Study On The Herbal Tea Of Taiwan And Its Preventive And Therapeutic Effects On Warm-heat Diseases

Tea is one of the most popular three drinks in the world, and China is its cradleland. At the beginning, the original plants of tea were Theaceae, but now more genera are included, the broadleaf holly leaf is a good example. Due to the accumulation of experiences on treating disease, tea began to develop to pluralism. Herbal tea is the medical drink under the warm-wet climate in the south of China, which is the decoction of atoxic local herbs. For example, Wanglaoji Cool Tea, coming from Guangdong Province, is one kind of herbal tea, which is made and sold by oneself in the tropical zone of our country. Herbal Tea of Taiwan is the performance of pluralism development of tea in Taiwan.In 1971, Qiu Nianyong investigated on the major formulas and raw materials of the herbal tea within Taiwan market, and then sorted. After his starting work, there were two books contributing to this project. One was Life-cultivation effect of green grass tea which was written by Zhang Kuanchang, and the other was Green grass tea &Herbal tea which was written by Zhang Fengrong. This research was based on the information mentioned above, and at last 90 empirical formulas of herbal tea were collected.The statistic data about the frequency of herbs in the 90 formulas showed that 72 kinds of herbs were included, the total frequency was 460 and the average quantity of herbs was 5.1. There was no equilibration among these 72 kinds of herbs. Huguenot fern herb was used most frequently, and was included in 59 formulas of 90, which was 65.6%. In the paper, the research object was the most popular used 15 herbs which had a frequency more than 10%. There were intimate descriptions about the genera, morphous, synonym, property and flavor, effects and applications of these 15 herbs. The plant materials used in herbal tea included roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds and entire plants. These materials were used after proper treatments. The methods of decoction and taking were also included in this paper.Taiwan locates to the southeast of the mainland of China with marine climate. It is very hot and moisture, so that it is easy to have summer-heat disease, damp-heat disease, or summer-heat accompanied damp disease. As a mare island, Taiwan is surrounded by sea and the people there like to have fish and have a favor in salt. Thus, abscess or ulcer is also common disease in Taiwan. And in the initial and middle stage of these diseases, clinical manifestations were always differentiated as hot syndrome, which was another feature of warm-heat disease in Taiwan.Theoretically, herbal tea can prevent and cure warm disease. According to the property and flavor of the original plants, in the most frequently used 15 original plants of herbal tea, there were 14(93.3%) with cold or cool property, 1(6.7%) with mild property, and none with warm or hot property. Based on the data above, the preventive and therapeutic effects of herbal...