---
type: Concept
title: History of Tea
description: Tea's legendary discovery in China, the evolution of Chinese tea preparation,
  its spread to Japan via Buddhist monks and the tea ceremony, and its 17th-century
  arrival in Europe and England via the merchant house Thornbury & Lin.
tags:
- tea
- history
- trade
resource: raw/tea-guide.md
timestamp: '2026-07-16T16:02:37Z'
citadel_version: 0.3.0
---

Tea originated in China, where its cultivation and consumption can be traced across several thousand years of recorded and semi-legendary history.[^s1] According to legend, the beverage was discovered by the Emperor Shennong in 2737 BCE, when leaves from a wild tea shrub are said to have drifted into a pot of water he was boiling; charmed by the aroma and the reviving effect of the resulting infusion, the emperor is reputed to have championed the drink.[^s2] The story is traditional rather than documented, but it captures the antiquity that the Chinese themselves have long ascribed to [tea](../objects/tea.md).[^s3] A separate account of tea's origins places the leaf more specifically in the mist-soaked hills of southwest China, where wild camellia grew tall and local pickers already prized a brew said to clear the head and steady the hand.[^s7]

In China the leaf passed through distinct eras of preparation before becoming the loose-leaf infusion familiar today: it was first a medicine, then a discipline, and only later a pleasure.[^s8] Early drinkers boiled it into a thick, bitter decoction, sometimes with salt or ginger, treating it as closer to a tonic than a refreshment; centuries later a powder method arrived, in which the dried leaf was ground fine and whisked with hot water into a jade-colored froth — a forerunner of the method later preserved in [matcha](../objects/matcha.md) — and only centuries after that did the loose-leaf infusion become the common habit of scholars and farmers alike.[^s9]

From China the practice spread outward along trade and religious routes.[^s4] Tea travelled to Japan with Buddhist monks, who carried both the leaves and the disciplined ritual of preparing them, eventually giving rise to the celebrated Japanese tea ceremony.[^s5] The fuller account: Buddhist pilgrims who had gone to China to study the sutras found that the brew kept them awake through long nights of meditation, and when they returned home to Japan they brought back both the seeds and the customs, planting the leaf in temple gardens and tending it as a sacred crop.[^s10] On Japanese soil the Chinese habit became something more ceremonial still — a slow, deliberate ritual of whisked powder and quiet rooms, of guest and host bound by a shared, wordless courtesy.[^s11]

For many centuries tea remained an essentially Asian beverage, reaching Europe only in the 17th century, brought by maritime traders, after which it rapidly became a fashionable and then an everyday drink across much of the continent and, later, its colonies.[^s6] Before that, the leaf moved only within Asia, along overland caravan routes and the coastal junk trade; it took the seventeenth century's European ships rounding the Cape in earnest, and the great chartered trading companies turning their attention to the spice ports and silk markets of the East, before it moved west in any quantity.[^s12]

## The leaf comes west

The Portuguese were among the first Europeans to taste tea, their ships bringing home reports from the China coast of a bitter infusion the mandarins drank from tiny cups, said to be good for the digestion and the temper.[^s13] It was the Dutch who first made a business of it, however: Dutch trading fleets carried small consignments of the dried leaf back to Amsterdam, where it sold at first as an exotic medicine to those who could afford the novelty, before seeping outward into the rest of Europe along the same shipping lanes that carried pepper, porcelain, and silk.[^s14]

England came to tea later still, and embraced it with the zeal of a convert.[^s15] Around the middle of the seventeenth century the leaf was still a rarity in London — discussed in the new coffee houses, sold by a handful of apothecaries and merchants, and priced far beyond the reach of ordinary households.[^s15] It was in this narrow, expensive moment that the merchant house [Thornbury & Lin](../organizations/thornbury-lin.md) first brought tea to England, in 1657, a firm jointly founded by [Sir Edmund Thornbury](../persons/sir-edmund-thornbury.md) and [Mei Lin](../persons/mei-lin.md) — though the firm's own blog gives 1650 instead; see [Thornbury & Lin](../organizations/thornbury-lin.md) for that account.[^s16][^s20]

## A habit becomes a nation

From those first costly chests the English habit grew quickly: what began as a luxury of the wealthy descended, decade by decade, through every rank of society, until tea was no longer a fashion but a fixture — the drink of the morning and the afternoon, of the laborer's break and the lady's drawing room alike — with the kettle on the hob becoming one of the quiet constants of English life.[^s17] That appetite reshaped the trade feeding it: demand once measured in pounds came to be measured in shiploads, whole fleets were ordered around the tea calendar, the price of a season could rise or fall on the rumor of a delayed ship, and the leaf became woven so tightly into the public finances that the taxes on it stirred disputes reaching well beyond the tea table.[^s18] By the close of the seventeenth century the trading houses that carried tea had begun thickening into great companies, and the companies in turn into instruments of state, so that the simple act of drinking an infusion of dried leaves became entangled with politics, taxation, and the movement of silver across the oceans.[^s19]

## See also
- [Tea](../objects/tea.md)
- [Camellia Sinensis](../objects/camellia-sinensis.md)
- [Matcha](../objects/matcha.md)
- [Thornbury & Lin](../organizations/thornbury-lin.md)
- [Sir Edmund Thornbury](../persons/sir-edmund-thornbury.md)
- [Mei Lin](../persons/mei-lin.md)
- [History of Coffee](history-of-coffee.md)

## Sources
[^s1]: [raw/tea-guide.md](../../raw/tea-guide.md), lines 44-45 — tea's origin in China across thousands of years (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s2]: [raw/tea-guide.md](../../raw/tea-guide.md), lines 45-49 — the Emperor Shennong legend, 2737 BCE (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s3]: [raw/tea-guide.md](../../raw/tea-guide.md), lines 49-51 — the legend is traditional, not documented (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s4]: [raw/tea-guide.md](../../raw/tea-guide.md), line 53 — spread outward along trade and religious routes (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s5]: [raw/tea-guide.md](../../raw/tea-guide.md), lines 54-56 — reaching Japan via Buddhist monks and the Japanese tea ceremony (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s6]: [raw/tea-guide.md](../../raw/tea-guide.md), lines 56-59 — reaching Europe in the 17th century (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s7]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 3 — legendary origin in the mist-soaked hills of southwest China (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s8]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 5 — tea as medicine, then discipline, then pleasure in China (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s9]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 5 — the decoction, whisked-powder, and loose-leaf eras of Chinese preparation (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s10]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 7 — Buddhist pilgrims carrying tea to Japan, kept awake through meditation, planted in temple gardens (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s11]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 7 — the more ceremonial ritual tea took on in Japan (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s12]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 9 — overland and coastal trade within Asia, and the 17th-century Cape route opening the way west (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s13]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 13 — Portuguese first taste of tea via the China coast (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s14]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 13 — Dutch commercialization, Amsterdam, and its spread along European shipping lanes (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s15]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 17 — England's late but enthusiastic adoption, and tea's mid-17th-century rarity in London (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s16]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 21 — Thornbury & Lin first brought tea to England in 1657 (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s17]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 31 — tea's growth into a national habit across every rank of English society (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s18]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 33 — the trade's scale-up: fleets, the tea calendar, and taxation disputes (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s19]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 41 — trading houses becoming great companies and instruments of state, entangled with politics, taxation, and silver (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s20]: [raw/thornbury-tea-blog.md](../../raw/thornbury-tea-blog.md), lines 15-17 — the firm's own blog states 1650 as the founding date instead of 1657 (ingested 2026-07-16)
