History of Tea

Tea is usually regarded as being a quintessentially English drink, and we’ve been drinking it for over 350 years.

But in truth the history of tea goes much further back. The tale of tea starts in China. According to legend, in 2737 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting underneath a tree while his servant boiled drinking water, when some leaves from the tree blew into the water. Shen Nung, a famous herbalist, made a decision to try the infusion that his servant had incidentally made. The tree was a Camellia sinensis, and the ensuing drink was what we now call tea.

It is not possible to know if there is any truth in this story. But tea drinking definitely became established in China many centuries before it had even been heard about in the west. Boxes for tea have been found in crypts dating from the Han dynasty ( 206 BC – 220 AD ) but it was under the Taste dynasty ( 618-906 AD ), that tea became forcibly established as the nation’s drink of China. It became such a favorite that in the late eighth century a writer called Lu Yu wrote the 1st book completely about tea, the Ch’a Ching, or Tea Classic.

It was right after this that tea was initially introduced to Japan, by Jap Buddhist monks who had travelled to China to study. Tea drinking has changed into a urgent part of Eastern culture, as seen in the development of the Tea Rite , that might be rooted in the rituals described in the Ch’a Ching. So at this point in the history of tea, Europe was rather lagging behind. In the second half the sixteenth century there are the 1st brief touches on of tea as a drink among Continentals .

These are typically from Portuguese who were living in the East as traders and missionaries. But although a few of these people might have brought back examples of tea to their local country, it wasn’t the Portuguese who were first to ship back tea as a commercial import.

This was done by the Dutch, who in the last years of the sixteenth century started to impose upon Portuguese trading routes in the East.

By the turn of the century they’d established a trading post on the island of Java, and it was thru Java that in 1606 the 1st shipment of tea was dispatched from China to Holland. Tea shortly turned into a trendy drink among the Dutch, and from there spread to other states in continental western Europe, but due to its high price it stayed a drink for the rich.