The story begins with a legend. According to Britannica, tea has been known in China since about 2700 bce, and for thousands of years it was a medicine, made by boiling fresh leaves in water. Nothing about it suggested a future as the drink of every office kitchen and grand hotel lounge.
The shift came slowly. Around the 3rd century ce tea became a daily drink in China, and cultivation and processing began. In 350 ce someone wrote down the first published account of how to plant it, process it and drink it. Then it started to move. Around 800 the first seeds reached Japan, where growing was well established by the 13th century. There tea found a second home in ritual: the Japanese tea ceremony, rooted in Zen Buddhism, centres on harmony, respect, cleanliness and tranquility. A host in a rustic tea house serves guests special sweets, then prepares tea from pulverized leaves in hot water.
Ships carry it west
Europe came to tea by sea. The Dutch East India Company carried the first consignment of China tea there in 1610. In 1669 the English East India Company brought a cargo from ports in Java to the London market. Between those dates, in the 1660s, King Charles II and his wife, the Portuguese Infanta Catherine de Braganza, made the drink fashionable in England, according to Historic UK.
Afternoon tea, that most English of customs, turns out to be far younger than the habit behind it. Historic UK credits Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, with starting it in 1840. In her household dinner was served at eight, which left a long gap after lunch, and around four o’clock she grew hungry. She asked for a tray of tea, bread and butter, and cake to be brought to her room. She kept doing it, and then she began inviting friends. By the 1880s, upper-class women were changing into long gowns, gloves and hats for tea in the drawing room between four and five.
An empire grows its own
The 19th century spread the plant itself. Chinese growers from Amoy took tea cultivation to Formosa, now Taiwan, in 1810. The Dutch began growing it in Java, bringing seeds from Japan in 1826 and seeds, workers and implements from China in 1833. In 1824 tea plants were found in the hills along the frontier between Burma and the Indian state of Assam. The British introduced tea culture to India in 1836 and to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in 1867. At first they planted seeds from China, then switched to the Assam plant.
That choice shaped what most people drink. Britannica describes two main varieties, the small-leaved China plant and the large-leaved Assam plant, and notes that black tea, by far the most common type produced, is best made from Assam or hybrid plants. Teas from British estates in India and Ceylon reached Mincing Lane, the centre of London’s tea trade.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tea growing had reached Russian Georgia, Sumatra and Iran. It also spread across Africa, to Natal, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Congo, Tanzania and Mozambique, and to Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Queensland in Australia.
Where Duchess Anna’s tray once carried silver pots and bone china, the average suburban home today manages a biscuit and a mug of tea made with a teabag. Historic UK calls that sacrilege.
Sources
- Tea | Definition, Types, & History | Britannica
- The history of afternoon tea – a great British tradition | Historic UK
