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The History of Tea

The evolution of tea in China

When the Chinese started drinking tea almost five thousand years ago, they sipped it for its health-giving properties. They found that the brew refreshed them, cured stomach aches, indigestion...

Tea travels to India

In India, tea is mentioned as a medicine in the Ramayana, the most important religious book dating from the 3rd century B.C. But we know little about the use or consumption of the beverage in the...

Tea travels to Japan

From China, tea made its way into neighbouring countries along trade routes where it was exchanged for other essential goods such as salt, iron goods, wool and cotton. It also found a home in new...

The first British tea plantations

Back in London, towards the end of the C18th, the Board of Directors of The East India Company had begun to worry about the cost of importing so much Chinese tea. They also realised by now that t...

The first tea in America, Europe & England

The Americans started importing tea in the 1650s, before anyone in England had even heard of the Oriental plant, and the first Europeans to ship tea home from Chinese ports in about 1610 AD were ...

The Boston tea party

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, new tea taxes imposed by King George III’s government on its American territory in 1767 provoked an angry response among the colony’s tea traders and tea drinke...

Birth of modern yacht racing – clipper ships

Despite the new ventures in India, small amounts of China tea were still being purchased for delivery into London and a new generation of faster, sleeker ships called ‘clippers’ brought the teas ...

Tea reaches Australia

Tea came to Australia aboard the First Fleet in 1788 under the Command of Captain Arthur Phillip and has played a big part in its culture ever since. The Australian billy was a metal container, o...

The drink of the nation

With substantial quantities of tea being grown on British territory, and a big reduction in the tax on teas in the 1860s, tea was now affordable to everyone in Britain and it truly became the d...