James Norwood Pratt

About James Norwood Pratt

A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, brought up on land which has been in his family since before the American Revolution, James Norwood Pratt was educated at Chapel Hill and abroad and published his first book on tea in 1982.He is widely acknowledged as the instigator and prophet of America's present Tea Renaissance. A popular spokesman for tea and an author with numerous columns, articles and interviews in US and overseas periodicals and various books that have been translated into multiple languages, JNP is quite possibly the world's most widely read authority on tea and tea lore today. He lives in San Francisco and likes to say,"The NEW tea lovers are the people who have forced our sleepy old tea trade to wake up."

Posts by James Norwood

Origins of Tea

Origins of Tea

By James Norwood Pratt on April 15, 2009

In the misty distant past, the second of China’s emperor’s ruled Asia. He was a sage named Shen Nong who understood all manner of plants and their uses. The Chinese say it was Shen Nong who first taught them agriculture and herbal medicine and – of equal importance in their eyes – how to make tea. The first book on the subject, the Ch’a Ching, the “classic” or “scripture” of tea, written in the 760s, cited the emperor as an authority.

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