Abstract:

In traditional Chinese tea industry knowledge, differences among teas were generally understood in terms of place of origin, harvesting, and processing. As tea spread to the West from the early modern period onward, European naturalists, lacking sustained field observation, relied largely on fragmentary knowledge, tea-plant specimens, and botanical illustrations to interpret the commercial distinction between black tea and green tea as a botanical difference. On this basis, they constructed the concepts of Thea bohea ( the black tea tree) and Thea viridis( the green tea tree) and incorporated them into classificatory schemes for the tea plant. Later, as investigations in China deepened, Western observers gradually came to recognize that the differences between black tea and green tea derived chiefly from tea-processing techniques, and the concepts of Thea bohea and Thea viridis consequently lost their classificatory basis. This case shows that modern western knowledge of tea-plant classification did not emerge independently within Europe, but was formed and continually revised through transregional circulation, knowledge translation, and technical practice.

Keyword: Thea bohea, Thea viridis, tea-plant classification, tea-processing techniques, sino-western knowledge translation

Published on Studies in Dialectics of Nature, Issue 9 2026.