The History of Tea: From its Origins to Today

Five thousand years, perhaps more. Tea is one of the longest conversations between man and a plant. It began in a forest in Yunnan, and it continues today, in your cup as in ours.

Origins in Yunnan

The tea plant Camellia sinensis is native to a forested area that today covers southwest China, northern Myanmar, northeast India, and northern Laos. It is in this region that the world's oldest tea trees still grow, and it is in Yunnan, specifically in the mountains of Lincang and Xishuangbanna, that the most impressive of them are found. Some trees are over a thousand years old. Some, it is said, are more than two thousand five hundred years old.

This botanical antiquity has a simple consequence: it was there, and probably nowhere else, that early humans encountered tea. Before becoming a drink, tea was likely a chewed leaf, a medicinal plant, a food cooked with other herbs. The indigenous peoples of Yunnan – the Bulang, Dai, Hani, Lahu, Wa – have preserved traditions to this day where tea is not only drunk but also eaten, fermented into a paste, consumed in forms that classical Chinese civilization eventually forgot.

Yunnan is therefore not just another tea-producing region. It is, as far as we can tell, the starting point. Everything you find in a cup of tea today, no matter where it was produced, descends directly from these forests.

Shen Nong and the first written records

Chinese tradition attributes the discovery of tea to Emperor Shen Nong, a mythical figure said to have lived nearly five thousand years ago. The most widespread account tells of a tea leaf, carried by the wind, falling into the water he was boiling. He tasted it, found the drink refreshing, and recognized its virtues. Shen Nong, who is also the supposed father of Chinese medicine and agriculture, thus included tea in his herbal catalog of two thousand studied plants.

The legend serves more to name a beginning than to date an event. What archaeologists and texts confirm is that the first traces of tea consumption date back to the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 to 220 AD). During the Three Kingdoms period, texts mention a pressed Yunnan tea. At this time, tea was still a regional product, sometimes cooked in soup with ginger, onions, and salt, in a preparation very different from what we call tea today.

The first work entirely dedicated to tea is the Chá Jīng (茶经), the "Classic of Tea," written by Lu Yu during the Tang Dynasty, around 760 AD. Three volumes, ten chapters, describe the plant, its cultivation, processing, utensils, preparation, and water quality. It was from this book that tea ceased to be a rustic beverage and became a codified art, and China began to drink it for its own sake.

Tang, Song, Ming, Qing: The Chinese Golden Age

During the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907), tea became a court beverage, then popular. It was drunk in the form of compressed cakes, ground with a mortar, and boiled in water, sometimes with a little salt. The first taxes on tea appeared, making it a strategic product for the Empire.

The Song Dynasty (960 to 1279) refined its use. The cake gave way to powdered tea, whisked with hot water in a bowl using a bamboo whisk, in a ceremony that would later travel to Japan and give birth to the Way of Tea (chadō) and matcha as we know it today. Under the Song, tea became a subject of poetry, painting, and philosophy. Emperors themselves wrote about it.

Under the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644), everything changed. Emperor Hongwu, the first Ming ruler, banned the compression of tea into cakes for imperial tribute in 1391. Tea had to be delivered as whole leaves. This seemingly administrative decision transformed the entire relationship with tea: grinding ceased, brewing in a teapot began, and the modern form of loose-leaf tea emerged. It was also under the Ming that oolong teas developed and the foundations of all subsequent tea production were laid.

Finally, under the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912), tea reached its commercial zenith. Pu'er became a tribute tea offered to the imperial court. In 1733, Tongxinghao, the first Pu'er tea brand in history, was founded. Red tea (black tea) originated in the Wuyi Mountains at the end of the 17th century, paving the way for massive trade with Europe.

The Tea Horse Road

Long before tea crossed the seas, it crossed the mountains. The Tea Horse Road (茶马古道, chámǎ gǏdào) originated at the end of the 6th century and for over a thousand years structured trade between Yunnan and Tibet. Caravans departed from the producing mountains, loaded with compressed cakes, and journeyed north to Dali, Lijiang, Shangri-La, before crossing the Himalayas to Lhasa. From there, tea continued its journey to Nepal, Bhutan, and India.

The name of the road tells the story of the trade that gave it its value: tea from Yunnan for Tibetan horses, robust and indispensable to Chinese armies. A round trip took an entire year. Mules carried the cakes in wicker baskets, along narrow trails, in the rain, in the fog, at altitudes of over four thousand meters. It was probably under these prolonged, hot, and humid transport conditions that Pu'er discovered its ability to mature, transform, and improve with time.

The compressed form in cakes, bricks, and balls, which still characterizes Pu'er today, comes directly from this caravanning necessity. What was practical became an aesthetic tradition. What was a transportation accident became a signature. The tea that lends itself best to a long aging process is also the one that was carried the furthest.

Arrival in Europe

The first Europeans to taste tea were Portuguese and Dutch navigators in the early 17th century. Tea arrived in Amsterdam in 1610, in London around 1657, and in Paris shortly after. It was initially sold in pharmacies as an exotic remedy, at a price that reserved it for the aristocracy. In the 18th century, its price dropped, its consumption spread, and the fashion for tea conquered European salons.

It was in England that tea took on its familiar place. Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess married to Charles II in 1662, brought the habit of tea to the English court. Three centuries later, the cup of tea had become a national identity. In between, the East India Company built a commercial empire on this leaf, leading to the Opium Wars and the dismantling of the Chinese monopoly.

To meet growing demand and free themselves from China, the British began planting tea trees in India (Assam, Darjeeling) from the 1830s, then in Sri Lanka, and subsequently in East Africa. The colonial tea industry was born at this time. It produced in quantity, at low cost, what China had been producing artisanally for centuries. Tea became a global commodity, its origin faded, and it was during this period that the first "English Breakfast" blends appeared, the first betrayal of the very idea of terroir.

From Colonial Tea to a Return to Terroir

The 20th century was one of mass production. Tea bags appeared in 1908, by accident, when a New York merchant sent samples in small silk pouches that his customers infused as they were. Broken leaves, fannings, and the industrialization of plantations in India and Africa fed a giant market where tea quality became secondary. Teabags sold in supermarkets, flavored, blended, anonymous, became the norm. In the majority of European households, the origin of tea was forgotten.

And then, slowly, an inverse movement began. At the end of the 20th century, a generation of tea drinkers started to take an interest again in single-origin tea, in cru, in terroir, in hand-picking, in the producer. Specialized tea houses multiplied in Europe. Enthusiasts learned to distinguish a Longjing from a Bi Luo Chun, a Tieguanyin from a Da Hong Pao, a Sheng Pu'er from a Shou. China, for its part, rediscovered its tea heritage: old tea cakes became collector's items, terroirs were mapped, and ancient tea forests were finally recognized as a heritage to be protected. In 2023, UNESCO inscribed the Jingmai Mountain Ancient Tea Forests cultural landscape on the World Heritage List, the first international recognition of a tea-related site.

Our work is part of this return to terroir. We spend six months a year in the mountains of Yunnan, in Lincang, in Mengku and DaXueShan, working directly with Yunnan producers, participating in harvesting, hand-frying leaves in large traditional woks, sun-drying, and blending in small batches. This is, on our scale, a way of putting five thousand years of history back in its rightful place: the cup is not just a product; it is the culmination of a chain of actions that men and women have repeated for centuries in a specific forest.

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