Scientists: 1,800-year-old tea relics found in Tibet

Scientists recently discovered that at least 1,800 years ago tea had been transported into Ngari of Tibet, wokeji.come reported.

In view of this, at that time, there was a branch of the Silk Road that ran through the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Related research findings were published in Science Report.

Tea originated in China. The earliest tea relics have been found in the tombs of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127A.D.). It has long been speculated that tea, silk and porcelain, by trade along the Silk Road, were transferred from the the ancient capital of Chang'an in China into Central Asia and beyond.

But so far, along the Silk Road, no evidence has been found of tea entering Xinjiang or Qinghai-Tibet Plateau before the Tang Dynasty (618-907A.D.). It is generally believed that ancient tea, being more relatively decomposed or carbonized, is difficult to find well preserved and identify.Lv Houyuan is a researcher at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Science. In cooperation with domestic and foreign counterparts, he carried out plant identification and chronology analysis on tea relics from the Gurujiamu Monastery in Ngari and the Yangling imperial mausoleum of the Han Dynasty(202 B.C.-220A.D.) in Xi'an.

They found that the tea has four types of morphological characteristics, and furthermore through mass spectrometry, a modern tea standard sample chromatography, two biomarkers of tea were confirmed: caffeine and theanine.

Using carbon-14 dating methods, they proved that the plants unearthed in the Gurujiamu Monastery dated to be 1,800 years old, therefore belonging to the ancient Shangshung Kingdom in Tibet; furthermore, plants unearthed at the Yangling imperial mausoleum were dated to be about 2,100 years old, consistent with historical documents.

On this basis, scientists discovered that the two plants unearthed both contain only tea plant related derivatives - plant calcium bodies, theanine and caffeine etc., thus confirming that they are in fact tea.

This is also the world's oldest known kind of tea.