The history of tea

Traditionally 2737 BCE

The best-known origin story in tea, and a date — 2737 BCE — that is quoted in more places than almost any other in the subject and rests on nothing an archive could be asked for.

From before the written record to roughly the eighth century CE

For most of its history the leaf was not steeped. It was eaten, pickled, boiled into a soup with other things in it, and pressed into cakes — and in a few places it still is.

Around the second century BCE

Textual claims about early tea are contested and hard to pin down. Physical remains are not: tea buds have been recovered from Han-period tombs, which puts material tea about two thousand years back rather than five.

From around the Tang and Song, formalised under later dynasties

A state-managed barter that ran for centuries and shaped an entire category of tea. Compressed dark tea exists in the form it does because it had to survive months on a mule.

c. 760–780 CE

The first book about tea, and the moment tea acquires a literature. It is a manual — soil, tools, picking, making, water, vessels — and the aesthetic reputation it now carries was largely built by later readers.

Early ninth century

Japanese monks brought tea back from Tang China in the ninth century and an emperor had it planted. Within a few generations it had faded, and Japan had to receive tea a second time three hundred years later.

Traditionally 828 CE

Korea's tea origin story has a name, a place and a year attached to it, and the year comes from a chronicle compiled several centuries after the event it reports.

Roughly the tenth to thirteenth centuries

Powdered tea whisked into a bowl with a bamboo whisk, judged on the whiteness of its foam and how long the foam clung to the bowl. This is the direct ancestor of matcha, and it is Chinese.

Returned from China c. 1191; wrote Kissa Yōjōki in the early thirteenth century

The monk credited with bringing tea to Japan did something narrower and more interesting: he returned with Song whisked-tea practice, and he wrote the book that made tea matter to the warrior class.

The edict is dated to the late fourteenth century; the shift runs into the fifteenth

The single largest change in how tea is made, and it is usually credited to one imperial edict abolishing compressed tribute cake. The edict is real. Whether it caused the shift is a different question.

From the sixteenth century onward

When China moved to steeping, it needed a vessel it had not needed before. Unglazed stoneware from one county in Jiangsu became that vessel, and acquired a collector's market that has never gone away.

From around the sixteenth century

The practice that separates Japanese green tea from every other green tea in the world: covering the field for weeks before picking. It is the origin of matcha's colour and of gyokuro's sweetness, and it began as protection rather than as a flavour decision.

Across the sixteenth century, ending with Rikyū's death

Chanoyu's decisive aesthetic turn, made under a warlord's patronage and ending with the tea master ordered to take his own life. The ceremony was politics before it was serenity.

Traditionally 1610, with Portuguese contact earlier

Dutch ships, not English ones, and a date usually given as 1610 that marks a commercial shipment rather than the first leaf a European ever saw.

The technique matures across the Edo period and is mechanised in the twentieth century

Matcha is not ground green tea. It is a specific leaf, grown under shade, dried without rolling, stripped of stem and vein, and milled on granite slowly enough that the powder does not cook.

From 1662

A Portuguese queen consort who already drank tea, marrying into a court that mostly did not — and the origin of a story that credits one wedding with a national habit.

The eighteenth century

A second Japanese tea way, built on steeped leaf rather than whisked powder, and explicitly positioned against the wealth and formality that chanoyu had accumulated.

Documented from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

The small-pot, many-infusions method that now stands for Chinese tea everywhere is a regional practice from the Chaoshan area of eastern Guangdong, and it was a household habit long before it was a performance.

Through the eighteenth century, with the sugar boycotts in the early 1790s

Britain's tea habit and Britain's sugar habit grew together, and the sugar came from enslaved labour in the Caribbean. The abolitionist movement understood the connection perfectly well and organised a consumer boycott around it.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with legislation from the 1860s and 1870s

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century tea was routinely bulked out with other leaves, spent leaves redried, and coloured with substances that were not food. The scandal is a direct ancestor of modern food safety legislation.

1757 to 1842

For most of a century all European tea buying in China ran through a single port and a licensed guild of Chinese merchants. Every structural pressure that followed — the silver drain, the opium trade, the wars — starts from that bottleneck.

16 December 1773

342 chests of East India Company tea thrown into Boston harbour, in a protest that was not about a tax increase — the Tea Act had made the tea cheaper.

1784

Britain cut tea duty from well over 100 per cent to around 12 and destroyed a smuggling industry overnight. It is the single most important legislative event in how Britain came to drink tea.

The 1820s and 1830s

The story is usually told as a British discovery. What actually happened is that Singpho and Khamti communities showed British officials a plant they had been using for generations.

Traditionally the 1840s

Anna, Duchess of Bedford, getting hungry between meals in the 1840s. The story is repeated everywhere, is not documented in the way its confidence implies, and describes an aristocratic meal that is routinely confused with a working-class one.

1834

The Company's exclusive right to the China trade ended in 1834, and within five years Britain had a company growing tea in Assam. The two facts are directly connected.

1839

The first commercial tea company outside China, formed in 1839, and the beginning of the plantation model that still shapes how most of the world's tea is produced.

1839 to 1842, with a second war 1856 to 1860

Britain's tea purchases created a silver deficit; opium sold into China was the instrument used to close it; war followed when China tried to stop the opium. Tea is the demand at the start of that chain.

From the mid-nineteenth century, with Mombasa opening in the 1950s

Most of the world's tea has been sold by auction for a century and a half. Where the auctions are, and who bids at them, determines what a grower is paid.

From the 1840s

A hill station acquired for its climate, planted with Chinese-variety tea at altitudes where the bush grows slowly, producing something that tasted like nothing else and was priced accordingly.

1848 to 1851

A Scottish botanist travelling in disguise, removing tea plants, seeds and workers from China for the East India Company. It is usually told as the theft that created Indian tea, and Indian tea was already under way without him.

From the 1850s, with legal frameworks running into the twentieth century

Tea estates needed large permanent workforces in places that did not have them. The systems used to supply and retain that labour — indenture, penal contracts, recruitment from distant regions — are the least-told and most consequential part of the industry's history.

The 1850s and 1860s, ending after 1869

The fastest commercial sailing ships ever built, racing tea home from China — and made commercially obsolete within a few years by a canal.

Recipes from the mid-nineteenth century; the fair was in 1904

The story says a hot day in St Louis forced a tea merchant to serve his tea over ice, and iced tea was born. Iced tea recipes had been in American cookbooks for decades.

From the 1870s

Sri Lanka is a tea country because a leaf disease destroyed its coffee industry in the 1870s and the planters had to grow something else.

From the 1870s

Rolling by hand, then by machine. The single technological change that made tea a mass commodity rather than a craft product, and the reason a plantation could process what a plantation could pick.

From the 1880s through the interwar period

Late Victorian tea rooms were one of the first respectable public spaces in Britain where a woman could eat unaccompanied. That is not a decorative fact about them; it is why they spread.

From the 1880s and 1890s

Before packaged branded tea, a shopper bought loose tea weighed out by a grocer, of unknown and variable origin. Selling a sealed packet with a name on it changed the whole relationship.

From the 1900s, accelerating between the wars and after independence

For most of a century Indian tea was grown for export and barely drunk in India. The domestic market was built deliberately, by advertising campaigns and by an industry that had lost its buyers.

Patented 1903; the Sullivan story is set around 1908

The famous story involves a New York merchant, silk sample pouches, and customers brewing them by mistake. The documented origin is a US patent granted in 1903 to two women in Milwaukee.

From the early 1900s, with the smallholder agency founded in the 1960s

Kenya is now the world's largest exporter of black tea, and the more interesting half of that story is not the colonial planting — it is that most of the crop is now grown by smallholders rather than estates.

From the 1920s, with production established from the 1940s

A deliberate twentieth-century state project to replace an import with a domestic crop, and one of the most complete national conversions to tea drinking anywhere.

The early 1930s

A machine that cuts leaf into small hard granules instead of rolling it, invented in Assam in the early 1930s. Most of the tea drunk in the world is made this way, and almost nobody who drinks it knows the word.

1940 to 1952

Britain rationed tea from 1940 to 1952 and the government bought up the world's available supply. The wartime handling of tea is a substantial part of why it sits where it does in British life.

From the 1950s, with the change largely complete by the 1980s

In 1960 tea bags were a negligible share of the British market. Within four decades they were nearly all of it. It is one of the fastest complete changes in national drinking habit anywhere.

Canned oolong from 1981; canned unsweetened green tea from 1985

Selling tea in a can with nothing added to it required solving a real technical problem, and it changed what a beverage market could contain. Most tea drunk in Japan today is bought ready-made.

The 1980s

Taiwan in the 1980s, tapioca pearls in iced milk tea, and two establishments with competing claims that went as far as a lawsuit. It is now one of the largest tea-based product categories in the world.

From the 2000s, with acute supply pressure from the mid-2020s

Global demand for matcha grew faster than a crop that takes years to plant, weeks to shade and hours to mill could grow with it. By the mid-2020s Japanese producers were rationing allocations.