On the afternoon of September 20, the School of Agricultural Engineering of GVTC invited Dr. Livio Zanini, President of the Italian Association for Tea Culture, to hold an international tea culture lecture “How Europe Discovered Tea” for more than 400 teachers and students from GVTC.

Dr. Livio Zanini is the President of the Italian Association for Tea Culture, and Assistant professor of Language and Literature of China and Southeast Asia at Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy. At the same time, he is also an experienced Chinese tea culture research expert with nearly 30 years of research experience on tea and tea culture, the main research areas are the Chinese tea culture at the end of the sixteenth century and the form and significance of tea appreciation in the late Ming Dynasty. Dr. Livio Zanini has published many tea related academic papers including: <Before the Arrival of Tea in Europe> <The Chinese Beverage in Western Sources Prior to the 17th Century>, <Not Just Spring Rolls. The Dynamics of Chinese Entrepreneurs in China food>, <It's Your Turn to Drink: Happy Gaming and Alcohol Consumption in China> <A Chinese Drink For the Buddha> etc.. In the lecture, Dr. Livio Zanini described the origin and development of tea in Europe from the perspective of research on Western historical documents and cultural classics in Chinese fluently. The teachers and students who participated in the lecture have a deeper understanding of the history of Chinese tea culture and its spread in the world from another perspective. And the content has a strong academic research nature.

For the discussion session, CHEN Enhai, the Dean of the School of Agricultural Engineering, briefly introduced the Double High-levels Plan Tea Cultivation and Tea Processing major of GVTC, and also hoped that the two parties could carry out in-depth cooperation in tea culture research, tea standard input and output, course sharing, cultural communicate and exchange in the future. Dr. Livio Zanini also expressed the same vision, hoping that through cooperation and exchanges between the two parties, tea knowledge can be better popularized in Europe, so that more Europeans can fall in love with tea and tea culture.