Do you drink tea? Do you know where tea comes from?

China is known as the birthplace of tea and history of tea culture. I never thought that I could approach to this before until I took a journey in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province of China. Nowadays, many Chinese people begin to learn about the tea culture to access to elegance, and tea has become one of the famous beverages all over the world. Foreigners turn up their thumb to this drink and speak highly of it. And the National Tea Museum in Hangzhou is a nice place presenting tea culture and Chinese culture to us foreigners.

Following the pretty guide with one of the mini speakers in her hand, we arrived at a museum that is fraught with tea theme. The special design left deep impression for everyone here. Moreover, a lot of Chinese characters enchased in the road made you feel exotic and impressive. That was the first time that I though Chinese culture is so great, and I found I fell in love with it from then on. Neither as mysterious as Egyptian culture nor as modern as American culture, Chinese culture impresses with its long history.

Chinese tea, as one of the characters in Chinese culture, is classified into approximately five categories according to the different methods by which it is processed.

1. Green Tea. Green tea keeps original color of the tea leaves without fermentation during processing.

2. Black Tea. Black tea is fully fermented before baking and developed on the basis of the green tea.

3. Wulong Tea. This represents the tea that is half way between the green and the black teas, being made after partial fermentation. It is a specialty from the provinces on China's southeast coast: Fujian, Guangdong and Taiwan.

4. Compressed Tea. This kind of tea black looks in color in its commercial form and is compressed and hardened into a certain shape. Most of them are in the form of bricks or bowls, or cakes. Therefore, it is good for transport and storage and travelers prefer to wholesale some and take back. Compressed tea is mainly produced in Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

5. Scented Tea. This kind of tea is made by mixing fragrant flowers in the tea leaves through the course of processing. The flowers commonly used for this purpose are jasmine and magnolia among others. Jasmine tea is a well-known favorite with the northerners of China and with a growing number of foreigners. Scented tea is particularly popular among mid-aged people.

Chinese tea, along with silk and porcelain, is well-known in the world for hundreds of years and has been an important Chinese envoy introducing Chinese culture. Thanks for this travel, I have to admit that I have been obsessed with Chinese culture though the unique Chinese tea. At the end of this travel, I bought a souvenir-a VCD introducing the history of Chinese tea, which can be transformed and shared with my friends by pen drive.