Timeless: Ruins of 'modern delights' in... 2,400-year-old tombs

A cup in an ancient tomb in the ancient capital city of the Zhou Dynasty (China) contains the oldest evidence that tea leaves were processed and brewed to drink just like in modern times.

According to a research team led by Professor Shuya Wei from the Institute of Cultural Heritage and History of Science and Technology, Beijing University of Science and Technology (China), previous documents show that in the Spring Autumn (770-476 BC), tea was grown for sacrifices and vegetables in China.

The tea cup containing the world's oldest tea has just been unearthed in China

However, this is the first time that people have found evidence of tea being processed to become a modern-day drink in the years BC.

The ancient cup containing tea grounds was unearthed from the ancient tomb number 1 in the Western Ocean, where the remains of the ancient capital city of the Zhou Dynasty, in Shandong province.

Professor Wei and co-authors analyzed the specimen from this 2,400-year-old ancient tomb using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and other methods, and then compared it with modern tea grounds.

Ancient tea grounds

The results show that the FTIR spectrum of what is believed to be ancient tea grounds is identical to the FTIR of modern tea grounds.

Citing the authors, Sci-News reports that Chinese scientists have long believed that this is the first country to process and drink tea in a modern way, but it has only been poorly documented in the literature. Ancient documents, legends, but no concrete physical evidence until an ancient tea sample was discovered at the Tomb of Hanyang, dated 2,150 years old.

The specimen at the Hanyang Tomb was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest tea in the world in 2016, but the tea sample at the ancient tomb in the Atlantic Ocean is several centuries older.

"Our results indicate that tea drinking culture may have begun as early as the Warring States period," the authors conclude in their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.