Gynostemma Tea - Gynostemma pentaphyllum - Jiao Gu Lan Tea (Wu Ye)

From China

The herb of immortality, from Guizhou. Jiao gu lan grows wild in the damp mountains of southern China, and in Guizhou the locals called it xiancao - immortality herb - and drank it as an everyday tea long before any physician wrote it down. It is a vine in the cucumber family, which is unusual company for a famous herb.

Its route into the record runs backwards from most: it first appears in a Ming dynasty book on famine foods, was largely ignored by the classical pharmacopoeia, and only became well known after Japanese researchers took an interest in the 1970s. Southern China had been drinking it for centuries by then.

How it is used: brewed like a green tea, a few leaves in hot water. Sweet at the front, faintly bitter at the finish, and it takes several steepings.