When tea first appeared in Britain, it was an exotic and unknown beverage, and was sold as a herbal tonic. Yet within two centuries it had become – as it remains – an indispensable part of British life.

The typical British ‘cuppa’ is brewed from black Indian tea leaves and served with milk and sugar. Indian teas may be the most common in Britain, but the origins of tea and the culture of tea-drinking lie in China, where the wild tea plant was first domesticated. Even today, the words for tea in almost every global language can be traced back to the Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese ‘cha’, or ‘te’ in the Amoy dialect of south-eastern China.

Origins of tea

No one is sure exactly when tea-drinking began but according to Chinese legend it was discovered by the Divine Farmer, one of the mythological ancestors of Chinese civilisation, after some wild tea leaves drifted into a pot of water he was boiling outdoors.

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Varieties of Tea