Shape one: a precise date on an ancient event
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
2737 BCE for the discovery of tea. 828 CE for tea arriving in Korea. 1191 for Eisai. A confident year attached to something two thousand years old should raise the question of what could possibly be fixing it, and the answer is usually a chronicle compiled centuries later, or a tradition, or nothing at all. The rule of thumb: the further back a date sits, the more suspicious its precision should make you. Real early dates come as centuries and ranges, because that is what the evidence supports. TeaHQ labels every date on its history pages for exactly this reason.
Shape two: one person introduced tea to a country
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Catherine of Braganza brought tea to Britain. Eisai brought tea to Japan. Robert Fortune created the Indian tea industry. This shape is wrong nearly every time it appears, and it is wrong in the same way each time: it takes a real person who did a real, narrower thing and inflates them into a sole cause. Drinking habits are economic and gradual. Britain became a tea-drinking country because duty was cut in 1784 and the price collapsed, a century after Catherine. Japan received tea twice and the first time did not take. Assam was being planted before Fortune left for China. In each case the individual is real and the causal claim is not.
Shape three: an accident of genius
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
A merchant sends samples in silk bags and the tea bag is invented. A hot day at a World's Fair invents iced tea. Leaves blow into an emperor's pot. These stories are memorable, which is why they survive, and they are almost always compressions of a slower commercial development. When you meet one, the useful question is not "is it true" but "what was already happening that this story is standing in for". Iced tea recipes were in American cookbooks decades before 1904. A patent for a single-cup leaf holder predates the Sullivan story.
Shape four: a tradition described as timeless
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
"For centuries, the Japanese have..." "An ancient Indian tradition..." Both should prompt the question: how old, exactly, and how would we know? Masala chai as a mass Indian drink is twentieth-century and was actively created by an industry advertising campaign. Turkey's tea culture is a republican-era agricultural project. Moroccan mint tea requires Chinese green tea that arrived in the nineteenth century. None of these is less real for being recent, and describing them as ancient is a specific and avoidable error.
Shape five: a source that is selling something
A great deal of tea history circulates through retailer About pages, which have a commercial interest in antiquity, in ceremony, and in their own product's connection to both. That does not make them liars; it makes them a genre with a systematic bias, and the bias runs in one direction. Better sources for this subject: museums and national archives, university publications, national tea boards for institutional chronology, and UNESCO's intangible-heritage documentation for practices. Where TeaHQ cites a retailer at all it is to document what the market says, never as evidence that a historical claim is true.
What to do with a claim you cannot check
Keep it, and label it. Deleting a widely repeated story leaves a reader who has already met it with nowhere to find out what it is, which is why TeaHQ records the Shennong legend and the Duchess of Bedford rather than omitting them — flagged as legend, with what the evidence carries stated alongside. That is the whole method: not scepticism about everything, but saying which register a statement is in. "This is documented", "this is disputed", "this is a story people tell" are three different sentences and the difference is nearly always available.