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However, the first written reference to tea does not appear until the third century BC, when a well-known Chinese surgeon said it improved concentration and alertness (though there is still some confusion over whether the surgeon was recommending tea or sow thistles!).

The Chinese word tu, which appears in these records, is the name for both tea and sow thistles. The distinction between the two was only made between 206 BC and AD 220, when an Emperor of the Han Dynasty ruled that tea should be pronounced 'cha' – a word still used in the UK until quite recently as slang for a cup of tea.

Until the third century AD, tea was only used as a medicine made from leaves gathered from wild trees, but as demand grew, farmers began to cultivate it. Tea’s popularity grew during the fourth and fifth centuries as plantations were set up in the Yangtze River valley. Tea began to appear everywhere – taverns, wine stores, noodle houses; in fact, it was held in such high regard it was even presented as a gift to emperors.

The Tang Dynasty (AD 618-906) is often referred to as the 'Golden Age' of tea, when drinking it became a ceremony, and the picking and processing of the leaves were controlled by strict rules to ensure a prefect result.

Before the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368-1644) the only tea produced in China was green tea. Then, two new types were developed to suit the growing market – black and flower-scented.

Tea in Japan

A Japanese Monk, Dengyo Daishi, is thought to have taken the first seeds from China to Japan for cultivation, after studying there from AD 803 to 805. Five years later, when he served the tea to the Emperor Saga, he liked it so much that he ordered cultivation to be established.

As in China, over the centuries, the drinking of tea in Japan became a highly important ritual ceremony, and an integral part of Japanese culture.

Tea in Britain

The Dutch and the Portuguese were the first to bring tea to Europe in the 17th century, and it soon found its way to Britain, which would later adopt it as the national drink. The growth of the British Empire eventually took both the growth and drinking of tea across the rest of the world.

The first recorded date of tea in Britain was in 1658, when a merchant by the name of Thomas Garraway in the City of London advertised tea for sale by auction in a weekly newspaper.

In 1662, when Charles II married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, a dedicated tea-drinker, tea’s popularity took a turn for the better. When the princess introduced tea to her friends at court, word of the drink spread, and it quickly became the fashionable thing to do.

Because of the high cost of tea, it was only drunk by the rich until the early 18th century, when taxes were reduced, and it quickly Britain’s most popular drink.

When the Opium wars broke out between Britain and China, China refused to export tea to Britain, so they had to look elsewhere. Northen India was chosen for its climate, but also because some native Assam tea bushes were discovered growing there, and these were soon used in preference to the imported Chinese plants.

The first shipment of Assam tea reached London in 1838. Estates in other parts of India, principally Darjeeling and Nilgiri were soon set up, and in the 1870s Ceylon also became a major tea-producing area after the coffee crop failed.

Britain’s consumption of tea rose from 23,730,000 pounds (weight) in 1801 to 258,847,000 in 1901, and imports of Indian and Ceylon teas gradually took over from China. Imports of mainly Chinese teas reached a peak of 170 million pounds in 1886, then fell to 13 million pounds in 1900 – only 7% of Britain’s total imports. By 1939, China imports had fallen as low as 1.3 million pounds. However, by the 1970s they had started to rise again.

As well as tea being popular in Britain, it was also popular in its colonies, especially America – until the Boston tea Party, that is! When Americans threw a delivery of tea into the habour in protest at taxes that were being levied, it sparked the American War of Independence, and an end to America’s tea-drinking tradition.

The name ‘tea'

The English name 'tea' was not derived from the Mandarin Chinese word 'cha' but from the Chinese Amoy dialect name 'te' (pronounced 'tay'). This was a result of the early contact between Dutch and Chinese traders in the port of Amoy in China’s Fujian Province. In Dutch the word became 'thee', and since the Dutch were mainly responsible for bringing tea to Europe, the name remained similar throughout each language: 'thee' in German, 'te' in Italian, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Hungarian and Malay, 'tea' in English, 'thé' in French, 'tee' in Finnish, 'teja' in Latvian, 'ta' in Korean, 'tey' in Tamil, 'thay' in Sinhalese and 'thea' to scientists.

The original Mandarin Chinese word 'cha', became the Cantonese word 'ch’a' and passed as 'cha' to Portuguese, Persian, Japanese and Hindi, 'shai' in Arabic, 'ja' in Tibetan, 'chay' in Turkish and 'chai' in Russian.

Tea in China

To find the origin of tea, one has travel back to the year 2737 BC. According to Chinese legend, the Emperor Shen Nung only ever drunk boiled water, until one day, when sitting beneath a wild tea tree, a breeze caused some of the leaves to fall into his pot of boiling water. He found the taste stimulating, and so the history of tea began.

It is not known whether the Emperor really existed, or if he was simply a myth – but it is generally accepted that tea was popular in China long before it was exported to the Western world.

The History of Tea

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