotic plants (chapter 52). Pictured labelled “Tsia Japonesibus”

Speaking of the name “Tsia” (I need to write a post on what I’m learning about the names of tea too!) this spelling of the word tea also gave rise to the word ‘Tsiology’. which was “coined in 1826 for the science or knowledge of tea”.

[4] The three types of tea here are: Bohea, Bing tea, and Singlo

[5] However, the book does mention that the general public would be under the misconception that the different types of tea were from different plants because they were so different. But since the book doesn’t elaborate much on what the public thought, I’m leaving it out of the main narrative.

[6] Regarding the spelling of names here – van Driem tries to be as accurate as possible but I’m using the conventional English spellings so that you can look them up if needed. In quotations there might be a slight difference in spelling.

[7] The actual quote is a bit different because all the letters “s” were written with “f”. For easy reading I fixed it.

[8] To quote van Driem, Linnaeus was misled by Hill “most finally and immediately

[9] Fun fact about Ellis: He managed to grow tea in England and he wasn’t alone – “in the 1760s others too brought tea plants from Canton to England as ornamentals, whilst tea plants grown from Japanese seed were also available in England from Holland.” To put this back in the timeline, Robert Fortune made his first journey to China in 1843, almost eight decades later.

[10] While honouring Linnaeus, von Siebold also mentions that “Thea viridis is now obselete since green and brown tea are derived from one and the same plant” so Linnaeus’ mistake is, thankfully, not repeated.