On packs of black, green and other types of tea you can often see the inscription "long leaf". But not everyone knows the meaning and origin of this familiar word.
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The origin of the word baikhov
In China, from ancient times there is an expensive variety of white tea called "Bai Hao Yin Zhen", which means "white villi". The real "Bai Hao Yin Zhen" is manually assembled in an ecologically clean area with a certain climate in the spring. In this case, only the buds of leaves that have not had time to open and covered with villi are collected. Only people without bad habits and not using perfumes are allowed to collect. Tea is manually processed, after which its villi become silvery, hence its name.
In ancient times, Chinese merchants called Bai Hao a variety of teas to pass them off as high-quality and expensive and sell them to foreign merchants at an inflated price. Returning home, Russian merchants also tried to sell the tea they brought more expensive and somewhat distorted the name. As a result, the word "long leaf" was fixed, which was supposed to emphasize the high cost and rarity of tea.
This expensive variety, however, has nothing to do with ordinary tea, which is commonly used everywhere.