This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these

amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the

Cabinet of Curiosity's. Some aspects of culture are so ingrained that we cannot imagine a time without them.

It's easy to picture what it was like to not have cars or cell phones or email, but

conceive what human life was like before the invention of water filters requires a more subtle

stretch of the imagination. The same can be true of other drinks and foods, the origins of alcohol,

bread, and more. We've known these things for so long the original incidents that led to their

invention are the stuff of myth. And this is true for tea. It comes in such a wide variety of flavors,

green, black, herbal, mint. It has iterations that span an equally wide variety of cultures.

English breakfast tea, d'argeeling, chai. They say more about the people who prepared them

than they do about their own history, which makes you wonder,

where did tea come from in the first place? We know it originated in East Asia and slowly spread to

the rest of the world, but once you go far enough back in history, you find yourself in a realm

where myth and history intersect. In the early 2000s BCE, Yan Emperor Shen Nong was traveling with a column of servants.

A mythic figure in Chinese folklore, it said in some stories that he was born after his mother

inhaled the breath of a dragon. By the time he had grown into adulthood, he was a polymath,

an herbalist, and a scientist, with an extremely curious mind.

In fact, it's said that he journeyed all the way across China to record every herb that grew

in the wild and what medicinal effects they might have.

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