Green and Black: Story of Tea

The exhibition by Desa Đorđević Milutinović, PhD, museum advisor of the Natural History Museum in Belgrade, shows through exhibits, photos, and texts the journey from leaves picked from the tea plant to a cup of a pleasant and medicinal drink, as well as the journey of tea from the homeland of China to all parts of the world. Four basic types of tea are presented: white, green, black and oolong, and visitors will have the opportunity to see for themselves the basic differences between black and green teas, as well as to learn about the rules for preparing certain teas.

In addition to tea leaves, other forms of tea will be displayed at the exhibition, such as ceremonial Japanese matcha tea (powdered) or cake-shaped tea (the oldest type of tea leaf use). In addition to well-known teas made from medicinal plants such as mint, chamomile, linden, sage, there are also many “real” teas that are made from only one, relatively small mountain plant, TEA (Camellia sinensis), whose natural habitat is in Asia. For the production of teas from the TEA plant, only the leaves are used, and mostly only the ones at the top (the youngest). The picking is done by hand and the plants must be at least three years old.

Today there are about 1500 different teas obtained from the tea plant (Camellia sinensis). Some of the most famous green teas are Japanese matcha, Chinese gunpowder, Japanese sencha and Chinese green tea with jasmine. The most famous black teas are English breakfast, Earl Gray, Assam, and Darjeeling. In Belgrade, tea parties were important for social life between the two wars, and they usually served Russian black tea in porcelain services with silverware, and care was taken about appropriate clothes, good manners, and suitable topics for conversation. After the Second World War, tea parties as a form of gathering completely disappeared from the social scene in Serbia, and the re-arrival of tea in Serbia almost coincides with the beginning of the new millennium.

One part of the exhibition is dedicated to porcelain and porcelain tea accessories (teapots, cups, a porcelain whisk stand), and visitors will have the opportunity to see unique metal tea boxes, accessories for preparing a ceremonial tea sword, Russian samovars, Moroccan and Turkish accessories for tea etc.

Porcelain objects from the Ethnological Collection of furniture of the National Museum Kraljevo will also be presented at the exhibition.