History of Tea

The history of tea dates back over 4,000 years to the Chinese province of Yunnan. According to Chinese mythology, the legendary Emperor Shennong discovered the tea plant, Camelia sinensis, while compiling a botanical reference book. The emperor gathered samples for his studies and chewed on the leaves of different plants to assess their effects. It was then that the discovered that tea was a useful antidote for counteracting the effects of poisoning.

A later legend recalls Shennong sitting under a tree in 2737 BCE and boiling water when a leaf from the tree fell into the pot and colored the water green. The tree in question was of course a wild tea tree.

For a long time, tea was used purely for medicinal purposes and only evolved into a popular beverage thousands of years later. Tea leaves were a common ingredient in, for example, vegetable soup, along with different kinds of beans, onions and fruits. Still today, indigenous populations in Yunnan use tea leaves the same way they use vegetables.

There are no historical records describing when tea first evolved into a infused beverage, but there have been stories of Buddhist monks drinking tea to combat fatigue during zazen meditation. The history of tea is hence closely linked with the history of Buddhism. The practice of tea growing spread across China along with Buddhism during the period of the Three Kingdoms (220 - 265 CE) and the following dynasties. A Buddhist monk is also credited with introducing tea to Japan in the 7th century.

The first book written about tea is called "Tea Classics" by Lu Yu from around the year 780. The three-tomed literary work describes the process of growing tea plants and making infused drinks from them as well as the way to drink tea. According to most history books, tea did not gain the kind of popularity it enjoys today until the era of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 906 CE), when is was also given the Chinese name 'cha.'

The first mentions of tea outside of China and Japan date from around 850 CE in the Arabian region. According to historical accounts, the use of tea as a drink spread from there to Italy and the rest of Europe around the year 1559. The Portuguese and the Dutch also claim to have been the first to introduce tea into Europe, which would mean that it arrived here in 1610, after the trade routes between China and Europe had been established.

It is the British that should be credited with the actual breakthrough of tea in the western countries. The British East India Company turned tea into a substantial commodity and established vast tea plantations in India, where they actively developed new varieties of the plant. The Indian tea tree differs slightly from its Chinese relative: it is more tree-like in character and has larger leaves. Its scientific name is Camellia assamica.