How the first teas were made?

The three main types of tea are Green Tea, Oolong Tea and Black Tea.
The two main types of manufacture are: Orthodox, a gentle kneading and rolling process, and CTC, a severe crushing, tearing and curling of the leaf between sharp toothed, stainless steel rollers.

One can only speculate as to how the first teas were made but it is most likely that the shoots of the tea bush were harvested, dried in the sun, and then prepared with boiling water.

A natural progression would be to partially dry the leaves in the sun until they took on a wilted appearance, and if rolled between the palms of one's hands, the leaf took on an attractive twisted appearance.

It would have then been dried in the sun. The sun drying would be replaced by 'hot panning', where the twisted leaves would be placed in a shallow pan and heated over a charcoal fire, agitating the leaves constantly for even drying.

This 'hot panning' is a recognized Chinese manufacturing technique and they would have inadvertently discovered that heating the leaf would arrest fermentation. Fermentation, or more correctly, Oxidation, is caused by a naturally occurring enzyme in the tea leaf, called a 'polyoxidase enzyme' This combines with oxygen in the air and starts to make the bruised and rolled leaf brown, (similar to an apple being cut in two and left exposed to the air). Research has found that the enzyme can be inactivated if the leaf is heated to about 90 deg C and the tea therefore retains a better green color on the dried leaf and the brew in the cup.

The Chinese still use a form of hot panning where the leaf is tumbled in a heated rotating cast iron cylinder. The Japanese use steam to heat the leaf. At Madura we use hot air, which is clean and efficient. Black tea was probably discovered by a mistake in overlooking a batch of tea and drying it some time later. Oxidation would have taken place and the leaf would have taken on a coppery, chocolate appearance. When dried and infused, the cup colour would be golden, deep red or all shades in between, and the taste would be very different. In Asia, green tea is preferred while in the West, black tea dominates.