The history of tea in China is long and complex. The Chinese have enjoyed tea for millennia. Scholars hailed the brew as a cure for a variety of ailments; the nobility considered the consumption of good tea as a mark of their status, and the common people simply enjoyed its flavor.

Tea was first discovered by the Chinese Emperor Shennung in 2737 BC. It is said that the emperor liked his drinking water boiled before he drank it so it would be clean, so that is what his servants did. One day, on a trip to a distant region, he and his army stopped to rest. A servant began boiling water for him to drink, and a dead leaf from the wild tea bush fell into the water. It turned a brownish color, but it was unnoticed and presented to the emperor anyway. The emperor drank it and found it very refreshing, and cha (tea) was born.

While historically the origin of tea as a medicinal herb useful for staying awake is unclear, China is considered to have the earliest records of tea drinking, with recorded tea use in its history dating back to the first millennium BC. The Han Dynasty used tea as medicine. The use of tea as a beverage drunk for pleasure on social occasions dates from the Tang Dynasty or earlier.


Lu Yu's Cha Jing
The Tang Dynasty writer Lu Yu's (729-804) Cha Jing is an early work on the subject. (See also Tea Classics) According to Cha Jing writing, around AD 760, tea drinking was widespread. The book describes how tea plants were grown, the leaves processed, and tea prepared as a beverage. It also describes how tea was evaluated. The book also discusses where the best tea leaves were produced.
At that time, the nature of the beverage and style of tea preparation were quite different from the way we experience tea today. Tea leaves were processed into compressed cakes form. The dried teacake, generally called brick tea was ground in a stone mortar. Hot water was added to the powdered teacake, or the powdered teacake was boiled in earthenware kettles then consumed as a hot beverage.

Historically, the tea of China with the history of more than 5000 years, was originally taken as a detoxifying medicine though it grew to great social prominence during the Tang (620-907 AD) and Song (960-1279 AD) Dynasties. In addition to tea’s attributed health benefits, the high level of "tea culture" was appealing to people outside of China as well. Since the fifth century AD, tea has been exported by land and sea throughout Asia before it reached Europe in 1610. It was Dutch traders that first brought tea to Europe but the British who greatly developed it, transplanting it to India in the early 1800s.