Whence
Tea
Drink

Where does Tea come from?

Tea comes from southwest China. The tea plant is native to the hills where China's Yunnan province meets northern Myanmar and northeast India, and tea was a Chinese drink for well over a thousand years before England tasted it.

From medicine to everyday drink

Tea drinking probably began in Yunnan, where leaves of the native tea plant, Camellia sinensis, were first brewed as medicine. Chinese legend credits the mythical ruler Shennong with discovering it, but the oldest known physical evidence is tea found in the tomb complex of Emperor Jing of Han, who died in 141 BC. Under the Tang dynasty, Lu Yu wrote The Classic of Tea, an early book on growing and brewing it.

How tea travelled

Tea left China with traders and monks. Leaves found in a tomb in Ngari, western Tibet, show it had reached the Tibetan Plateau by about AD 200. The Japanese monks Saichō and Kūkai brought tea seeds home in 805 and 806, and the Zen priest Eisai brought more to Kyoto in 1191. Portuguese merchants were the first Europeans to import tea, in the 16th century, and in the early 1600s a Dutch ship carried green tea to Amsterdam.

Why many people say England

Britain came to tea late. Thomas Garway first sold it in London in 1657, and the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza made it fashionable at court after marrying Charles II in 1662. By 1750 it was Britain's national drink, yet the leaves still came from China. Then Britain looked to India: tea plants were found in Assam in 1824, and in 1848 the East India Company sent the botanist Robert Fortune to bring tea plants out of China to India.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Tea ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › History of tea ↗ · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗ · wals.info ↗

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