But tea has a rich history, and in this section, we may track it from the early instances in Imperial China to its current position at the centre of British life. Discover how tea was brought to the UK and America by the Tea Clippers and its fascinating history in China and the Far East.
Learn how a queen from the seventeenth century brought tea to England and how crucial the tea trade was to the British East India Company, one of the most potent businesses the world has ever known. Learn about the widespread smuggling and adulteration that resulted from the amazing popularity of tea in the eighteenth century as well as the terrible lengths that smugglers went to defend their illicit enterprise.
In addition, learn how the American Revolution was launched by the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and how the Clipper races in the nineteenth century were made exciting by the competition between English and American tea dealers. And explore the social history of tea in Britain, starting with the earliest discussions about its health benefits and continuing through the emergence of tea bags, the long-standing practise of the London Tea Auction, and how tea helped soldiers' morale throughout the World Wars.
Tea has been a staple of British culture for more than 350 years, and is frequently considered to be a uniquely British beverage. But in reality, tea has a much longer history. Tea's history is rooted in China. According to mythology, some leaves from the tree blew into the river in 2737 BC as the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was seated beneath a tree and his servant was boiling water for him. The renowned herbalist Shen Nung made the decision to try the infusion that his servant had unintentionally made. The tree, a Camellia sinensis, gave rise to the beverage we now know as tea.
It is impossible to determine whether this story is true or not. But before it was even known in the west, tea drinking undoubtedly became widespread in China. Although teapots from the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) have been discovered in tombs, it wasn't until the Tang dynasty (618–906 AD) that tea truly established itself as China's national beverage. The Ch'a Ching, also known as the Tea Classic, was the first book written just about tea and was published in the late eighth century by a writer by the name of Lu Yu. Soon after, Japanese Buddhist monks who had been to China for academic purposes brought tea for the first time to Japan. drinking tea has
Europe was so somewhat behind at this point in tea history. The first brief references to tea as a beverage among Europeans date from the second half of the sixteenth century. These are primarily from Portuguese traders and missionaries who lived in the East. The Portuguese were not the first to ship back tea as a commercial import, even if some of these people may have brought samples of tea back to their home nations. This was carried out by the Dutch, who started to impede Portuguese trade routes in the East in the final years of the sixteenth century.
They had established a trading presence on the island of Java by the turn of the century, and it was through Java that the first shipment of tea from China to Holland was made in 1606. The Dutch quickly adopted tea as a fashionable beverage, and it later spread to other nations in continental western Europe. However, due to its exorbitant cost, tea remained a beverage reserved for the affluent.
