Lotus
A plant of which almost every part is used: the stamens scent tea in Vietnam, the leaf is brewed in China and Korea, the seed goes into sweets and the root is a vegetable. Vietnamese lotus tea is made by packing green tea inside a living flower overnight or by layering it with the stamens.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Nelumbo nucifera
- Family
- Nelumbonaceae
- Part used
- Flower, Leaf, Seed
- Origin
- Asia from the Indian subcontinent to the Russian Far East, and northern Australia; drunk chiefly in Vietnam and China
- Drunk in
- Hanoi, Hunan, Korea, Japan
Character
The stamens give a clean cool perfume; the leaf gives something greener, more astringent and faintly like young bamboo. They share a name and not much else.
Notes: lotus, green, melon
History
Cultivated across Asia since antiquity — seeds recovered from northeastern Chinese sites have been radiocarbon-dated to over a thousand years — and central to Buddhist and Hindu iconography long before it entered the drinks trade. Lotus-scented tea from the West Lake area of Hanoi is a documented Nguyen-dynasty court product and is still made there in small quantities at extraordinary prices.
How it is drunk
Trà sen is the ceremonial tea of northern Vietnam, offered to guests and at ancestor altars. Lotus-leaf infusion is an everyday summer drink in parts of China and Korea, and the two are quite different drinks from the same plant.
Production
For the scented tea, stamens are taken from flowers picked at dawn and layered with green tea over several cycles; a kilogram of finished tea can take well over a thousand flowers. Leaves are cut in late summer and dried flat or shredded.
Preparation
Infusion · Blended with tea
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 85–90 °C · 4 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Most 'lotus tea' sold internationally is flavoured with lotus essence rather than scented with flowers, and the difference in price between the two is enormous. Genuine trà sen is a luxury product in Vietnam itself.
Common mistakes
- Assuming lotus leaf and lotus-scented tea are the same drink. They are different parts, different processes and different traditions.
Comparisons
- Lotus vs jasmine — Two flowers used to scent tea by the same layering principle, one of them at a cost that makes it one of the most expensive teas in the world.
Guides
Evidence for this page
The botanical name, family and distribution above are checked against an external authority. Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn. — GRIN-Global Taxonomy record— retrieved and read, not countersigned by a named human. That source covers naming and distribution only. Everything else on this page — history, culture, production, flavour, preparation and buying advice — is TeaHQ’s own synthesis with no external source behind it.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Lotus is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.