The History of Tea

The earliest credible record of tea drinking appears in the medical writings of the Chinese physician Hua Tuo in the 3rd century AD. Tea was gradually shifting from a medicinal ingredient to a drink consumed for its own stimulating bitterness.

Location: China

The scholar Lu Yu completed "The Classic of Tea" (Chajing), the first known monograph devoted to tea, covering its cultivation, preparation, and the aesthetics of drinking. The work codified tea culture during the Tang dynasty as the beverage spread across social classes.

Location: Tang dynasty China

Buddhist monks who had studied in China introduced tea to Japan; a 815 entry in Japan's official history records the monk Eichu serving tea to Emperor Saga. Tea drinking later evolved in Japan into the elaborate ritual practice known as the tea ceremony.

Location: Japan

Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and merchants resident in China sent the first detailed European accounts of tea in the mid-16th century. The Portuguese trader Jasper de Cruz, writing around 1560, is credited with the earliest surviving European description of the drink and its commercial availability.

Location: Portugal and China

The Dutch East India Company shipped the first commercial tea consignments to Europe around 1610, initially through Dutch trading posts in Bantam. Tea spread from Holland to fashionable circles in France, Germany, and by the 1650s to England, where it was sold in coffee houses.

Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza married King Charles II and made tea drinking a daily habit of the English royal court. Her taste for the beverage helped transform tea from an exotic curiosity into an aspirational social ritual among the English aristocracy.

Location: London, England

American colonists protesting British taxation without representation boarded three East India Company ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The destruction of the tea cargo escalated the imperial crisis and became one of the precipitating acts of the American Revolution, turning tea itself into a political symbol.

Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA

The first consignment of Assam-grown tea was auctioned in London in January 1839, following the discovery of native tea plants in Assam by the Bruce brothers and the founding of the Assam Company in 1839. Within decades, plantations in Assam and Darjeeling made British India the world's largest tea producer, displacing China from its dominant market position.

Location: London, England and Assam, India

The botanist Robert Fortune, working for the British East India Company, traveled disguised through China's tea districts between 1848 and 1851 and shipped roughly 20,000 tea plants and seedlings, along with Chinese tea-processing expertise, to British India. The operation broke China's monopoly on tea cultivation and enabled the rise of the Indian and later Ceylon plantation industries.

Location: China and India

In the 1860s, purpose-built sailing ships known as tea clippers raced the 25,000-kilometer (16,000-mile) voyage from China to London to deliver the first new-season tea at premium prices. The 1866 race, in which Taeping and Ariel finished within minutes of each other after 99 days at sea, marked the climax of the clipper era before steamships took over the trade.

Location: Foochow to London trade route

Through the 20th century, tea drinking spread far beyond its Asian and European heartlands, aided by industrial tea-bag production, supermarket distribution, and new producers in Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Turkey. By the mid-20th century tea had become, after water, the most widely consumed beverage in the world.

Location: Global

Chinese tradition credits the mythical Emperor Shennong with the discovery of tea around 2737 BC, when leaves from a wild tree are said to have drifted into his boiled drinking water. While legendary, the story reflects tea's deep roots in Chinese medicine, where it was first consumed as a therapeutic concoction.

Location: China