The history of tea

Before recorded history — legend and botany

One plant, one place

Every true tea — green, white, oolong, black, pu-erh — comes from Camellia sinensis, an evergreen native to the borderlands where southwest China, northern Myanmar and northeast India meet. Left alone it becomes a tree; cultivated, it is kept as a waist-high bush so the new growth can be picked.

The legend credits the emperor Shennong, around 2737 BCE, with the discovery: leaves blow into his pot of boiling water, he drinks it, he approves. It is almost certainly not true and it is a very good story, which is roughly the standard for origin myths. The botanical and archaeological evidence points to tea being consumed in southwest China for several thousand years, initially more as a medicinal preparation than a pleasure.

Green, white, oolong, black and pu-erh are the same leaf. Only what happens after picking differs.

8th century — Tang dynasty China

The first person to write it all down

Lu Yu wrote the Cha Jing — the Classic of Tea — in the 760s, and it is the first book anyone wrote about tea anywhere. It covers cultivation, processing, the twenty-four implements required, and the correct water, about which Lu Yu is memorably particular: mountain spring first, river water second, well water last.

Tang-dynasty tea was nothing like a modern cup. Leaf was steamed, pounded, pressed into cakes and dried, then roasted, ground to powder and whisked or boiled — often with salt. Recognisable tea culture existed for centuries before recognisable tea did.

12th century — Japan

The branch that kept whisking

The monk Eisai brought powdered tea and Zen Buddhism from China to Japan together, and the two stayed entangled. Powdered tea became matcha, and the practice of preparing it became chanoyu — the tea ceremony — formalised in the 16th century by Sen no Rikyū around the principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity.

China later abandoned powdered tea entirely. Japan did not. That is why matcha is Japanese today despite being Chinese in origin, and why the Japanese tea tradition looks so different from the Chinese one that they can seem like unrelated practices.

China invented whisked powdered tea, then dropped it. Japan kept it for eight hundred years.

1391 — Ming dynasty China

One decree, and the world steeps loose leaf

The Hongwu Emperor abolished the tribute of compressed tea cakes in 1391, on the grounds that producing them wasted enormous labour. Producers switched to whole loose leaf, and the whole apparatus of tea changed with it: teapots appeared, steeping replaced whisking, and the categories we now recognise began to separate as makers experimented with wilting, bruising and oxidation.

Oolong and black tea both emerge in the centuries after this shift. So does the Yixing clay teapot, and the small-pot, many-steeps brewing that became gongfu cha.

17th century — Europe

Arrival, and a very large bill

Portuguese and Dutch traders brought tea to Europe in the early 1600s. It reached England in the 1650s as an expensive curiosity, and Catherine of Braganza — the Portuguese princess who married Charles II in 1662 — made it fashionable at court. Within a century it was a national habit rather than an aristocratic one.

Black tea dominated in Europe for an unromantic reason: fully oxidised leaf survived months at sea in a wooden ship and arrived still tasting of something. Green tea did not. The British preference for strong black tea with milk is, at root, a shipping constraint that became a culture.

18th–19th century — the part that is not charming

Opium, theft and plantations

Britain bought enormous quantities of Chinese tea and had little China wanted in exchange, producing a silver drain the East India Company closed by selling opium grown in India into China. China's attempts to stop the trade led to the Opium Wars. A national drink sits at the centre of that history and it is worth saying so plainly.

In 1848 the Company sent the botanist Robert Fortune into China in disguise to take tea plants, seeds and processing knowledge — one of the largest acts of corporate espionage in history. Combined with the discovery of native tea in Assam, this let Britain build its own plantation industry in India and Ceylon, worked under labour conditions that were frequently brutal.

The Boston Tea Party in 1773 belongs to the same story from the other end: colonists destroying East India Company tea over the terms on which it was sold to them.

Tea in India began as a way to stop paying China for tea.

20th century to now

The bag, and the turn back

The tea bag was an accident. Around 1908 the New York merchant Thomas Sullivan sent samples in small silk pouches, and customers steeped the pouch. Mass production followed, and with it a change in what went inside — bags suit small broken particles, which extract fast and turn bitter fast, so a century of drinkers learned tea as something strong, quick and in need of milk and sugar.

The last thirty years have run the other way. Single-origin leaf, harvest years, direct trade with specific gardens, and a broad rediscovery of Chinese and Taiwanese brewing outside Asia. It is now trivially easy to buy a tea from a named mountain picked in a named month, which for most of tea's history was not possible at any price.

That is where PS Teas comes in, in a small way. A very large number of people have been told their whole lives that tea is a bag of dust in boiling water. It is a leaf, from a shrub, and it has around two thousand years of people arguing about it. Laugh. Love. Tea.