Hibiscus: History and Traditional Use

The ruby-red, cranberry-sour drink that Senegal calls bissap, Nigeria calls zobo, Egypt and Sudan call karkadé, Mexico calls agua de Jamaica and the English-speaking Caribbean calls sorrel is one and the same plant: the fleshy red calyx of Hibiscus sabdariffa, the roselle. This article follows it from a disputed African homeland, across the Atlantic with the slave trade, through the wedding cups of Khartoum and the markets of Guadalajara, and into the laboratories that named its pigments in 1932, its signature acid in 1939 and, from 1999 onward, measured what it does to blood pressure. Where the record is firm we say so; where a story is tradition rather than document, we name it as such.

Table of Contents

  1. A Mallow from Africa: Origins and a Disputed Homeland
  2. One Name, Three Plants: Roselle, the Garden Hibiscus and Kenaf
  3. The Red Drink of Africa: Bissap, Zobo and Karkadé
  4. Across the Atlantic: Sorrel and Agua de Jamaica
  5. Around the Tropics: India, the Pacific, Australia and the Fibre Trade
  6. Cooling, Diuretic, Pressure-Lowering: Roselle in Traditional Medicine
  7. Into the Laboratory: Acids and Pigments (1932 Onward)
  8. The Blood-Pressure Trials: From Tehran to Tufts (1999–2022)
  9. Roselle Today: Tea, Colour, Fibre and the Global Trade
  10. Key Research Papers
  11. Connections
  12. Featured Videos

A Mallow from Africa: Origins and a Disputed Homeland

Roselle is a tall, red-stemmed annual of the mallow family, Malvaceae, kin to cotton, okra and marshmallow. After each pale yellow flower fades, the cup of sepals beneath it — the calyx — swells into the fleshy, crisp, brilliantly red structure that people harvest. It is this calyx, not the petal, that is dried for tea, boiled for syrup and cooked into jam; its flavour is so close to cranberry that early American growers sold the plant as "Florida cranberry".

Where roselle came from is genuinely unsettled, and honest accounts say so. The standard agricultural references place its origin in tropical Africa: Kew lists its native range from Ghana and Nigeria through Chad to Sudan, and the PROSEA handbook of Southeast Asian plant resources states that roselle "is probably of tropical African origin and was domesticated in ancient times first for its edible seeds and subsequently for its leaves, young shoots and flower parts". The same source adds that both roselle and its fibre cousin kenaf "may have been domesticated as early as 4000 BC in Sudan" — a date that would make roselle one of the older cultivated plants of the continent. That figure is an inference from crop geography, not an excavated seed.

A minority tradition points east instead. Julia Morton's Fruits of Warm Climates (1987), still the most-quoted English handbook on the crop, calls roselle "native from India to Malaysia" and supposes it was carried to Africa early; the 2014 Food Chemistry review by Da-Costa-Rocha and colleagues records that "its native distribution is uncertain", with some authors favouring India or Saudi Arabia. Botanists today mostly side with Africa, where the wild relatives and the greatest variety of local forms are found, but the plant has been cultivated so long on both sides of the Indian Ocean that the argument is not closed. What is not in doubt is that West Africa and the Nile valley hold its deepest and most continuous history of use.

Back to Table of Contents

One Name, Three Plants: Roselle, the Garden Hibiscus and Kenaf

Hibiscus is a genus of several hundred species, and three are routinely muddled in writing about hibiscus tea. Only one is the plant whose history and trials this article describes.

All three carry the initial "L." after their Latin names, marking Carl Linnaeus as their author. He named the roselle and the garden hibiscus on facing pages of the second volume of Species Plantarum in 1753 (H. rosa-sinensis on page 694, H. sabdariffa on page 695), the book that founded modern botanical naming, and added kenaf six years later in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1759). The genus name goes back to the Greek hibiskos, a word Virgil used for a mallow. The epithet sabdariffa is older than Linnaeus and its derivation is uncertain; one account traces it through Spanish to a Caribbean plant name, and it was later used as a genus name of its own. The English "roselle" is generally held to be a worn-down form of the French oseille de Guinée, "Guinea sorrel" — a name that records both the plant's West African source and its sour, sorrel-like taste — and is first recorded in English in the mid-nineteenth century. The Caribbean "sorrel" is the same comparison made directly; roselle is no relation of European sorrel (Rumex), only as tart.

Back to Table of Contents

The Red Drink of Africa: Bissap, Zobo and Karkadé

Long before roselle was a tea-bag ingredient it was an everyday African food plant used whole. The seeds are roasted or ground into meal; the young leaves and shoots are eaten raw or cooked as a sour vegetable, and the calyces are boiled with sugar into the drink that every region names for itself. The earliest uses were probably of seed and leaf, with the calyx drink developing later.

The drink's names map its geography. In Senegal and Burkina Faso it is bissap, and it is often called Senegal's national drink; in Nigeria it is zobo, from the Hausa zoborodo; in Ghana sobolo; in the Gambia wonjo; and across the Sahel a scatter of further names, each belonging to a language and a market. Bissap is typically served cold and sweet, often perfumed with mint, ginger or orange-flower water.

In Egypt and Sudan the calyx is karkadeh (Arabic karkadé), and there the drink is as much ceremony as refreshment. It is served hot in winter and iced in summer, offered to guests as hospitality, and in both countries a wedding is traditionally toasted with a glass of it. Sudan is also, by the judgement of the tea trade, the source of the finest calyces in the world, though poor drying often spoils them before they reach a buyer. The habit of drinking karkadeh to "cool" the body in summer heat is a folk practice the traditional-medicine section returns to.

Back to Table of Contents

Across the Atlantic: Sorrel and Agua de Jamaica

Roselle reached the Americas early, and the consensus — Morton writes "allegedly" — is that it travelled with the Atlantic slave trade, as one of the West African food plants, with okra and black-eyed peas, that enslaved people carried, planted and kept. No ship's manifest records it; the inference rests on where, and among whom, the plant first appears. It was being grown in Brazil in the seventeenth century, and survives in the cuisine of Maranhão, where the leaves flavour arroz de cuxá. In Jamaica the record is good: the physician and naturalist Hans Sloane, who spent fifteen months on the island in 1687–89 and published the first volume of his Voyage to the Islands in 1707, found roselle already well established in island gardens and noted it being made into tarts, jellies and wine. Morton's "Jamaica by 1707" is that book.

From the islands the drink became the Christmas sorrel of the English-speaking Caribbean — the calyces steeped with ginger, cloves and cinnamon, sweetened and often fortified with rum — and the calyx was also used to colour and flavour rum itself. On the mainland, Gullah Geechee communities of the South Carolina coast are reported to have grown hibiscus brought from Africa since the eighteenth century, and the "red drink" of African-American celebration is widely traced back to bissap and sorrel.

Mexico's agua de Jamaica — "Jamaica water", one of the classic aguas frescas — is the same calyx again, and the name is the usual clue to its route: the plant is flor de Jamaica in Spanish, and the common explanation is that it arrived in New Spain from the Caribbean, with Jamaica standing for the islands generally. No document fixes that etymology; it is the plausible story, not a proven one. What is documented is how established it was by the nineteenth century: roselle was cultivated for food in Guatemala before 1840, and in 1899 the American botanist J. N. Rose saw "large baskets of dried calyces" on sale in the markets of Guadalajara. Agua de Jamaica has since followed Mexican migration to become a familiar drink across the United States.

Back to Table of Contents

Around the Tropics: India, the Pacific, Australia and the Fibre Trade

The edible, calyx-bearing roselle spread through the tropics of Asia in the same broad period that it crossed the Atlantic: PROSEA dates its arrival in India and the Americas as a vegetable to the seventeenth century, and it has since become naturalised in much of South and Southeast Asia, where the sour leaves are as important as the calyx. In Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines both calyx and leaf appear in cooking, and in India the sour leaves go into chutneys, dals and pickles.

The plant's later travels are well dated, because agricultural experiment stations kept records. Queensland set up a short-lived roselle jam industry in 1892 that had dwindled to four acres by 1909. Around 1895 Australian seed reached California and Hawaii; by 1913 Hawaii had more than two hundred acres planted for a jelly industry that never quite materialised. Roselle is thought to have reached Florida from Jamaica around 1887 and was common in the south of the state by 1903; in 1905 the horticulturist P. J. Wester carried three edible cultivars from there to the Philippines.

A second, quite different roselle followed a few years behind. Beside the bushy edible type there is a tall fibre type, cultivar group Altissima: a single stem three to five metres high with a tough, bristly, inedible calyx, grown for the long bast fibres of its stem. This form was unknown outside Africa until 1914, when seed from Ghana reached the Philippines and its fibre potential was recognised; plantings followed in Java in 1918, Cuba in 1919, Malaysia in 1921, Sri Lanka in 1923 and India in 1927, and after the 1947 partition left the main jute districts in East Pakistan, roselle became an important jute substitute in India. Vietnam took it up in 1957 and Thailand built a large fibre industry after 1958. Roselle fibre is whiter and stronger than kenaf's, but the plant is slower and harder to strip, and kenaf won most of the market. It is this fibre roselle that gets confused with kenaf: the same species as the tea plant, but not the same crop.

Back to Table of Contents

Cooling, Diuretic, Pressure-Lowering: Roselle in Traditional Medicine

Roselle does not appear in the great written pharmacopoeias of antiquity — there is no verified entry in Dioscorides, the Ayurvedic compendia or the classical Chinese herbals — and claims that place it in Pharaonic Egypt rest on nothing better than its modern popularity there. Its medicinal history is instead oral and regional, recorded by ethnobotanists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and remarkably consistent from one continent to the next. The following uses are tradition, not evidence that they work.

Across India, Africa and Mexico, infusions of the leaves or calyces were taken as a diuretic (to increase urine), a choleretic (to stimulate bile), a febrifuge (to bring down fever) and a hypotensive — a remedy for high blood pressure — and were said to move the bowels. In Senegal roselle was specifically recommended for high blood pressure. In Egypt calyx preparations were used for heart and nerve complaints and to increase the flow of urine, and in Egypt and Sudan an infusion of karkadeh was drunk to lower body temperature: the "cooling" drink of the Nile summer. In North Africa the calyx was given for sore throats and coughs, while the soothing leaf pulp was applied to wounds and abscesses; in Guatemala the drink was a remedy for drunkenness and its after-effects; in Brazil the roots were held to settle the stomach; in Chinese folk medicine roselle was used for liver disorders and high blood pressure; and in Nigeria a seed decoction was given to nursing mothers to bring in milk. In Iran, where roselle is "sour tea", it was a folk treatment for hypertension — the belief that prompted the first modern trial. A Caribbean ethnobotanical survey of 2006 found roselle among the plants used for "cooling", for cleaning the liver and blood, and for high blood pressure.

Three threads run through all of this: cooling, water and pressure. German phytotherapy placed hibiscus flower among the mild remedies for colds and constipation, and when the German Commission E assessed Hibisci flos it issued a negative monograph — not because any harm was known but because no efficacy had been shown; commentators call it a "null" monograph. That verdict predates every controlled blood-pressure trial. The one traditional caution modern reviewers repeat is the plant's reputation as an emmenagogue, believed to bring on menstruation, which is why strong preparations are still advised against in pregnancy.

Back to Table of Contents

Into the Laboratory: Acids and Pigments (1932 Onward)

The two things anyone notices about roselle — its colour and its sourness — were also the first two things chemists took apart, and both stories begin between the wars. The colour came first. In 1932 the Japanese chemists Yamamoto and Osima isolated the principal red pigment of the calyx and named it hibiscin; revised in 1936 and eventually identified as delphinidin-3-sambubioside, an anthocyanin. Anthocyanins are the water-soluble pigments that make blueberries blue; a sambubioside is one carrying a particular two-sugar chain. The second major pigment, cyanidin-3-sambubioside, was named gossypicyanin. In 1973 Du and Francis at the University of Massachusetts published "Anthocyanins of Roselle" in the Journal of Food Science, measuring the pigments at roughly 1.5 grams per 100 grams of dried calyx — work done in a food-science department because the immediate interest was roselle as a natural red food colour, which the same group tested in beverages and gelatin desserts in 1979.

The sourness took a little longer. Citric and malic acids were first reported in calyx extracts in the late 1930s. Then, in 1939, the German food chemist Griebel, examining hibiscus flowers as an ingredient of foods and drinks, identified their principal acid as something new and called it hibiscus acid; he published further on it in 1942. Hibiscus acid turned out to be the lactone (an internal ring-closed ester) of (+)-allo-hydroxycitric acid, a close relative of the hydroxycitric acid of Garcinia fruit. Later analyses put hibiscus acid at 13 to 24 per cent of the dried calyx and citric acid at 12 to 20 per cent — which is why a strong cup of hibiscus tea is measurably acidic and why tea makers blend it with apple and orange peel. A 2020 review in Biomedicines gathers what is now known of these acids' pharmacology.

The upshot for the historian is that roselle's two most-studied families of compounds — the anthocyanins credited with its blood-vessel effects and the organic acids behind its taste — were known, named and roughly quantified some sixty years before anyone ran a proper clinical trial on the tea.

Back to Table of Contents

The Blood-Pressure Trials: From Tehran to Tufts (1999–2022)

The clinical chapter opens in Iran. In 1999 Haji Faraji and Haji Tarkhani of Shaheed Beheshti University in Tehran published, in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, "The effect of sour tea (Hibiscus sabdariffa) on essential hypertension". They gave sour tea to 31 of 54 patients with moderate hypertension and a control to the other 23. Twelve days in, the tea group's systolic pressure had fallen by 11.2 per cent and diastolic by 10.7 per cent, significantly more than the controls; three days after the tea was stopped the pressures were climbing again. The authors wrote that the study "proves the public belief" about sour tea while calling for larger work. It was small, short and unblinded, but it was the first, and explicitly a test of a tradition.

Mexico produced the next and more rigorous pair, from the Mexican Social Security Institute's research centre in Morelos under Armando Herrera-Arellano. The 2004 trial in Phytomedicine compared a daily infusion of 10 grams of dried calyx in half a litre of water (standardised to 9.6 milligrams of anthocyanins) against the drug captopril, 25 milligrams twice a day, in adults with mild to moderate hypertension for four weeks. Among the 75 patients analysed, hibiscus brought systolic pressure from about 139 to 124 mmHg and diastolic from 91 to 80, with no significant difference from captopril in effectiveness or tolerability; the tea also increased urinary sodium, consistent with the old "diuretic" reputation. The 2007 follow-up in Planta Medica was larger (193 enrolled), double-blind and used a dried extract delivering 250 milligrams of anthocyanins a day against lisinopril 10 milligrams. Hibiscus lowered pressure by about 17/12 mmHg, but lisinopril did better, and the extract was shown to reduce the activity of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE), the enzyme the drug targets — a mechanism for what Senegal and Tehran had noticed.

The trial most often cited in English is the American one. In 2010 Diane McKay and colleagues at Tufts University published a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in the Journal of Nutrition: 65 pre- and mildly hypertensive adults not on medication drank three 240-millilitre cups of brewed hibiscus tea or a placebo beverage every day for six weeks. Systolic pressure fell by 7.2 mmHg on hibiscus against 1.3 on placebo, and those who started highest fell furthest. Reviewers then added the trials up. A 2010 systematic review in Phytomedicine by Wahabi and colleagues judged the early evidence promising but methodologically weak; a 2015 meta-analysis of randomised trials in the Journal of Hypertension by Serban and colleagues found significant reductions in both systolic and diastolic pressure; and a 2022 meta-analysis in Nutrition Reviews by Ellis and colleagues confirmed favourable effects on blood pressure and other cardiometabolic markers. The effect is modest and the trials short, but the direction has held for a quarter of a century. The hub page and its Benefits leg weigh that evidence; the historical point is that here the laboratory confirmed what the tradition claimed, in the terms the tradition used.

Back to Table of Contents

Roselle Today: Tea, Colour, Fibre and the Global Trade

Roselle is now a world commodity, and it travels mostly as dried calyx for herbal and fruit tea blends, where it supplies the red colour and tartness behind many "fruit" infusions. By the trade's own account the United States and Germany are the primary markets; the leading suppliers are China and Thailand, then Sudan and Mexico, with Egypt, Senegal, Tanzania, Mali and Jamaica behind them; most African and Mexican production still goes to domestic drinkers. Sudanese and Thai calyces are the most sought after. Roselle anthocyanins also serve as a natural red food colouring, and the fibre roselle keeps a niche in India and Southeast Asia.

Regulation has caught up unevenly. The European Pharmacopoeia carries a quality monograph for the dried calyx (Hibisci sabdariffae flos, in pharmacy Latin), which sets a minimum content of acids — a standard of identity and purity, not a claim of efficacy. Germany's Commission E, as noted above, declined to approve a therapeutic claim in the era before the trials. In most of the world roselle is simply a food, drunk by hundreds of millions who have never heard the word sabdariffa. Which is the shape of its whole history: a plant domesticated in the African savanna, carried across two oceans by people who had no choice about going, named by a Swede who never saw it grow, taken apart by chemists in Tokyo, Germany and Massachusetts, measured by physicians in Tehran, Morelos and Boston — and still what it was in the beginning, a red, sour, cooling drink shared at a wedding.

Back to Table of Contents

Key Research Papers

The list covers the standard reviews of roselle's botany, ethnobotany and chemistry, the 1973 anthocyanin study, and the first and defining blood-pressure trials and meta-analyses. Historical primary sources (Sloane, Morton, PROSEA, the 1930s chemists) are named in the article rather than cited here.

  1. Da-Costa-Rocha I, Bonnlaender B, Sievers H, Pischel I, Heinrich M (2014). Hibiscus sabdariffa L. – A phytochemical and pharmacological review. Food Chemistry. — doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2014.05.002
  2. Ali BH, Al Wabel N, Blunden G (2005). Phytochemical, pharmacological and toxicological aspects of Hibiscus sabdariffa L.: a review. Phytotherapy Research. — doi:10.1002/ptr.1628
  3. Du CT, Francis FJ (1973). Anthocyanins of roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa, L.). Journal of Food Science. — doi:10.1111/j.1365-2621.1973.tb02081.x
  4. Izquierdo-Vega JA, Arteaga-Badillo DA, Sánchez-Gutiérrez M, et al. (2020). Organic acids from roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.) — a brief review of its pharmacological effects. Biomedicines. — doi:10.3390/biomedicines8050100
  5. Haji Faraji M, Haji Tarkhani AH (1999). The effect of sour tea (Hibiscus sabdariffa) on essential hypertension. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. — PubMed PMID: 10404421
  6. Herrera-Arellano A, Flores-Romero S, Chávez-Soto MA, Tortoriello J (2004). Effectiveness and tolerability of a standardized extract from Hibiscus sabdariffa in patients with mild to moderate hypertension: a controlled and randomized clinical trial. Phytomedicine. — doi:10.1016/j.phymed.2004.04.001
  7. Herrera-Arellano A, Miranda-Sánchez J, Avila-Castro P, et al. (2007). Clinical effects produced by a standardized herbal medicinal product of Hibiscus sabdariffa on patients with hypertension. A randomized, double-blind, lisinopril-controlled clinical trial. Planta Medica. — PubMed PMID: 17315307
  8. McKay DL, Chen CY, Saltzman E, Blumberg JB (2010). Hibiscus sabdariffa L. tea (tisane) lowers blood pressure in prehypertensive and mildly hypertensive adults. The Journal of Nutrition. — doi:10.3945/jn.109.115097
  9. Serban C, Sahebkar A, Ursoniu S, Andrica F, Banach M (2015). Effect of sour tea (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.) on arterial hypertension: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Hypertension. — doi:10.1097/HJH.0000000000000585
  10. Ellis LR, Zulfiqar S, Holmes M, Marshall L, Dye L, Boesch C (2022). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of Hibiscus sabdariffa on blood pressure and cardiometabolic markers. Nutrition Reviews. — doi:10.1093/nutrit/nuab104

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: Hibiscus sabdariffa ethnobotany and traditional use
  2. PubMed: Hibiscus sabdariffa anthocyanins and hibiscus acid

External Authoritative Resources

Back to Table of Contents

Connections

Back to Table of Contents