The History of Tea

Camellia sinensis: the tea plant of southwest China (Prehistory; drinking likely by the 2nd millennium BC)

All true tea comes from Camellia sinensis, an evergreen in the camellia family. Botanists and geneticists place its origin in southwest China, centred on Yunnan and the neighbouring hills of Sichuan and northern Myanmar. Two main forms grew from it: the small-leaf China variety and the large-leaf Assam variety. Tea drinking probably began in Yunnan as a medicinal brew in the 2nd millennium BC, long before anyone wrote about it.

Where it came from: People in the southwest picked leaves from wild trees, then began tending and selecting them. Genetic studies point to Yunnan, and to the Lincang area in particular, as a likely place where tea was first domesticated.

Where it is now: The plant never left. Old tea trees still grow in Yunnan's forests, and its descendants now fill tea gardens from Japan to India, Sri Lanka and East Africa.

• A 2022 study that resequenced 1,350 tea plants found three possible centres of origin inside Lincang, Yunnan.
• Many researchers hold a two-origin theory: the large-leaf assamica tea links to southwest China or Assam, while the small-leaf sinensis tea is linked to southeast China.
• In 2023 the Palace Museum in Beijing showed tea-tree root remains from Tianluoshan in Zhejiang, which it said push Chinese tea growing back about 6,000 years.

Try it yourself: Grow your own tea: live Camellia sinensis plants are sold for home gardens (Camellia sinensis tea plant live on Amazon)

Sources: Lei et al., Whole-genome resequencing reveals the origin of tea in Lincang, Frontiers in Plant Science (2022); Lu et al., Earliest tea as evidence for one branch of the Silk Road across the Tibetan Plateau, Scientific Reports (2016), PMC; CGTN: Tea culture exhibition, a journey through China's rich tea heritage (2023); Wikipedia: History of tea

The legend of Shen Nong and the falling leaf (Legend; the date “2737 BC” is traditional, not historical)

Shen Nong, the Divine Farmer, is a mythical ruler credited in Chinese tradition with teaching farming and herbal medicine. The popular tea story has leaves blowing into his boiling water, turning it into the first cup of tea, around 2737 BC. No early text tells this scene. The oldest surviving link between Shen Nong and tea comes from Lu Yu's Classic of Tea, written around 760 AD, which says only that tea as a drink “arose with Shen Nong”. The falling-leaf scene and the exact year belong to later retellings.

• The Huainanzi, a Han text of 122 BC, is the earliest written record tying Shen Nong to herbal medicine, but the tea story came much later.
• Another version of the legend says tea saved Shen Nong as an antidote to almost 70 poisons he met while tasting plants.
• In the same chapter, Lu Yu lists the Han writers Yang Xiong and Sima Xiangru among famous tea drinkers.

Sources: Lu Yu, The Classic of Tea (茶經), chapter 6 “Drinking” (六之飲), Chinese Wikisource; The Public Domain Review: The Legend of the Divine Farmer (Gillian Daniel, 2015); Wikipedia: History of tea

Tea in the tomb of Emperor Jing of Han (Buried by 141 BC; identified in 2016)

Emperor Jing of Han died in 141 BC and was buried at the Yangling mausoleum near Xi'an. In 2016 a team led by Houyuan Lu published tests on a dark brown, brick-shaped mass of leaves from one of the burial pits. It was made almost entirely of tea buds. (A 2021 study has since reported older tea residue, from a Warring States tomb in Shandong.) Caffeine, theanine and Camellia-type plant crystals confirmed it as tea, grown, the authors wrote, for the drinking habits of the Western Han court. The same study found tea in a grave in western Tibet from the 2nd to 3rd century AD, evidence that tea was already crossing the Tibetan Plateau.

• The tea came from pit DK15, one of 86 outer burial pits around the Han Yangling Mausoleum of Emperor Jing (Liu Qi).
• Radiocarbon dating of the tea itself gave about 255 BC, plus or minus 80 years.
• The Tibetan tea came from the Gurgyam cemetery in Ngari, 4,290 metres up, and is 400 to 500 years older than the earliest written record of tea in Tibet.

Sources: Lu et al., Earliest tea as evidence for one branch of the Silk Road across the Tibetan Plateau, Scientific Reports 6:18955 (2016), PMC; Scientific American: Archaeologists Uncover Another Branch of the Silk Road; Sci.News: 2,400-Year-Old Tea Residue Found in China (on the 2021 Zoucheng find); Wikipedia: Emperor Jing of Han

Wang Bao's servant contract mentions tea (59 BC) (59 BC (3rd year of Shenjue))

The Han writer Wang Bao composed a mock legal contract, known as Tong Yue (“The Servant's Contract”, also translated “Contract for a Youth”). It is dated the 3rd year of the Shenjue era, which is 59 BC. In it the writer buys a bearded enslaved man named Bianliao from a widow in Chengdu and lists, at comic length, the work he must do. Among the chores: brew tea and set out the utensils, and go to market to buy tea. Scholars treat it as the first unambiguous written reference to tea as a drink.

• The contract gives the price for the man as 15,000 cash, paid to the widow Yang Hui of Chengdu.
• The tea lines read 烹茶盡具 (“brew tea and lay out all the utensils”) and 武都買荼 (“buy tea at Wudu”; some editions read Wuyang), so tea was already bought and sold at market.
• Wang Bao lived about 84 to 53 BC and rose to fame at the court of Emperor Xuan.

Sources: Wang Bao, Tong Yue (僮約), Chinese Wikisource; Lu et al., Scientific Reports (2016), on 59 BC as the first unambiguous textual reference to tea, PMC; Wikipedia: Wang Bao

Tang dynasty tea cakes (618–907)

Under the Tang, most tea was not loose leaf but pressed cakes. Lu Yu set out the steps in seven words: pick it, steam it, pound it, pat it into shape, roast it, string it, seal it. Cakes kept and travelled well, the Tang state taxed the tea trade, and pressed tea later served as currency across much of Asia. To drink one, you toasted a piece, ground it, and boiled the powder, often with other flavourings.

How it was made: Pressing tea solved the problems of storage and transport for a crop grown far from the capital. By the Tang, tea had spread beyond monasteries into court and city life, and cakes made it a tradeable good.

Where it is now: Song drinkers turned the cakes into whisked powder, and in 1391 the Ming founder ended dragon-cake tribute. Pressed tea never vanished: pu-erh cakes and dark-tea bricks are made the same basic way today.

• Lu Yu lists coarse, loose, powdered and cake tea in his day, and notes that many people boiled it with onion, ginger, jujube, orange peel, dogwood or mint, which he called no better than ditch water.
• Later tea bricks were often scored into sections so pieces could be broken off and still keep their value.
• Imported tea bricks served as currency in Tibet and Bhutan until British-Indian silver rupees replaced them between 1874 and 1935.

Try it yourself: A pressed tea brick, the direct descendant of Tang tea cakes (compressed pu-erh tea brick on Amazon)

Sources: Lu Yu, The Classic of Tea (茶經), chapter 3 “Making” (三之造), Chinese Wikisource; Lu Yu, The Classic of Tea (茶經), chapter 6 “Drinking” (六之飲), Chinese Wikisource; Marc Jason Gilbert, Chinese Tea in World History, Education About Asia 13:2 (2008), USC US-China Institute; World History Encyclopedia: Tea in Ancient China & Japan; Wikipedia: History of tea

Lu Yu, author of The Classic of Tea (733–804; Classic written c. 760)

Lu Yu was a Tang writer who produced the Cha Jing, The Classic of Tea, the first known book devoted to tea. It runs to three scrolls and ten chapters covering the plant, tools, processing, brewing, drinking, history, growing regions and utensils. It opens: “Tea is a fine tree of the south.” The book turned tea from a medicine and a local habit into a subject of taste and craft, and set the pattern for every tea manual after it.

How they rose: Lu Yu studied for six years under a teacher, Zou Fuzi, and learned about tea and herbs at Longgai Monastery. He wrote the Classic while in the company of the scholar and poet Cui Guofu, starting around 760.

How they died: He died in 804. His original manuscript is lost; the Classic survives in later printed editions and is still read and translated today.

• Tea sellers of his own era made pottery statues of Lu Yu and worshipped him as the “tea god”.
• The Classic was first issued in three books; later editions combined them into one volume.
• Gilbert dates the writing to between 760 and 780.

Try it yourself: Lu Yu's Classic of Tea in English translation (The Classic of Tea Lu Yu Francis Ross Carpenter on Amazon)

Sources: Lu Yu, The Classic of Tea (茶經), chapter 1 “Origins” (一之源), Chinese Wikisource; Marc Jason Gilbert, Chinese Tea in World History, Education About Asia (2008); World History Encyclopedia: Tea in Ancient China & Japan; Wikipedia: Lu Yu

Pu-erh and the old tea forests of Yunnan (From the 10th century; UNESCO listing 2023)

Pu-erh is a fermented tea from Yunnan, made from the large-leaf assamica form of the tea plant and usually pressed into cakes or bricks. It takes its name from the old trading town of Pu'er, where tea from the hills was gathered and sold. On Jingmai Mountain the Blang people, who settled there in the 10th century, and the Dai grew tea under the forest canopy instead of clearing it. Raw pu-erh changes slowly over years in storage; a faster “ripe” style was invented in the 20th century.

Where it came from: Blang ancestors settled Jingmai in the 10th century and domesticated the wild tea trees they found there. Pressed Yunnan tea later travelled north and west by caravan and reached the Qing court as tribute.

Where it is now: Pu-erh is now one of China's best-known teas. In 2023 the old tea forests of Jingmai Mountain became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

• In the 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, a senior housekeeper of the Jia household tells the maids to brew some pu-erh, a sign of its place in elite Qing homes.
• The Kunming Tea Factory developed the wet-piling method for ripe pu-erh in 1973, cutting years of ageing to about 45–60 days.
• Jingmai was China's 57th World Heritage entry and the first one about tea.

Try it yourself: A classic 357-gram Yunnan pu-erh cake, to drink now or age (Yunnan pu-erh tea cake 357g on Amazon)

Sources: Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), chapter 63, Chinese Wikisource; China Daily: Old tea forests in Pu'er named World Heritage Site (2023); Wikipedia: Pu'er tea

The Tea Horse Road (By the Song dynasty; in use into the 20th century)

The Tea Horse Road was a web of caravan trails linking the tea country of Yunnan and Sichuan with Tibet. Its main routes ran from Pu'er and Yiwu through Dali and Lijiang, and from Ya'an through Kangding, to Lhasa. Tibetans needed tea; Chinese dynasties needed warhorses. The swap of pressed tea for ponies gave the road its name, and states set up special offices to run it.

How it began: The horse-for-tea trade goes back at least to the Song dynasty. The Ming set up Tea-Horse Offices at frontier prefectures to control it, and Kangding became the busiest tea-horse market under the Ming and Qing.

What became of it: The trade lasted into the Republican era (1912–1949). Today the Yunnan-Tibet Old Tea Horse Road draws tourists.

• The Ming History records Tea-Horse Offices set up in Qin, Tao, He and Ya prefectures.
• Porters sometimes carried 60–90 kg of tea or more, often more than their own body weight.
• A 1908 photograph from western Sichuan shows men setting out for Tibet carrying about 300 pounds of brick tea each.

Try it yourself: A Yunnan tea brick of the kind caravans carried to Tibet (Yunnan pu-erh tea brick 250g on Amazon)

Sources: Ming History (明史), juan 80, Treatise on Food and Money, tea law (茶法), Chinese Wikisource; Marc Jason Gilbert, Chinese Tea in World History, Education About Asia (2008); Wikipedia: Tea Horse Road

Jian ware “hare's fur” tea bowls (tenmoku) (11th–13th century)

Jian ware is dark-glazed stoneware from kilns at Jianyang in Fujian, at its height under the Song. Iron in the glaze separates in the kiln into streaks called hare's fur, or into “oil spots” and partridge-feather patterns. The black bowls had a purpose: Song tea was whisked into a pale froth, and dark glaze made the foam stand out. Japanese monks took the bowls home, where they became known as tenmoku.

How it was made: As whisked tea and tea competitions spread through Song society, demand for Fujian tea bowls rose. The emperor's own tea treatise praised bowls that were blue-black with fine streaks.

Where it is now: When China turned to steeped loose-leaf tea after 1391, the bowls lost their job at home. In Japan they stayed precious, and modern potters still make hare's-fur bowls.

• Five Southern Song Jian bowls are Japanese National Treasures.
• The Japanese name tenmoku comes from Tianmu Mountain in China.
• Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum notes that Jian bowls were used by the ruling elite, monks and ordinary people alike.

Try it yourself: A hare's-fur glaze tea bowl in the Song Jian style (Jian zhan tenmoku hare's fur tea bowl on Amazon)

Sources: Harvard Art Museums: Tea Bowl with Indented Lip and Russet Hare's Fur Markings, Jian ware, 12th–13th century; Asian Civilisations Museum (Roots.sg): Tea bowl, Jian kilns, Song dynasty, C-1421; Treatise on Tea (大觀茶論), attributed to Emperor Huizong, 1107, on bowls, Chinese Wikisource; TeaTime Magazine: The Chitra Collection, China's Early Trade with the West (2017); Wikipedia: Jian ware

Song whisked tea and the emperor's Treatise on Tea (Song dynasty (960–1279); treatise of about 1107)

In the Song dynasty, fine tea was ground to a powder, put in a bowl with hot water and beaten with a bamboo whisk. Gatherings held contests over who could whisk the best froth. The Treatise on Tea of about 1107, traditionally credited to Emperor Huizong, describes the bowl, the whisk, and a sequence of seven pourings of water. This is the method Japanese monks carried home and that survives as matcha.

How it was made: Earlier writers such as Cai Xiang, in his Record of Tea of about 1050, praised black bowls for showing the froth. Huizong's court made whisked tea a refined art.

Where it is now: Pressed cakes for powdered tea were costly to make. After the Ming founder halted cake tribute in 1391, steeping loose leaves became the Chinese norm, and whisking lived on mainly in Japan.

• The treatise says the best bowls are blue-black with fine “jade hair” streaks, a description of Jian ware.
• Tokyo University of the Arts notes there is no conclusive proof that Huizong wrote it himself, though it seems plausible.
• The treatise praises “white tea”, a rare variety found growing by chance on only one or two bushes, as beyond compare.

Try it yourself: A bamboo tea whisk, the tool Song drinkers used to raise the foam (bamboo matcha whisk chasen set on Amazon)

Sources: Treatise on Tea (大觀茶論), attributed to Zhao Ji (Emperor Huizong), Chinese Wikisource; GEICHA, Tokyo University of the Arts: A Tea Book by a Chinese Emperor?; TeaTime Magazine: The Chitra Collection, China's Early Trade with the West (2017); Wikipedia: Matcha

The Hongwu Emperor ends tea-cake tribute (1391) (1391)

Earlier courts had received tribute tea as elaborate cakes: Fujian's tribute tea was ground and pressed with silver plates into large and small dragon cakes. In 1391 the Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming, stopped it. The Ming History says he halted the cakes because they burdened the people and ordered only tea buds to be sent. Loose leaf became the court standard, and steeping whole leaves in water became the Chinese way of tea.

• The imperial Northern Park estate in Fujian, which had made tribute cakes for Song emperors, collapsed after the order, and Fujian's tea industry moved west to the Wuyi hills.
• A study of Zhu Quan's Tea Manual on silkqin.com argues the order covered only tribute tea, not all pressed tea, which still mattered to the tea-horse trade.
• Hongwu's own son Zhu Quan wrote a Tea Manual in about 1439–1440.

Sources: Ming History (明史), juan 80, tea law (茶法), Chinese Wikisource; silkqin.com: Zhu Quan's Cha Pu (on the 1391 edict and its scope); The History of Tea, chapter 9: The Ming Dynasty Tea Revolution (Teacup Media); Wikipedia: Wuyi tea

The Yixing clay teapot (Early 1500s to today)

Yixing teapots are made from zisha, “purple clay”, dug near Yixing in Jiangsu at the west end of Lake Tai. The clay is fine, iron-rich and easy to shape into small, precise pots. Left unglazed, a Yixing pot slowly absorbs traces of the tea brewed in it, so many owners keep each pot for one kind of tea. The pots arose in the Ming, just as loose-leaf steeping became the norm.

How it was made: The Ming writer Zhou Gaoqi says a monk at Jinsha Temple, whose name was already lost, first shaped fine clay into teapots. Gong Chun, a servant of the scholar Wu Yishan, who studied at the temple, copied the craft there in the early 1500s.

Where it is now: Yixing remains China's pottery capital. Old pots by named masters are museum pieces, and new zisha pots are made in large numbers.

• Yixing purple clay contains more than 9% iron, which gives the pots their colour.
• Shi Dabin, said to be Gong Chun's apprentice, at first made large pots, then switched to small ones after hearing the scholar Chen Jiru and his friends discuss tea.
• Hong Kong's Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware holds the K.S. Lo collection of Yixing pottery, shown in a 2009–2010 exhibition of more than 100 pieces.

Try it yourself: An unglazed Yixing purple-clay teapot for one favourite tea (Yixing zisha clay teapot on Amazon)

Sources: Zhou Gaoqi, Yangxian Teapot Lineage (陽羨茗壺系), Ming, Chinese Wikisource; Hong Kong Government press release: Yixing Pottery on display at Museum of Tea Ware (2009); Wikipedia: Yixing clay teapot

Wuyi rock tea, oolong and Da Hong Pao (16th century onward)

After the 1391 edict pushed Fujian's tea trade west, the Wuyi Mountains became its new heart. In the 16th century Wuyi makers learned new methods from Songluo monks and found that letting leaves partly oxidise before firing gave a dark, fragrant tea, later called oolong. Black tea probably began in the same hills. The most famous Wuyi rock tea is Da Hong Pao, “Big Red Robe”, named in a legend that a red robe was hung on the bushes in thanks after their tea cured a sick emperor or official.

Where it came from: Temples and farms on the rocky slopes grew and fired the tea. Records suggest the Da Hong Pao mother bushes go back at least to the 16th century.

Where it is now: In 2006 the government banned harvesting from the six surviving mother bushes. Commercial Da Hong Pao has been made from cuttings of them since 1985.

• In 2002, 20 grams of tea from the mother bushes sold for about $28,000.
• A University of Oxford heritage project notes a claim that monks recorded in the 1950s that the mother trees had died from too much fertiliser, which casts doubt on the famous bushes.
• The plant hunter Robert Fortune, in a book published in 1852, wrote that he got about 400 young plants from the Wuyi hills, many of which grew in the government tea plantation in the Himalayas.

Try it yourself: Da Hong Pao, the roasted Wuyi rock oolong (Da Hong Pao Wuyi rock oolong tea on Amazon)

Sources: Robert Fortune, A Journey to the Tea Countries of China (1852), chapter XIV, transcription at Kellscraft; Goldthread (SCMP): Is this really the world's most expensive tea? (2021); University of Oxford, Understanding Authenticity in China's Cultural Heritage: The Modern Invention of Big Red Robe Tea; Wikipedia: Wuyi tea

The monk Eichū serves tea to Emperor Saga (815) (815 (4th month of Kōnin 6))

Monks returning from Tang China brought tea to Japan: Saichō is believed to have carried seeds home in 805 and Kūkai followed in 806. The first dated record of anyone drinking it comes in 815. The official history Nihon Kōki says that when Emperor Saga visited Ōmi Province, the senior monk Eichū “brewed tea with his own hands and offered it” at Bonshaku-ji temple. Eichū had studied in China before returning to Japan.

• About six weeks later, in the 6th month, the same chronicle records an order for the home provinces and Ōmi, Tamba and Harima to plant tea and present it every year.
• After the tea, the chronicle says, the emperor bestowed a robe, then went out on Lake Biwa by boat.
• After this early court fashion, tea did not become truly fashionable in Japan until around 1200.

Sources: Nihon Kōki (日本後紀), book 24, entry for Kōnin 6 (815), Chinese Wikisource; GEICHA, Tokyo University of the Arts: The First Record of Tea in Japan; Marc Jason Gilbert, Chinese Tea in World History, Education About Asia (2008); World History Encyclopedia: Tea in Ancient China & Japan; Wikipedia: History of tea

Eisai and the Kissa Yōjōki (1141–1215; Kissa Yōjōki 1211)

Myōan Eisai was a Japanese monk who travelled to Song China and brought back both Rinzai Zen and the Song way of whisking powdered tea. He planted tea seeds and in 1211 wrote the Kissa Yōjōki, “Drinking Tea for Health”, praising tea as medicine. He tied tea to Chinese five-element theory, arguing that the bitter taste fed the heart and that Japanese diets lacked it.

How they rose: Eisai went to China in 1168 for about six months and again from 1187 to 1191, returning with tea seeds. He founded Kennin-ji in Kyoto in 1202.

How they died: He died in 1215. His book survives in later copies, and tea spread from his seeds to temples and then to the warrior class.

• The chronicle Azuma Kagami says the shogun Sanetomo fell ill after too much wine; the priest Yōjō (Eisai) brought him tea as medicine and a scroll on its virtues.
• The book's first sentence calls tea the ultimate mental and medical remedy.
• Eisai gave some of his seeds to the monk Myōe, who planted them at Kōzan-ji in Toganoo.

Try it yourself: Ceremonial matcha, the powdered tea Eisai brought back from Song China (ceremonial grade matcha Uji on Amazon)

Sources: Eisai, Kissa Yōjōki (喫茶養生記), 2 vols., Kyoto printing of 1716, Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Archive; Encyclopedia of Buddhism: Eisai; Kyoto Prefecture: Ujicha, Yamashiro (English brochure); Wikipedia: Eisai; Wikipedia: History of tea

Toganoo and Uji: Japan's first famous tea gardens (From the early 1200s)

The monk Myōe planted Eisai's tea seeds near Kōzan-ji temple at Toganoo, northwest of Kyoto, and handed seeds on to Uji. Toganoo tea was called honcha, “real tea”; everything else was hicha. In Uji, growers later learned to shade their bushes with reed and straw in early summer, which made the soft, sweet leaves used for matcha. Uji became, and remains, the name for top Japanese tea.

How it began: Myōe received the Kōzan-ji grounds in 1206 and planted tea there. The shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu later promoted Uji and its “Seven Excellent Tea Gardens”.

What became of it: Kōzan-ji still keeps a small tea plot, picked each May. Uji tea is now grown across parts of Kyoto, Shiga, Nara and Mie prefectures.

• In tōcha, guessing contests between honcha and other teas, wagers grew so large that the contests were banned.
• Uji ranked second to Toganoo in 1383 and had taken first place by the late 1500s.
• Every year on 8 November, Uji growers bring Kōzan-ji offerings of the year's first tea.

Try it yourself: Matcha from Uji, the town that set Japan's tea standard (Uji matcha ceremonial grade on Amazon)

Sources: Kōzan-ji temple, official site (栂尾山 高山寺); Japan Tourism Agency multilingual text: Kōzan-ji Tea Garden (MLIT); Kyoto Prefecture: Ujicha, Yamashiro (English brochure); Wikipedia: Uji tea

Murata Jukō and the first wabi tea (1423–1502; Letter of the Heart c. 1488)

Murata Jukō is usually named as the founder of the Japanese tea ceremony and of wabi-cha, tea in a spirit of simplicity. He condemned the gambling and sake drinking that went with tea gatherings in his day. He liked rough Japanese stoneware, especially Bizen and Shigaraki, while still valuing Chinese wares, and he is credited with the small four-and-a-half-mat tea room. His ideas survive in a short letter to his pupil Furuichi Chōin, the Kokoro no Fumi or Letter of the Heart.

How they rose: Born in Nara, he served at Shōmyō-ji temple, learned the aristocratic style of tea from Nōami in Kyoto and studied Zen under the monk Ikkyū.

How they died: He died in 1502. His approach passed through Takeno Jōō to Sen no Rikyū, who praised the Letter of the Heart.

• In the letter he warns that pride and clinging to self are the greatest obstacles on the Way of Tea.
• The same letter says the most important thing is to dissolve the line between Japanese and Chinese (wakan) wares.
• No reliable records confirm his biography, and a later story that he served the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa is considered unlikely.

Try it yourself: A Shigaraki stoneware bowl, the plain Japanese ware Jukō favoured (Shigaraki tea bowl chawan on Amazon)

Sources: Murata Jukō, Letter of the Heart (Kokoro no Fumi), original text and English translation by Adam Sōmu Wojciński (Ueda Sōko Chanoyu); Japan Past & Present (UCLA / Waseda): Historical Figures Associated with Chanoyu; New World Encyclopedia: Japanese tea ceremony; Wikipedia: Murata Jukō

Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591)

Sen no Rikyū is the most important figure in the Japanese tea ceremony, chanoyu. He pushed wabi tea to its limit: tiny rustic rooms such as the two-mat Tai-an, plain local utensils over costly Chinese ones, and raku bowls made for him by Chōjirō. Under Toyotomi Hideyoshi he became the most powerful man in the tea world, and tea became part of politics.

How they rose: Born in Sakai, the son of a warehouse owner, he began studying tea in his late teens, trained under Takeno Jōō and practised Zen at Daitoku-ji. He served Oda Nobunaga as a tea master in the 1570s, and Hideyoshi after Nobunaga's death in 1582.

How they died: Hideyoshi ordered his death, and he died on 21 April 1591. Tradition says he committed seppuku, though no document confirms how he died; the reasons for the falling-out are still argued over.

• Hideyoshi relied on Rikyū's tea gatherings to win over the daimyō and strengthen his government.
• One story ties his fall to a statue of him placed in the gate of Daitoku-ji; others point to politics inside the Toyotomi regime.
• The three Sen schools of tea, Omotesenke, Urasenke and Mushakōjisenke, were founded by the sons of his grandson Sōtan and still teach today.

Try it yourself: A bamboo tea scoop, the simple utensil tea masters carved for themselves (bamboo chashaku matcha tea scoop on Amazon)

Sources: Tokyo Fuji Art Museum: Letter by Sen no Rikyū, Momoyama period, hanging scroll; Nippon.com: Sen no Rikyū, Appreciation of Nature Fused with Aesthetic Sense (2021); Japan Past & Present (UCLA / Waseda): Historical Figures Associated with Chanoyu; EBSCO Research Starters: Toyotomi Hideyoshi Hosts a Ten-Day Tea Ceremony; Wikipedia: Sen no Rikyū

Raku tea bowls of Chōjirō (1580s to today)

Raku ware began with Chōjirō, a Kyoto tile maker who made tea bowls for Sen no Rikyū. The bowls are shaped by hand between the palms rather than thrown on a wheel, and are never quite symmetrical. They are fired at low heat and pulled from the kiln at the peak of firing to cool in the open air. Their quiet black and red glazes fit Rikyū's taste for humble, Japanese-made things.

How it was made: Chōjirō was the son of Ameya, a potter said to have come from Fujian in China. He reportedly made roof tiles for Hideyoshi's Jurakudai palace before Rikyū commissioned tea bowls from him.

Where it is now: The Raku family has carried on for sixteen generations; Kichizaemon XVI became head in 2019. Chōjirō's bowls are treasured in Japanese museums and tea schools.

• The name comes from a seal bearing the character raku (樂) granted by Hideyoshi; sources disagree on whether it was given in 1584 or 1598, and to Chōjirō or his successor.
• Rikyū picked out seven of Chōjirō's bowls as masterpieces.
• Japanese raku has no direct link to the Western “raku” firing technique.

Try it yourself: A hand-formed black raku matcha bowl (Japanese black raku tea bowl on Amazon)

Sources: LACMA: Raku, The Cosmos in a Tea Bowl, exhibition checklist (2015), listing Chōjirō bowls from the Raku Museum and Urasenke; Japan Objects: Raku Pottery, Everything You Need to Know (Anne Walther, 2020); Wikipedia: Chōjirō

The Grand Kitano Tea Gathering (1587) (1st day of the 10th month, 1587)

In 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi held a vast tea gathering at Kitano Tenmangū shrine in Kyoto. Signboards in Kyoto, Sakai, Nara and other towns invited anyone serious about tea, commoners included, to bring a kettle, a bucket, a bowl, and tea, or roasted rice powder if they had none. Hundreds of tea huts went up in the pine grove, and Hideyoshi's Golden Tea Room was set up in the shrine grounds. Sen no Rikyū, Tsuda Sōgyū and Imai Sōkyū were the leading tea masters at the event. It was announced for ten days but, by most accounts, Hideyoshi closed it after the first, for reasons that are unknown.

• Contemporary sources say Hideyoshi himself served tea to 803 people.
• A courtier's diary counted more than 800 tea venues in the grove days before; estimates for the day itself run to about 1,500.
• The teahouses of nearby Kamishichiken served dango dumplings that Hideyoshi praised, and the district, now Kyoto's oldest geiko quarter, flourished afterwards.

Sources: Oze Hoan, Taikōki (太閤記, 1626), book 7, “The Great Kitano Tea Gathering” (北野大茶湯之事), Japanese Wikisource; Cultural Heritage Online (Agency for Cultural Affairs): Ukita Ikkei, Kitano Ōchanoyu-zu, an imagined painting of the gathering, c. 1843; EBSCO Research Starters: Toyotomi Hideyoshi Hosts a Ten-Day Tea Ceremony; Japan Tourism Agency multilingual text: Kamishichiken District (MLIT); Wikipedia: Grand Kitano Tea Ceremony

Nagatani Sōen's sencha method (1738) (1738)

In the Edo period, shaded Uji tea for matcha was reserved for growers with special rights and went to the court and the shogun. Nagatani Sōen, a farmer in what is now Ujitawara, developed a method of steaming fresh young leaves and kneading them as they dried. The result, aosei sencha, was a green leaf tea with good colour, aroma and flavour that anyone could steep. It became the standard way Japanese green tea is made.

How it was made: According to the Yamamotoyama tea company, Sōen took his new tea to Edo in 1738, where the second Yamamoto Kahei bought the whole lot on the spot and promised to buy the next year's too.

Where it is now: Sencha is now Japan's everyday tea. Sōen's home district of Yuyadani, with its tea fields, is listed by Kyoto Prefecture as a landscape asset.

• Kyoto Prefecture describes his process as the standard method for Japanese green tea production today.
• The Yamamotoyama shop he sold to had been founded in Nihonbashi, Edo, in 1690.
• Sencha spread through Japan as the Uji processing method was taught in tea regions nationwide.

Try it yourself: Loose-leaf Uji sencha, made by the steaming method Sōen developed (Uji sencha green tea loose leaf on Amazon)

Sources: Yamamotoyama: company history (山本山について); Kyoto Prefecture: Landscape asset 24, Nagatani Sōen's birthplace and tea fields, Yuyadani; Kyoto Prefecture: Ujicha, Yamashiro (English brochure); Wikipedia: Uji tea

Gyokuro, “jade dew” (1835) (1835)

Gyokuro is a Japanese green tea grown under shade for about three weeks before picking, then processed like sencha. Shading raises the amino acid L-theanine and lowers bitter catechins, giving a sweet, savoury taste. It is brewed with cool water, around 40–70°C, and lots of leaf. The name means “jade dew” or “jewel dew”.

How it was made: The Yamamotoyama company credits its sixth head, Yamamoto Kahei VI, with creating gyokuro in 1835. Kyoto Prefecture tells a different story: that it first came about by accident while leaves from shaded gardens were being stirred.

Where it is now: Gyokuro remains Japan's top-grade leaf tea. Yame in Fukuoka grows over 40% of it, and Uji is another centre.

• Tea shaded for less than about twenty days is sold as kabuse-cha instead of gyokuro.
• Shading raises caffeine as well as L-theanine, so gyokuro is sweet but far from caffeine-free.
• A first infusion of gyokuro typically steeps for about two minutes.

Try it yourself: Shade-grown gyokuro, best brewed with cool water (gyokuro Japanese green tea loose leaf on Amazon)

Sources: Yamamotoyama: company history (山本山について); Kyoto Prefecture: Ujicha, Yamashiro (English brochure); Wikipedia: Gyokuro

The first tea reaches Europe (1610) (1610)

In 1610 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) brought small quantities of tea leaves and Japanese powdered green tea, packed in earthenware jars, to Holland by way of Batavia, now Jakarta. It was a costly curiosity, not yet a trade. The Portuguese had written about tea first, but the Dutch were the first to sell it in the West. By 1637 wealthy Dutch families were drinking it, and by 1660 nobles and rich merchants were building tea rooms in their homes. The Dutch word thee, picked up from Hokkien speakers either at the port of Amoy (Xiamen) or in Java (nobody knows which), became the root of English “tea”, French thé and German Tee.

• The first word of tea to reach Europe came overland, not by sea: a Venetian text published in 1559 records a Persian merchant, Chaggi Memet, praising “the chai of Cathay” as a cure for fevers and headaches.
• In 1564 the Portuguese Jesuit Luís de Almeida, writing from Japan, described powdered green tea, half a nutshell of it mixed into very hot water in a porcelain cup. It is the first European description of what we now call matcha.
• English first said “tea” the Dutch way, to rhyme with “obey”. Alexander Pope did exactly that in The Rape of the Lock, and the modern pronunciation, rhyming with “sea”, only settled around 1750.

Try it yourself: Japanese green tea, the kind that sailed in Europe's first tea cargo (Japanese sencha green tea loose leaf on Amazon)

Sources: Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712-14), canto III, “sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea” (Project Gutenberg); George van Driem, “The Tale of Tea”, Regional Eye magazine (University of Bern); World Green Tea Association (O-CHA NET): Netherlands and Tea; Wikipedia: History of tea

Garway's tea broadside and Pepys's first cup (c. 1660) (1658-1660)

Tea came to London as an expensive novelty sold in coffeehouses. The first dated British reference is a 1658 advertisement in the newspaper Mercurius Politicus for “China Drink” sold at a City coffee house. Thomas Garway, a tobacconist and coffee-man of Exchange Alley, sold tea from about 1657 at 16 to 50 shillings a pound, a fortune at the time. He printed a single-sheet broadside, An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality and Vertues of the Leaf Tea, to explain the strange drink to buyers. On 25 September 1660 Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he sent for “a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.”

• Nobody knows exactly when Garway's broadside was printed. The Wellcome Collection's copy is dated only “[1660?]”, a cataloguer's guess taken from the Wing catalogue of early English books.
• On the sheet Garway describes himself as a tobacconist and “seller and retailer of tea and coffee” in Exchange Alley, near the Royal Exchange in London.
• Tea was taxed almost out of reach at first: the first duty on leaf tea, in 1689, was so high that it nearly stopped sales, and it was cut in 1692.

Sources: Thomas Garway, An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality, and Vertues of the Leaf Tea [1660?] (Wellcome Collection record); Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1660, entry for 25 September (Project Gutenberg); UK Tea & Infusions Association: History of tea; Wikipedia: History of tea

Catherine of Braganza (1638-1705) (1662)

Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal, married Charles II on 21 May 1662. Tea was already the favourite drink at the Portuguese court, and a chest of it is said to have travelled with her. She did not introduce tea to England: Pepys had drunk it two years earlier. But her taste for it set a fashion that spread from the court to the aristocracy and then to wealthier households. Her dowry, which included Tangier, Bombay and two million Portuguese crowns, also tied England more closely to trade in the East.

How they rose: She was born on 25 November 1638 at the ducal palace of Vila Viçosa in Portugal. The marriage treaty with Charles II brought her to England in May 1662, after a stormy crossing to Portsmouth.

How they died: Childless, she left England in March 1692 and reached Portugal in January 1693. She acted as regent for her brother Peter II, and died at the Bemposta Palace in Lisbon on 31 December 1705, aged 67.

• According to the UK Tea & Infusions Association, when she landed at Portsmouth on 13 May 1662 she asked for a cup of tea. There was none to be had, and she was offered a glass of ale.
• Bombay, part of her dowry, was handed by Charles to the East India Company for a rent of £10 a year in gold.
• In 1663 the poet Edmund Waller wrote a birthday poem for her praising tea, with the line “The best of Queens, and best of herbs, we owe.”

Sources: Edmund Waller, “On Tea” (1663) (Luminarium); UK Tea & Infusions Association: Catherine of Braganza; Wikipedia: Catherine of Braganza

Twinings at 216 Strand (1706) (1706-today)

In 1706 Thomas Twining, who had worked for the East India Company, bought Tom's Coffee House in Devereux Court, just off the Strand, and began selling tea next to the coffee. In 1717 he expanded into three adjoining houses, and in time his tea sales outgrew his coffee. The firm has traded at 216 Strand ever since and claims to be London's longest-standing ratepayer.

How it began: Thomas Twining was born in 1675 in Painswick, Gloucestershire, and moved to London with his family when he was nine. After working for the East India Company under Thomas D'Aeth, he bought Tom's Coffee House from him in 1706.

What became of it: Thomas Twining died in 1741 and was buried at St Mary's Church, Twickenham. The firm stayed in the family for generations. It is now owned by Associated British Foods, and the shop at 216 Strand still trades.

• The Victorian writer Walter Thornbury recorded that in Queen Anne's reign “ladies of fashion used to flock” to Twining's house in Devereux Court to drink tea from very small cups.
• The Twinings logo dates from 1787, and the company claims it is the oldest logo in the world in continuous use.
• Thomas's grandson Richard Twining helped persuade the government to slash the tea tax, and in 1784 published Observations on the Tea and Window Act in its defence.

Try it yourself: Twinings English Breakfast, from the firm that has sold tea on the Strand since 1706 (Twinings English Breakfast tea on Amazon)

Sources: Richard Twining, Observations on the Tea and Window Act, and on the Tea Trade (London: T. Cadell, 1784) (Wellcome Collection record); Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 3 (1878), ch. X, The Strand: Southern Tributaries (Tufts Digital Library); Vic Keegan, Lost London 235: Coffee, tea and Devereux Court (OnLondon, 2022); Wikipedia: Thomas Twining (merchant)

The Treaty of Kyakhta and the camel tea caravans (1727) (1727-1916)

The Treaty of Kyakhta of 1727 settled the border between Russia and Qing China and made the town of Kyakhta, south of Lake Baikal, the point for official trade. Russia paid mostly in furs; China sent cotton, silk, tobacco and, more and more, tea. Camel caravans carried the chests from Kalgan, a gate in the Great Wall, across Mongolia to Kyakhta, and from there the tea went on across Siberia by river, cart and sledge. Tea's share of the goods arriving from China rose from 22% by value in 1792 to 40% ten years later. The overland trade faded after the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and the railways came.

• The first state caravan after the treaty, in 1727-28, brought home only about 30,000 pounds of tea, a small fraction of later loads.
• Camels were used because one could carry about 400 pounds, roughly three times the load of a packhorse.
• Karl Marx, writing in the New York Daily Tribune in 1857, reported that tea sold at Kiachta reached 175,000 chests in 1852, most of it the superior “caravan tea” that continental drinkers preferred to tea shipped by sea.

Try it yourself: Russian Caravan, a smoky black blend named after the camel convoys (Russian Caravan tea on Amazon)

Sources: Karl Marx, “Russia and China”, New York Daily Tribune, 7 April 1857 (Marxists Internet Archive); Russian Life: The Siberian Tea Road (May-June 2013); Wikipedia: Kyakhta trade

Canton and the Thirteen Factories (1757-1842) (1757-1842)

In 1757 the Qianlong Emperor restricted Western trade to the southern port of Canton (Guangzhou). Foreign merchants had to live and work in the Thirteen Factories, a row of warehouses on the river, and could deal only with licensed Chinese merchants, who from 1760 formed a monopoly called the Cohong under the customs official the British called the Hoppo. Tea, silk and porcelain went out; silver from Spanish America came in, because Europeans had few goods that Chinese buyers wanted. The imbalance that this created is the background to the opium trade.

How it began: Coastal trade reopened in 1684 and the British East India Company had its first Canton outpost by 1711. The 1757 edict turned Canton into China's only legal gateway for Western ships.

What became of it: The system ended with the First Opium War. The Treaty of Nanking in 1842 abolished it and let British merchants trade with whomever they pleased; Canton stayed a port but lost its monopoly.

• After an English trader, James Flint, sailed north in 1759 to complain about corruption at Canton, the court tightened the rules: foreigners could not trade there in winter, had to live in the factories, and Chinese subjects were barred from borrowing from them or working for them.
• The trade ran on the monsoon: ships arrived after the southwest monsoon ended in October, traded for about four months, and sailed home on the northeast monsoon from January.
• In 1793 the Qianlong Emperor told George III that “the tea, silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces, are absolute necessities to European nations.”

Sources: Qianlong Emperor, Letter to George III, 1793 (Fordham Modern History Sourcebook); MIT Visualizing Cultures: Rise and Fall of the Canton Trade System, China in the World; Wikipedia: Canton System

The Tea Act and the Boston Tea Party (1773) (10 May and 16 December 1773)

The Tea Act, which received royal assent on 10 May 1773, was meant to help the financially troubled East India Company sell its huge stock of tea. It let the Company ship tea directly to America through chosen local agents, cheap enough to undersell smuggled tea, while the tax on tea in the colonies stayed in place. Many Americans saw it as a trick to make them accept taxation without representation. In Charleston the tea was landed but kept off the market, and ships bound for New York and Philadelphia were sent back. In Boston, on the night of 16 December 1773, men in disguise boarded the Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver at Griffin's Wharf and threw the tea into the harbor; Parliament answered with the Coercive Acts, which closed the port.

• The Boston Gazette of 20 December 1773 counted 342 chests and said the work took less than four hours; the Massachusetts Historical Society gives 340 chests holding some 90,000 pounds of tea.
• Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson part-owned the firm hired to receive the tea shipped to Boston.
• A fourth tea ship bound for Boston, the William, never arrived: it was wrecked on Cape Cod.

Sources: Boston Gazette, 20 December 1773 report (American Battlefield Trust); Text of the Tea Act, 1773 (ushistory.org); Massachusetts Historical Society: Collections relating to the Boston Tea Party; Wikipedia: Tea Act

The Commutation Act ends the tea smugglers (1784) (20 August 1784)

By the 1780s British tea duties had climbed to about 119%, and smuggling had grown into a large organised business that by some estimates brought in more tea than the legal trade, at about half the price. William Pitt the Younger's Commutation Act, which received royal assent on 20 August 1784, cut the duty to 12.5% and made up the lost revenue with a heavier tax on houses and their windows. Smuggling stopped paying. Retained legal imports of tea jumped from about 4.96 million pounds in 1784 to about 16.3 million in 1785, largely because tea that used to be smuggled now came in openly. Cheaper legal tea helped make it Britain's everyday drink.

• Pitt acted on the advice of Richard Twining, grandson of the firm's founder, who led the London tea dealers and defended the act in a 1784 pamphlet.
• The smugglers, who called themselves “free traders”, held a public meeting in London and printed pamphlets against the law. It made no difference.
• Before 1745, smuggled tea was estimated at about three times the volume of tea imported legally.

Sources: Richard Twining, Observations on the Tea and Window Act, and on the Tea Trade (1784) (Wellcome Collection record); Princeton University Library, Rare Books: 1785, The English Tea Trade at Work; History News Network: Richard Twining, the Commutation Act, and Smuggling; Wikipedia: Commutation Act 1784

Earl Grey tea: legend and record (1830s-1880s) (1830s legend; 1880s record)

Earl Grey is black tea flavoured with oil of bergamot, a citrus fruit. It is named after Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, the Whig prime minister of 1830-34 whose government passed the 1832 Reform Act and abolished slavery across the British Empire in 1833. Family and company stories say a Chinese mandarin gave him the blend, or made it to suit the limey water at his home, Howick Hall in Northumberland. Grey never went to China, and the written record is thinner: bergamot-scented tea is mentioned in 1824 without his name, a “Grey's” tea was advertised from 1852, and Charlton & Co. sold a “celebrated Grey mixture” in 1867 before advertising “Earl Grey's mixture” in 1884.

How it was made: The legends date the gift or the recipe to the 1830s, and Jacksons of Piccadilly say Lord Grey gave the recipe to its partner George Charlton in 1830. No document from the 1830s has been found to prove it.

Where it is now: Earl Grey is now made by almost every tea company. Twinings and Jacksons both tell origin stories, though Stephen Twining has said his company never laid claim to the formula or the name.

• In 1837 charges were brought against a firm accused of secretly adding bergamot to cheap tea so it could be sold as a premium product.
• An 1894 American magazine reported that Queen Victoria drank “Earl Grey's mixture” at breakfast.
• The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest example of the phrase “Earl Grey tea” comes from 1929; it had “Earl Grey's mixture” from 1891.

Try it yourself: Classic bergamot-scented Earl Grey, from one of the firms that tells the legend (Twinings Earl Grey tea on Amazon)

Sources: Current Literature, vol. XV no. 6 (June 1894), “Chief Cooks of Royalty”, reprinted from the Pittsburg Leader (Internet Archive); Michael Quinion, World Wide Words: Earl Grey tea; GOV.UK: History of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey; Wikipedia: Earl Grey tea

Opium for tea and the First Opium War (1839-1842) (1839-1842)

Britain's thirst for tea drained silver to China: by 1800 the East India Company was buying about 23 million pounds of tea a year, worth about 3.6 million pounds in silver. To balance the trade, British merchants sold opium grown in Bengal into China, illegally, and the silver began to flow the other way. In 1839 the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu forced British and American dealers to surrender 20,283 chests and 200 sacks of opium and had it destroyed in public at Humen beach from 3 June. Fighting began that autumn. The Treaty of Nanking, imposed on 29 August 1842, ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain, opened five treaty ports, granted an indemnity and ended the Canton system.

• Lin Zexu wrote to Queen Victoria in 1839 arguing that China gave the world tea and rhubarb, “things which your foreign countries could not exist a single day without,” and sent back only poison.
• The Union Jack was formally raised over Hong Kong on 26 January 1841, more than a year before the war ended.
• Opium profits let British merchants greatly expand tea shipments to England; historians have called the opium trade the most profitable commodity trade of the 19th century.

Sources: Commissioner Lin Zexu, Letter to Queen Victoria, 1839 (Fordham Modern History Sourcebook); MIT Visualizing Cultures: The First Opium War, The Opium Trade; Wikipedia: First Opium War

Assam tea and the Assam Company (1823-1839) (1823-1839)

In 1823 the Scottish trader Robert Bruce was told by Maniram Dutta Barua, later known as Maniram Dewan, that the Singpho people of Upper Assam drank tea from a wild bush, and he met the Singpho chief Bessa Gam. Robert died soon after, and his brother Charles sent leaves to the botanic garden in Calcutta, where the plant was eventually recognised as a variety of the tea plant, now called Camellia sinensis var. assamica. Charles Bruce, working with Chinese tea makers at Sadiya, produced the first Assam tea, and the first consignment went on sale in London in January 1839. The same year the Assam Company was formed and given large tracts of land, the start of a plantation industry that changed Assam.

Where it came from: Charles Bruce, posted at Sadiya, kept sending samples to Calcutta. In 1838 he published an account of making black tea there with Chinese workers, and once the tea sold in London the Assam Company followed in 1839.

Where it is now: Maniram became the company's dewan in 1839, later founded his own tea garden, turned against British rule, and was hanged at Jorhat on 26 February 1858 for plotting in the 1857 rising. Assam's gardens spread fast: about 4,000 acres were under tea by 1859, and the Assam Valley had about 300 tea gardens by 1872.

• The first shipment was tiny: one account puts the tea that reached London at about 350 pounds in eight chests, after spoiled leaf was thrown out.
• Charles Bruce's 1838 pamphlet on making black tea at Sadiya (“Suddeya”) credits the method to the Chinese tea makers he had brought in.
• Maniram's own Cinnamara estate near Jorhat made him one of the first Indian tea planters in Assam.

Try it yourself: Malty, strong Assam black tea, the backbone of most breakfast blends (Assam black tea loose leaf on Amazon)

Sources: C. A. Bruce, An Account of the Manufacture of the Black Tea, as Now Practised at Suddeya in Upper Assam (Calcutta, 1838), page scans (Koi-Hai.com); N. K. Das, “Making of Tea Tribes in Assam”, Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies IV:1 (2016); Findmypast: The Bruce brothers, how two Scottish siblings kick-started the Indian tea trade; Wikipedia: Maniram Dewan

Anna, Duchess of Bedford, and afternoon tea (c. 1840) (c. 1840)

Anna Maria Russell, Duchess of Bedford, a friend of Queen Victoria and one of her Ladies of the Bedchamber from 1837 to 1841, is often credited with inventing afternoon tea around 1840: tea and cake in the late afternoon to bridge the long gap between lunch and an ever-later dinner. The best evidence is a memoir by the actress Fanny Kemble, who remembered the duchess holding small, private tea parties in her room at Belvoir Castle in 1842. Food historians point out that tea with bread and cakes was being advertised in Bath and elsewhere from the 1750s, so the duchess did not invent the habit. What she may have done is make it fashionable among the very rich, and Victoria herself was holding tea receptions by the 1880s.

How they rose: Born Anna Maria Stanhope on 3 September 1783, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Harrington, she married Francis Russell in 1808 and became Duchess of Bedford when he succeeded to the title in 1839.

How they died: She died on 3 July 1857, aged 73, and was buried in the Bedford Chapel at Chenies, Buckinghamshire.

• Kemble wrote of “rather mysterious invitations” to the duchess's room, where a few women were brewing tea with her own private kettle, and called the habit “rather shamefaced”.
• Belvoir Castle's archivist found only two or three weekends in the early 1840s when the Duke and Duchess of Bedford visited together, which fits Kemble's account.
• In 1758 The Gentleman's Magazine was already scolding ordinary people for wasting time and money on afternoon tea.

Try it yourself: A tiered stand for sandwiches, scones and cakes, the afternoon tea set-up (three tier cake stand afternoon tea on Amazon)

Sources: Fanny Kemble, Records of Later Life (1882), letter from Belvoir Castle with her note on “afternoon tea” (Project Gutenberg); Foods of England: Afternoon Tea; Grantham Journal: National Afternoon Tea Week being celebrated at Belvoir Castle, where the tradition may have first began (8 August 2022); Wikipedia: Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford

Darjeeling tea gardens (1841) (1841-today)

Archibald Campbell, the British superintendent of Darjeeling, first planted tea there in 1841. The Chinese tea plant, var. sinensis, did well on the cool, steep slopes where the Assam variety struggled. The first three commercial estates opened at Tukvar in 1852, and by 1874 there were 113. Today 87 registered estates, on about 17,500 hectares at heights of up to 2,000 metres, make tea that is picked in seasonal flushes. The spring first flush is the lightest; the second flush is prized for its muscatel note.

How it began: The East India Company was looking for places to grow Chinese tea in India. The botanist Joseph Hooker, visiting a few years later, found tea growing well at Leebong, below the town, and wrote that it might be cultivated there “to great profit”.

What became of it: In 2004 Darjeeling tea became the first product registered under India's new geographical indication law. Output is small and falling: about 7 million kg in 2021, roughly 0.5% of India's tea.

• Campbell first tried tea at his own house, about 7,000 feet up, where Hooker found that frost and snow held it back; after a March hailstorm, Hooker wrote, “Dr. Campbell's tea-plants were cut to pieces.”
• Darjeeling yields are very low, about 400 to 450 kg of made tea per hectare.
• Hooker thought tea grown at Leebong, below the town, could help open a trade with Tibet.

Try it yourself: Spring-picked Darjeeling, light and flowery, from the hills Campbell planted (Darjeeling first flush tea on Amazon)

Sources: Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals, vol. 1 (1854) (Project Gutenberg); Tarit Kumar Datta, Darjeeling tea, India (FAO case study on geographical indications); Wikipedia: Darjeeling tea

Robert Fortune, tea spy (1848-1851) (1848-1851)

In 1848 the East India Company sent the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune into China's inland tea districts, which were closed to foreigners, to collect tea plants, seed and know-how for its new gardens in India. He travelled in Chinese dress with a false pigtail, visiting the green-tea hills of Sung-lo and the black-tea Bohea (Wuyi) hills. In 1851 he delivered about 2,000 plants and 17,000 sprouting seeds to the North-West Provinces of India, packed in glass Wardian cases, along with Chinese tea makers. He also argued, from what he had seen, that green and black tea come from the same plant and differ only in how they are made.

How they rose: Born at Kelloe in Berwickshire in 1812 (some sources say 1813), he trained as a gardener and first went to China in 1843 for the Horticultural Society of London. He was curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden from 1846 and left in 1848 to take the tea job.

How they died: He wrote several popular travel books and died at his home in Gilston Road, South Kensington, on 13 April 1880. The house now carries an English Heritage blue plaque; he is buried in Brompton Cemetery.

• Fortune watched workers dye export green tea with Prussian blue and gypsum, and calculated that drinkers in England and America swallowed more than half a pound of the stuff with every hundred pounds of tea.
• When he reached Calcutta in March 1851 with six Chinese tea makers, the botanic garden's superintendent asked to see them work. The nearest tea leaves were in the Himalayas, so they made a “tea”, for looking at, not drinking, from the leaves of a local tree, Pongamia glabra.
• British drinkers came to prefer strong, dark tea from the local Assam variety over the Chinese plants he worked so hard to collect.

Try it yourself: Smoky black tea from the Wuyi (Bohea) hills Fortune slipped into (Lapsang souchong loose leaf tea on Amazon)

Sources: Robert Fortune, A Journey to the Tea Countries of China (London: John Murray, 1852) (Internet Archive); English Heritage: Robert Fortune blue plaque; Dictionary of National Biography (1889): Fortune, Robert (Wikisource); Wikipedia: Robert Fortune

Indentured labour on the tea gardens (1859-1926) (1859-1926)

Assam's planters could not find enough local labour, so recruiters brought in workers from other parts of India, many of them Adivasis from what are now Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and neighbouring states. They were bound by penal contracts: the Workmen's Breach of Contract Act of 1859 made leaving the job a crime punishable by prison, and later labour acts of 1865, 1882 and 1901 tightened the system. Disease and death rates among new arrivals were high, and flogging and other abuse are recorded. The 1859 Act was repealed only in 1925, and the 1901 Act in 1932. In Ceylon, Tamil workers from south India, recruited from 1827 for coffee and then tea, did most of the plantation work.

• Between 1891 and 1901 alone, 596,856 workers were brought into Assam, about a tenth of the province's population, according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Wages were set low and paid lower: the legal minimum was 5 rupees a month for men and 4 for women, and before 1900 planters commonly paid less than that.
• In 1948 Ceylon's new Citizenship Act left most descendants of the Tamil plantation workers stateless; many were later sent to India under a 1964 pact.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911): Assam, on tea gardens and imported labour (Wikisource); N. K. Das, “Making of Tea Tribes in Assam: Colonial Exploitation and Assertion of Adivasi Rights”, Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies (2016); Wikipedia: Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka

James Taylor and the birth of Ceylon tea (1867) (1867)

In the 1860s Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was a coffee island. In 1867 James Taylor, manager of the Loolecondera estate, cleared about 20 acres for tea and taught himself to make it, at first rolling the leaves by hand on his bungalow verandah. From 1869 a fungal disease, coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix), devastated the coffee plantations. Planters who faced ruin replanted with tea, using Taylor's estate as their model, and within a generation “Ceylon” meant tea.

How they rose: Taylor was born in 1835 at Mosspark, Monboddo, in Kincardineshire, Scotland, and sailed from London on 22 October 1852, aged 17, to work on a coffee estate. By 1857 he was running Loolecondera.

How they died: He died on 2 May 1892, aged 57, and is buried in Mahaiyawa Cemetery, Kandy. Sri Lanka's tea output peaked at about 340 million kg in 2013.

• Taylor wrote that a Mr Noble, a planter from Cachar in India, showed him how to pluck, wither and roll tea, using leaf from a few old bushes in his bungalow garden.
• His first tea sent to England was a consignment of just 23 pounds.
• Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in 1892, called the tea fields of Ceylon “as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo.”

Try it yourself: Bright, brisk Ceylon black tea; look for the lion logo of 100% Ceylon tea (pure Ceylon black tea loose leaf on Amazon)

Sources: Arthur Conan Doyle, “De Profundis” (1892), in The Last Galley (Project Gutenberg); History of Ceylon Tea: Planters' registry, James Taylor; Ceylon Tea (pureceylontea.com): The Birth of Ceylon Tea; Wikipedia: Tea production in Sri Lanka; Wikipedia: James Taylor (tea planter)

The Cutty Sark, last of the tea clippers (1869) (1869)

The Cutty Sark was a clipper built at Dumbarton in 1869 for the shipowner John Willis, designed for one job: to rush each year's first China tea to London. She was launched on 22 November 1869, the same week the Suez Canal opened, which gave steamships a route to China more than 3,000 miles shorter. She made only eight voyages in the tea trade. On her first return trip from Shanghai she carried 1,305,812 pounds of tea.

How it was made: Willis ordered her to beat rival clippers. She cost £16,150; her builders, Scott & Linton, ran out of money and William Denny and Brothers finished her.

Where it is now: From 1883 she carried Australian wool. Sold to Portuguese owners in 1895 and renamed Ferreira, she was bought back by Captain Wilfred Dowman in the 1920s, moved into a dry dock at Greenwich in 1954 and opened to visitors in 1957. A fire in 2007 tore through all three decks; she reopened in 2012.

• In the 1872 race against the clipper Thermopylae she lost her rudder in a gale; her carpenter built a new one at sea over six days, and she reached London a week behind.
• She was sold to the Portuguese firm of Joaquim Antunes Ferreira for £1,250.
• In the wool trade she was faster than in tea: in 1886, under Captain Richard Woodget, she sailed from Sydney to London in 73 days.

Sources: John Fraser, The clipper Cutty Sark, oil painting BHC3277 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich); Royal Museums Greenwich: Cutty Sark history; Wikipedia: Cutty Sark

Thomas Lipton (1848-1931) (1890)

Thomas Lipton built a chain of grocery shops across Britain on loud advertising and low prices, then moved into tea in 1888. In 1890 he went to Ceylon, made deals with planters including James Taylor, and acquired plantations of his own; the best known is the Dambatenne estate near Haputale. By owning the gardens and skipping the brokers he could sell tea to working-class customers cheaply, under the slogan of bringing it straight from the garden to the teapot. The Lipton name became one of the best-known tea brands in the world.

How they rose: Born in the Gorbals, Glasgow, to Ulster-Scots parents, probably on 10 May 1848 (the 1851 census lists him as 3, though he later gave 1850), he worked in the United States for about five years as a young man. Back in Glasgow he opened his first provision shop in 1871.

How they died: He died in 1931 at Osidge, his house in north London, leaving most of his fortune to Glasgow; he had no children. Lipton tea is still sold worldwide.

• He challenged for the America's Cup five times between 1899 and 1930, never won, and was given a cup as “the best of all losers”.
• He gave £20,000 to feed the London poor at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and was knighted the next year, in 1898; he was made a baronet in 1902.
• A viewpoint on the Dambatenne estate, where he liked to look out over the hills, is still called Lipton's Seat.

Try it yourself: Lipton Yellow Label, the everyday black tea brand Lipton built (Lipton Yellow Label tea on Amazon)

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911): Lipton, Sir Thomas Johnstone (Wikisource); Daily FT (Sri Lanka): A sip of history, the enduring legacy of Dambatenne Estate (2024); Wikipedia: Thomas Lipton

The tea bag (patented 1903) (filed 1901, patented 1903)

On 26 August 1901 Roberta C. Lawson and Mary McLaren of Milwaukee filed a patent for a “tea-leaf holder”: a small mesh pouch holding just enough tea for one cup, which could be lifted out once the tea had brewed. US patent 723,287 was granted on 24 March 1903. A popular story gives the credit to Thomas Sullivan, a New York tea and coffee importer who around 1908 sent out tea in small silk bags that customers supposedly dunked by accident. The silk bags are documented, the accident is not, and the patent came first. The paper bag followed: William Hermanson patented a heat-sealed paper fibre bag in 1930.

How it was made: Lawson and McLaren wanted a way to brew a single cup without loose leaves or waste. Their patent describes a pouch of open-mesh fabric that let water in and kept the leaves together.

Where it is now: The tea bag now dominates tea drinking in Britain and America. Britain came to it late: Tetley is credited with first selling tea bags there in 1953, and sales only took off in the 1970s. PG Tips launched pyramid-shaped bags in 1997.

• The 1903 patent describes a bag holding “so much only as is required for a single cup of tea.”
• In 1929 Adolf Rambold built the Pompadour, the first automatic tea-bag packing machine, for the German firm Teekanne.
• In the Sullivan story, customers were meant to empty the silk sample bags and dunked them whole by mistake; it survives as a legend, not a documented event.

Try it yourself: PG Tips pyramid bags, the 1997 twist on the 1903 idea (PG Tips pyramid tea bags on Amazon)

Sources: US Patent 723,287, Tea-leaf holder, R. C. Lawson and M. McLaren, filed 26 August 1901, granted 24 March 1903 (patent PDF); UK Tea & Infusions Association: History of tea; Wikipedia: Tea bag; Wikipedia: Tetley

Kenya's tea country (1903) (1903-today)

Tea came to Kenya in 1903, when settlers planted a few bushes at Limuru on an experimental basis. Commercial growing began in 1924, and for decades Africans were barred from growing it. That changed in 1956; the first smallholder tea factory opened at Ragati in Nyeri in 1957, and the Kenya Tea Development Authority was set up in 1964 to help small farmers. Today Kenya grows more than 450 million kg a year, much of it black CTC tea sold through the public auction at Mombasa, and in recent years has usually ranked as the world's largest exporter of black tea.

How it began: Settlers set up the first small gardens at Limuru and Kericho. Commercial growing began in 1924, and the Tea Board of Kenya was created in 1950 to regulate the industry.

What became of it: Tea earns about 23% of Kenya's foreign exchange. The KTDA is now a private company owned by about 600,000 smallholder farmers, who also own its 69 factories, and a new Tea Act took effect on 11 January 2021.

• Until 1956, colonial rules kept African farmers from growing tea at all.
• Kenya's first law on tea production was the Tea Ordinance of 1934.
• Much of Kenya's crop is made by the crush-tear-curl (CTC) method, which turns the leaf into small, hard pellets.

Try it yourself: Strong, bright black tea from the Kenyan highlands (Kenyan black tea on Amazon)

Sources: Tea Board of Kenya: Timeline of the Tea Board of Kenya; Tea Board of Kenya: History of Kenyan tea; Kenya Tea Development Agency: About us; Wikipedia: Tea production in Kenya

Iced tea and the 1904 World's Fair (1904 (recipes from the 1870s))

The story goes that at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Richard Blechynden, special commissioner for Indian tea, could not sell hot tea in the summer heat, poured it over ice and created a sensation. He may well have helped make iced tea popular, but he did not invent it. Iced tea was appearing in the United States by the 1860s, printed recipes date from the 1870s, and menus at the fair listed both hot and iced tea. Today about 85% of the tea Americans drink is iced.

How it was made: Cold tea drinks were known in the early 19th century; in 1823 the Countess of Blessington wrote of sipping iced tea in Naples. By the 1870s American cookbooks gave recipes for it.

Where it is now: The St. Louis story became the standard version in the mid-20th century. A Missouri Historical Society archivist has suggested it grew in post-war nostalgia for the fair, helped by the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis.

• The 1878 Virginia cookbook recipe uses green tea: brew it at breakfast, then pour it over ice and sugar at supper, with a squeeze of lemon to make it “delicious and healthful.”
• Blechynden was no struggling stallholder: he was director of the East India Pavilion, and his waiters were from India, not Ceylon, as the legend often says.
• The tea trade later promoted the legend: when the Tea Bureau held its 1951 “Miss Iced Tea” contest, only St. Louis women could enter.

Try it yourself: A pitcher with a tea infuser for cold-brewing iced tea at home (iced tea pitcher with infuser on Amazon)

Sources: Marion Cabell Tyree, Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), p. 64, “Iced Tea” (Internet Archive); The Food Timeline: Beverages, iced tea; Wikipedia: Iced tea

Bubble tea (Taiwan, 1980s) (1986-1988)

Bubble tea, also called pearl milk tea or boba, is sweet iced tea, usually with milk, served with chewy balls of tapioca made from cassava starch and drunk through a wide straw. Two teahouses claim it. Hanlin Tea Room in Tainan says its founder, Tu Tsong-he, added white tapioca balls from a local market to milk tea in 1986. Chun Shui Tang in Taichung, which had popularised cold, shaken tea, says its product manager Lin Hsiu-hui tipped tapioca balls into her iced tea at a staff meeting in 1987 or 1988. By the mid-1990s it was on menus across Taiwan, and it spread from there to mainland China, the rest of Asia and the world.

How it was made: In 1980s Taiwan, fast-made sweet tea drinks gave people somewhere to meet at night and a break from the island's traditional oolong culture; an order could be ready in about three minutes.

Where it is now: The rival teahouses went to court in 2009; in 2019 a Taiwanese court ruled that bubble tea was a general food anyone may make and credited neither. Taiwan declared 30 April National Bubble Tea Day in 2020, and the drink has become an informal national symbol.

• Neither teahouse ever managed to patent or trademark the drink.
• In 2020 a Taiwanese legislator proposed a new passport cover design featuring bubble tea as the island's signature drink.
• Bubble tea has become part of Taiwan's diplomacy: its foreign minister has shared one with Japan's representative, and the president served it on national day.

Try it yourself: A home kit with tapioca pearls, tea and wide straws (bubble tea kit with tapioca pearls on Amazon)

Sources: Taiwan News: Legislator proposes erasing 'China' from Taiwan's passport cover (20 April 2020); Taipei Times: Who invented bubble tea? (2018); Al Jazeera: Taiwan finds diplomatic sweet spot in bubble tea (26 June 2020); Wikipedia: Bubble tea

The global matcha boom and shortage (2024-2025) (2024-2025)

Matcha is green tea made from leaves shaded for two to three weeks before harvest, steamed, dried, aged and then stone-ground to a fine powder. For centuries it belonged to Japan's tea ceremony. Over the past decade it became a global café drink, pushed by social media and by chains such as Starbucks and Dunkin' adding matcha drinks. Supply could not keep up. Heat brought a second poor harvest in a row around Kyoto in 2025, prices reached record highs, many suppliers limited how much each customer could buy, and Ippodo raised the price of its top matcha by 53%. A 15% US tariff on Japanese goods from August 2025 added to the pressure on American buyers.

• Supply is slow to grow: Ippodo says a newly planted tea bush needs about five years before it can be harvested, and Japan's tea farmers are ageing.
• On Thailand's LINE MAN delivery platform, matcha orders rose about 300% in 2025, to 6.5 million cups.
• China has been building up mass matcha production in Guizhou province since 2018, with Japanese technical help.

Try it yourself: Ceremonial-grade matcha plus a bamboo whisk to make it the traditional way (ceremonial grade matcha with bamboo whisk set on Amazon)

Sources: The Nation (Thailand): Matcha Mania and Spicy Cravings, food delivery trends (12 December 2025); globalEDGE (Michigan State University): The global matcha tea industry (2023); Wikipedia: Matcha; Food Dive: A matcha shortage is coming for social media's latest obsession (25 September 2025); Semafor: Matcha prices surge as rising temperatures hit production (10 July 2025)