The History of Tea
Tea is nearly 5000 years old. As legend has it, a Chinese Emperor named Chen Nung discovered tea in 2737 BC.
When he was sitting in his garden some leaves from a tree blew into a pot of boiling water, infusing the water with a rich colour and aroma. He was interested in the new liquid, drank some, and found it very refreshing.
It was, however, not until 3000 years later that tea cultivation and processing began and that consumption spread throughout the Chinese culture, making tea a daily drink.
Around 800AD, the first tea seeds were brought to Japan by Buddhist priests. Japan developed its own tea traditions, and as in China, it took until the 14th century for tea drinking to enter the popular culture of Japan.
The Dutch and Portuguese, trading for silk and spices in the China Seas, were the first to procure tea and introduce it in Europe in the late 16th century. Soon the Dutch East India Company set up a regular shipment of tea to ports in France, Holland and the Baltic coast in 1610. Great Britain was the last of the three great sea faring nations to break into the Chinese and East Indian trade routes, first samples of tea not reaching England until 1652. Once introduced, tea quickly became Britain’s most popular drink, largely replacing ale and becoming the source of many new tea customs, still in place today. Tea may have reached the New World before being introduced in England.
This was to only to a minority of settlers however, who lived in the Dutch colony of what was then called New Amsterdam (New York after the English acquired it).
At the end of the 17th century it was publicly available for sale and in 1720 tea was a generally accepted staple of trade between England and the Colony.
The massive increase of the tea tax by the English resulted in the Boston Tea Party in 1773 when settlers dressed up as Indians and boarded the Dartmouth and threw hundreds of pounds of tea into the harbour.
This act eventually led to the War of Independence and to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and perhaps the Americans’ slight preference for coffee?
At first many British attempts at growing tea in India failed. Each failure, however, contributed to the eventual perfection of the technology. Finally in the 19th century tea cultivation on plantations flourished.
The 20th century has seen the spread of tea in Africa, notably in Kenya.
Although during the 20th century trends were towards coffee, tea, due to its potential health benefits, enjoys a great world wide resurgence, in particular for specialty teas like Green Tea and in flavoured teas.
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