The Origins and Sources of Tea: China, Japan and India

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad that I was not born before tea.

Reverend Sydney Smith

The history of tea is jewelled with tales of adventure and commerce, stories of comfort in hardship and relief when things get better. At once the most domestic of beverages, tea is also the most elegant, the most evocative – and the most inspiring to writers.

Founding father

The story of the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung highlights the origin of tea. The founder of Chinese agriculture and skilled in medicine, Shen Nung drank nothing but boiled water. One day in 2737BC, he sat with his simmering water by a handsome tree. The breeze swayed through the leaves, wafting a few of them into his water. The fragrance was wonderful; the beverage deliciously stimulating. The tree, it turned out, was a tea tree, and in this way the first pot of tea serendipitously brewed itself. As the Emperor noted in his Pen ts'ao or Medical Book, tea does more than relieve ailments: 'It quenches thirst. It lessens the desire for sleep. It gladdens and cheers the heart.'

How true those observations are! Not so the tale of Shen Nung. Enchanting as it is, it cannot be literal fact. Tea leaves are dried and processed before being made into a pot of tea. More important, the earliest version of Shen Nung's book was not written until the Second or Third Century AD, and its references to tea date from that era, not from the dawn of Chinese history, when Shen Nung lived.

So the story about the Emperor and the tea leaves is a myth. But like all myths it explains why we do what we do, and it captures truths: tea uplifts the spirits and sharpens the mind; it soothes the sick and preserves the healthy; it charms; it entrances. Its discovery has been a blessing and a pleasure to the countless millions who have made it the world's most popular beverage.

Writers on tea

Writers have been some of the world's greatest tea lovers. From its earliest days, tea has inspired tales and poems. Soon after the beverage arrived in England in 1657, poet Edmund Waller highlighted its stimulating effect on poets' minds: 'Tea doth our fancy aid' he claimed. He called it 'the Muse's friend,' noting its triumph over earlier inspirations:

Venus her Myrtle, Phoebus has his bays;
Tea both excels, ...

Matthew Prior also linked tea to poets. In his 1687 poem The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, the Country Mouse confesses to Bundle that he had 'heard much talk of the Wits' Coffee House':

'Thither,' said Bundle, 'you shall go and see
Priests drinking coffee and Poets tea.'

A century later, Dr. Samuel Johnson confessed himself:

A hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.

Like Johnson, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley could put away countless cups of tea, and he loved tea-time foods. Thomas Hogg, his biographer noted:

Tea was ever grateful, cup after cup ... Like all persons of simple tastes, he retained his sweet tooth; he would greedily eat cakes, gingerbread and sugar; honey, preserved or stewed fruits with bread.

In the 1940s, when gingerbread was rare and tea severely rationed, George Orwell devoted an Evening Standard article to how to make tea, detailing the eleven points necessary for 'wringing out of one's ration' twenty decent cups of tea a week.

Poets, tea and the pleasures of home

But tea does more than stimulate literary creativity; it also taps a golden lode of images. For poets, tea suggests home comforts. In England, William Cowper voiced these most memorably in his 1785 poem The Task:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

For the Ninth-Century Chinese poet Po Chu-I cups of tea mark the routines of daily life:

After lunch – one short nap;
On waking up – two cups of tea.

If such routines are destroyed their memory becomes a hunger for past content. Rupert Brooke captured this in The Old Vicarage, Grantchester:

And does the clock still stand at ten to three,
And is there honey still for tea?

Conversely, the Twentieth-Century Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, looks ahead to memories to warm the future in his poem Picnic to the Earth:

Here I will keep on saying 'I have returned!'
As long as you repeat 'Welcome back!'
Here I will keep on returning again and again,
Here let's drink hot tea.
Here sitting together for a while
Let's have the refreshing wind touch us.

The tea-drinking characters of novelists and playwrights

Novelists and playwrights use tea-times to set a scene, convey character, develop relationships, and suggest feelings and ambience. When Algy eats the cucumber sandwiches he has ordered for Lady Bracknell at the beginning of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest the audience realises that he little fears the fire of this dragon aunt. All will clearly be well at the end of the play. Readers of Molly Keane's novels of Irish country-house life soon spot that anyone who is given an egg with their tea is being favoured – perhaps for sporting exploits, but also for personal charms. In contrast to the lavish Irish teas, the abstemious tea parties of the ladies of Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford exemplify the genteel economy of their lives. They cannot provide the eggs, the muffins, and the cakes that make teatime a late-afternoon feast. Nonetheless, they reign over their tea-tables like the women in thousands of novels and plays, asserting a social position and controlling a domain.

In short, fictional tea-times tell us what it felt like to be taking tea in earlier centuries, capturing the pleasures that powered the economics of getting tea from tropical tea gardens and into British teacups, and vivifying tea-times of today by conjuring benign shades of tea-times past.

Origins and growth

Tea comes from the leaves of Camellia sinensis. Lovingly called 'the queen of camellias' by the Japanese tea historian Okakura Kakuzo, it is one of hundreds of important and beautiful plants that evolved in the botanical paradise of the Himalayas. These steep mountains stride the tropics, drawing monsoon-bearing winds up their heights. Tea thrives in heat and...