History

Tea has been drunk for longer than most countries have existed, and almost everything about how it is grown, traded, taxed and made has changed at least once along the way. This is the strand that follows those changes.

It begins in the southwest of China, where the plant is native and where it was a medicine before it was a drink. It moves with monks to Japan, with caravans along the Tea Horse Road to Tibet, with ships to Europe, with a stolen seedling to India. Each of those moves left something behind — a processing method, a vessel shape, a word for the drink — and most of them are still visible in a cup made today.

A history of tea is unavoidably a history of medicine, religion, empire and trade, because tea was the cargo that funded wars and the ritual that structured monasteries. The pages filed here follow those threads outward rather than pretending tea can be told on its own.