The story of tea begins in China. According to legend, in 2737 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting beneath a tree while his servant boiled drinking water, when some leaves from the tree blew into the water. Shen Nung, a renowned herbalist, decided to try the infusion that his servant had accidentally created. The tree was a Camellia sinensis, and the resulting drink was what we now call tea.

It is impossible to know whether there is any truth in this story. But tea drinking certainly became established in China many centuries before it had even been heard of in the west. Containers for tea have been found in tombs dating from the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) but it was under the Tang dynasty (618-906 AD), that tea became firmly established as the national drink of China. It became such a favourite that during the late eighth century a writer called Lu Yu wrote the first book entirely about tea, the Ch’a Ching, or Tea Classic.

It was shortly after this that tea was first introduced to Japan, by Japanese Buddhist monks who had travelled to China to study. Tea drinking has become a vital part of Japanese culture, as seen in the development of the Tea Ceremony, which may be rooted in the rituals described in the Ch’a Ching.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century there are the first brief mentions of tea as a drink among Europeans. These are mostly from Portuguese who were living in the East as traders and missionaries. But although some of these individuals may have brought back samples of tea to their native country, it was not the Portuguese who were the first to ship back tea as a commercial import. This was done by the Dutch, who in the last years of the sixteenth century began to encroach on Portuguese trading routes in the East. By the turn of the century they had established a trading post on the island of Java, and it was via Java that in 1606 the first consignment of tea was shipped from China to Holland. Tea soon became a fashionable drink among the Dutch, and from there spread to other countries in continental western Europe, but because of its high price it remained a drink for the wealthy.

The first dated reference to tea in Britain is from an advert in a London newspaper from September 1658. It announced that “China Drink, called by the Chinese, Tcha, by other Nations Tay, alias Tee” was on sale at a coffee house in the City. The first coffee house had been established in London in 1652, and the terms of this advert suggest that tea was still somewhat unfamiliar.

It was the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza that would prove to be a turning point in the history of tea in Britain. She was a Portuguese princess, and a tea addict, and it was her love of the drink that established tea as a fashionable beverage first at court, and then among the wealthy classes as a whole. Capitalising on this, the East India Company began to import tea into Britain, its first order being placed in 1664 – for 100lbs of China tea to be shipped from Java.

By the eighteenth century many Britons wanted to drink tea but could not afford the high prices, due to the high taxation of tea, and their enthusiasm for the drink was matched by the enthusiasm of criminal gangs to smuggle it in. Their methods could be brutal, but they were supported by the millions of British tea drinkers who would not have otherwise been able to afford their favourite beverage. What began as a small time illegal trade, selling a few pounds of tea to personal contacts, developed by the late eighteenth century into an astonishing organised crime network, perhaps importing as much as 7 million lbs annually, compared to a legal import of 5 million lbs. In 1784 the government realised that heavy taxation was creating more problems than it was worth. The new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, slashed the tax from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent. Suddenly legal tea was affordable, and smuggling stopped virtually overnight.

During the eighteenth century, tea drinking was as popular in Britain’s American colonies as it was in Britain itself. Legally, all tea imported into America had to be shipped from Britain, and all tea imported into Britain had to be shipped by the East India Company. However, for most of the eighteenth century, the East India Company was not allowed to export directly to America. During the 1770s the East India Company ran into financial problems: illegal tea smuggling into Britain was vastly reducing the amount of tea being bought from the Company. In an attempt to revive its flagging fortunes and avoid bankruptcy, the Company asked the British government for permission to export tea direct to America, a move that would enable it to get rid of its surplus stock of tea. The Company owed the government £1 million, so the government had no desire to let the Company go bankrupt. Thus in 1773 the Tea Act was passed, granting the Company’s wish, and allowing a duty of 3d per lb to be levied on the exports to America.

The British government did not anticipate this being a problem: by being exported directly to America, the cost of tea there would actually become cheaper, and 3d per lb was considerably less duty than was paid on tea destined for the British market. But it had underestimated the strength of the American resistance to being taxed at all by their British colonial masters. They were further incensed by the decision of Parliament that the East India Company would have a monopoly on the distribution of tea in America, using its own agents instead of established American tea merchants. This seemed like an attempt to put patriotic Americans out of business.

In autumn 1773 four ships, Dartmouth, Eleanor, Beaver and William, set sail for Boston with their precious cargo of tea. In the early evening of 16 December, a band of men boarded the ships, hoisted the tea on board deck, split open the chests – 342 in total – and threw all the tea into the sea. The following morning large quantities of tea were still floating in the harbour waters, so to prevent any being salvaged, men went out in rowing boats and beat the tea beneath the surface of the water with their oars. A joke went round for months afterwards that fish taken from American waters tasted strongly of tea.

This Tea Party sparked off other protests: tea being shipped to New York and Philadelphia was sent back to London, while tea off-loaded at Charleston was left to rot in the warehouses. In retaliation, the British government passed five laws in early 1774 that became known as the Intolerable Acts. The Acts played a key role in uniting the 13 American colonies against British rule. The united resistance of the colonies would lead to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, which was signed in July 1776, just three years after the Boston Tea Party. It seems a little incongruous that a little over 250 years ago, tea was such a hot political issue in America that it sparked off the American War of Independence and eventually led to the United States of America becoming an independent nation instead of a group of British colonies.

Another great impetus to tea drinking in Britain resulted from the end of the East India Company’s monopoly on trade with China in 1834. China had been the origin of the vast majority of tea imported to Britain, but the end of the monopoly stimulated the East India Company to consider growing tea in India, the center of the Company’s operations, where it also played a leading role in government. This led to increased cultivation of tea in India, beginning in Assam. There were a few false starts, but by 1839 there was sufficient cultivation of tea of ‘marketable quality’ for the first auction of Assam tea in Britain.

In 1858 the British government took over direct control of India from the East India Company, but the new administration was equally keen to promote the tea industry and cultivation increased and spread to regions beyond Assam. It was a great success, production was expanded, and by 1888 British tea imports from India were for the first time greater than those from China.

The end of the East India Company’s monopoly on trade with China also had another result, which was more dramatic though less important in the long term: it ushered in the era of the tea clippers. While the Company had had the monopoly on trade, there was no rush to bring the tea from China to Britain, but after 1834 the tea trade became a virtual free for all. Individual merchants and sea captains with their own ships raced to bring home tea and make the most money, using fast new clippers which had sleek lines, tall masts and huge sails. In particular there was competition between British and American merchants, leading to the famous clipper races of the 1860s. The race began in China where the clippers would leave the Canton River, race down the China Sea, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic, past the Azores and into the English Channel. The clippers would then be towed up the River Thames by tugs and the race would be won by the first ship to hurl ashore its cargo at the London docks. These races soon came to an end with the opening of the Suez canal, which made the trade routes to China viable for steamships for the first time.

By 1901, fuelled by cheaper imports from India and Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), tea had become firmly established as part of the British way of life. This was officially recognised during the First World War, when the government took over the importation of tea to Britain in order to ensure that this essential morale-boosting beverage continued to be available at an affordable price. The government took control again during the Second World War, and tea was rationed from 1940 until 1952.

1952 also saw the re-establishment of the London Tea Auction, a regular auction that had been taking place since 1706. The auction was at the centre of the world’s tea industry, but improved worldwide communications and the growth of auctions in tea producing nations meant that the London Tea Auction gradually declined in importance during the latter half of the twentieth century. The final London Tea Auction was held on 29 June 1998.

As the tea auction declined, a prominent element of modern tea-drinking took hold – the tea bag. Tea bags were invented in America in the early twentieth century, but only really took off in the 1970s. Nowadays it would be hard for many tea-drinkers to imagine life without them.

With recent scientific research indicating that tea drinking may have direct health benefits, it is assured that for centuries to come there will always be a place for a nice cup of tea.