The legend, labelled as one
The story most often told is that the Chinese emperor Shennong discovered tea in 2737 BCE when leaves blew into his boiling water. It is a good story and it is a legend: Shennong is a mythological figure, the date is conventional, and the account appears in sources written a very long time after the event it describes. TeaHQ records it because readers meet it constantly, and labels it rather than repeating it as history.
What is better established
Camellia sinensis is native to the mountainous region where south-west China, northern Myanmar, north-east India and adjacent areas meet, and both the small-leaf sinensis and large-leaf assamica varieties occur there. Tea drinking is documented in China well before it appears anywhere else, and the earliest uses appear to have been medicinal and culinary as much as recreational. The precise centres and dates of domestication remain debated in the botanical and archaeological literature, and TeaHQ does not resolve them.
Lu Yu and the first systematic account
The Classic of Tea, conventionally attributed to Lu Yu and dated to the Tang dynasty in the eighth century, is generally treated as the first systematic treatment of cultivation, processing and preparation. Its significance is partly that it exists and partly that it shows tea already established enough to warrant one. It describes a preparation — compressed tea, boiled, sometimes salted — that would be unfamiliar to most modern drinkers.
Preparation has changed completely, more than once
This is the part most often missed. Tang-era practice boiled compressed tea. Song practice whisked powdered tea, which is where Japanese matcha ultimately comes from. Loose-leaf steeping — the method almost everyone now means by 'tea' — became dominant in China only from the Ming period. Anyone imagining a continuous unbroken practice from Shennong to their mug is imagining something that did not happen.