Shennong's story of tasting a hundred herbs is recorded in Historical Records of Huang San, Huai Nan Zi Xiu My Instructions and Materia Medica. Shennong era was a matriarchal clan society in which Anemarrhena asphodeloides didn't know his father. At that time, mankind had entered the heyday of the Neolithic Age, and primitive animal husbandry and agriculture had gradually developed. The discovery of Hongping ancient rhinoceros cave in Shennongjia is the site of ancient human activities in ancient times, which is the best proof.
According to legend, Shennong has a crystal clear stomach, from which people can clearly see what they eat. At that time, people ate everything alive, so they often got sick. In order to relieve people's pain, Shennong personally tasted all the plants he saw, watched the changes of these plants in his stomach, and judged which ones were toxic and which ones were non-toxic. When he tasted the tender leaves of an evergreen tree with white flowers, he washed them everywhere in his stomach, as if he were checking something in his stomach, so he called the green leaves "tea". Later, people called it the evolution of "tea" tea.
In the Han Dynasty, Shennong's Herbal Classic recorded the origin of tea and Shennong's record: "Shennong tasted a hundred herbs every day and was poisoned by seventy-two herbs, so he eliminated them with tea."
Yu's Tea Classic: "Tea is a kind of drink, which originated from Shennong." In the history of cultural development in China, the origin of all things related to agriculture and plants always belongs to Shennong. After coming back here, you can't push it up any more. Because of this, Shennong became the god of agriculture.
How did humans invent the habit of drinking tea? Or how did tea originate? Medicine says: this view holds that tea "originally entered human society as medicine." "Shennong Hundred Herbs Classic" wrote: "Shennong tasted a hundred herbs, and when he encountered seventy-two poisons every day, he was relieved by tea."
Now, we can think that tea has been recognized and used for a long time in China, as well as the cultivation and harvest of tea trees. However, it can also be verified that tea is widely used in all walks of life, probably after Lu Yu's Tea Classic was handed down in the Tang Dynasty. Therefore, there is a poem in the Song Dynasty that "since Lu Yu was born, the world has learned from each other's strengths and made spring tea". In other words, after the invention of tea, it was not known to the public for more than 1000 years.
Lu Yu listed Shennong, Zhou Gongdan, Yan Ying and other ancient tea men in China in the Book of Tea, indicating that China was the first country to discover and utilize tea. He quoted Shennong's "Food Classics" as saying: "The power of tea will make you happy for a long time", and he quoted Erya as saying: "Bitter tea; He quoted Yan Zi Chun Qiu as saying: "When the baby was in Qi Jinggong, he ate rice without millet, three elder brothers moxibustion, five eggs and tea." It can be seen that the pre-Qin tea affair in China has already begun. However, some scholars believe that the works cited by Lu Yu are all works of the Han Dynasty. And the Chinese nation originated in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Although the ancient climate in northwest China was warmer, it never produced tea. How does Shennong achieve the goal of "tasting 72 poisons every day and solving them with tea?" They think that the tea affair in China came too late, and foreigners used this mechanism to send tea from India to China. It was later discovered that there was no tea in ancient India.