Why this encyclopedia exists
tea.doctor exists because the conversation about tea and health has, for the better part of two decades, drifted into two unhelpful extremes. On one side: marketing copy that treats every cup as a cure — antioxidants, detox, longevity, weight loss — without footnotes or honesty about sample sizes. On the other side: a reactive medical literature that often reduces Camellia sinensis to a single molecule (EGCG, L-theanine, caffeine) and tests it at doses no human would ever drink. Neither extreme is useful to the person who simply wants to understand what a bowl of well-made Shu Pǔ’ěr (熟普洱) has meant to the people who have drunk it for centuries — and what, if anything, current science can responsibly say about it.
Our scope is narrow on purpose. We document Chinese tea only — the six traditional classes codified under GB/T 30766-2014: green, yellow, white, oolong (青茶), red (what the West calls black), dark (黑茶, including pǔ’ěr), and the re-processed teas that derive from them. For each tea, each cultivar, and each benefit category, we separate three layers clearly: traditional usage as recorded in sources such as the Běn Cǎo Gāng Mù (本草纲目, 1578) and regional gazetteers; ethnographic practice as observed in producing villages today; and peer-reviewed research, linked directly to PubMed or DOI with the study type, sample size, and limitations stated in plain language.
What we do not do is equally important. We do not prescribe. We do not recommend dosages. We do not suggest any tea can treat, prevent, or cure disease. We do not run affiliate links to supplement vendors. We do not publish a benefit claim without at least one citation, and we mark every page with a persistent disclaimer that points readers to qualified medical professionals for anything resembling a health decision.
The editorial standard we hold ourselves to is simple — if a tea master in Wǔyí or a researcher at the Tea Research Institute in Hangzhou read our entry, would they recognise it as accurate and complete? That is the bar. Most tea content online fails it. We are trying, slowly, page by page, to write the resource we wished existed when we started drinking tea seriously fifteen years ago.
How tea.doctor came to be
tea.doctor began in 2022 as an internal reference document at Teamotea — a spreadsheet, really, of every health claim we had ever encountered on competitor packaging, cross-checked against actual literature. The spreadsheet grew to 1,400 rows in eighteen months. Roughly 60% of the claims we audited had no peer-reviewed support at the doses implied by ordinary tea drinking. About 25% had preliminary in vitro or animal data only. The remaining 15% had at least one human trial worth taking seriously, though usually with caveats around sample size, funding source, or generalisability.
That audit became the seed of this site. We decided that if we were going to sell tea elsewhere in the constellation — at shop.thetea.app and shop.puerh.app — we owed our readers a separate, non-commercial space where the conversation about health could be conducted on its own terms, without a buy button at the bottom of every page. tea.doctor went live in early 2024 with twelve benefit categories and forty-eight tea entries, expanding monthly.
Editorial principles we will not negotiate
Every entry on tea.doctor follows the same internal template. A traditional-uses section draws from named classical sources with edition and date — we cite the 1782 Sì Kù Quán Shū (四库全书) edition of Chá Jīng (茶经) rather than vague references to “ancient Chinese medicine.” A research section links each cited study by DOI with study type (RCT, observational, in vitro, meta-analysis), sample size, and one-sentence limitation. A practitioner section, where relevant, includes commentary from named tea masters or producers we have interviewed directly — never anonymous “experts.” And a disclaimer section, identical across the site, restates that none of this constitutes medical advice.
We write in sentence case. We avoid the words detox, miracle, superfood, boost, and cure. We italicise pinyin with tone marks and pair it with characters on first use. We update entries when new research emerges — every page carries a last-reviewed date, and the changelog is public.
Sourcing, transparency, and what we get wrong
tea.doctor is funded entirely by Teamotea, the parent company behind the THETEA constellation. We accept no payment from tea producers, supplement companies, or wellness brands for editorial coverage. Our research links go to PubMed and publisher DOIs directly, never through affiliate trackers. When we interview a producer or tea master, we disclose any commercial relationship the constellation has with them — most are vendors at shop.thetea.app, and we say so on the page.
We also get things wrong. The first version of our entry on Bái Háo Yín Zhēn (白毫银针) overstated the strength of evidence for its anti-inflammatory effects; we revised it in November 2024 after a reader, a clinical pharmacologist in Guangzhou, sent us a careful critique. That correction sits at the top of the entry, dated and signed. We would rather publish slowly and revise honestly than ship confident copy we cannot defend. If you find an error, write to us — [email protected] — and we will read every message.