A Short, Un-sweetened History Of Tea How many thousands of years tea has been growing in Southeast Asia is a question best left to botanists and paleontologists. The Chinese, however, do have a story of the origin of tea as a beverage. Around 2700 BC, the story goes, Emperor Shen Nung was brewing up his customary drink of boiled water when leaves from an overhanging tea tree accidentally fell into the kettle. The result was a brew that quickly found a place of honor in the royal cupboard and in Chinese legend. Tea is never actually mentioned in Chinese writings, until the fourth century AD. But by the year 780, tea had been raised to the level of religious icon in the Cha Ching (Tea Classic), written by scholar Lu Yu. Through the Buddhism they shared with the Chinese, the Japanese also adopted tea drinking and developed the elaborate ritual of the Tea Ceremony still practiced today. Europeans, however, had to be content with their wines, ales, and beers for some eight centuries after the publication of Lu Yu's book. Surprisingly, Marco Polo never mentioned tea upon his return to Italy in 1295, after twenty years in China. And the Portuguese traders who brought just about every other type of Oriental delicacy back to Europe in the sixteenth century never bothered to establish a commercial trade in the teas they sampled in ports like Canton and Amoy. It was the Dutch who surfaced as Europe's preeminent Oriental traders when the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 ended Portuguese and Spanish dominance of the commercial routes. And it was the Dutch who decided there might be a guilder or two to be earned in tea. In 1637 the Dutch East India Company added tea to their list of goods traded regularly. Tea drinking, with its rumored medicinal benefits, spread through Europe. Surprisingly, those prodigious tea drinkers, the British, were the last to appreciate is charms, coffee being the fad of the day. But, with a tea-loving Portuguese queen in the palace of Charles II, tea drinking won the day, and the British East India Company began to import teas directly from China. Tea caught on in America, as well introduced by the Dutch in New Amsterdam, not by the British. Thrifty New Englanders even brought a new twist to tea consumption: they brewed their tea, then ate the spent leaves on toast with butter and salt. Alas, tea became embroiled in politics in the American colonies. Starting in 1765, the British government taxed tea imports in the colonies so heavily that colonists boycotted the British East India Company and turned to smuggled Dutch tea. It was an attempt to force British tea on the colonies that led to the dumping of 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773. Tea consumption in America, not surprisingly, declined drastically during the Revolution. But by then, tea had already worked its magic on American tastes. The first merchant ship under the US flag headed for China to fill its holds with the treasured leaves. Today tea is second in popularity to coffee in the United States. Worldwide it is number one. And the problem a true connoisseur of tea faces is not one of supply, but of finding the truly distinguished teas among a sea of undistinguished varieties and blends. So now let us help you chart your way to some teas that have already taken their place in history as some of the best... ours.