The first page was written in Cina

Tea! thou soft, sober, sage and venerable liquid;- thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wink-tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life, let me fall prostrate.

Colley Cibber (1671-1757) The Lady's Last Stake, Act 1, Scene 1

If you are sitting on your sofa in a sunny Autumn afternoon, in a mood of longing for the beauty and the past, dreaming the lost paradise, the plenty of lost paradises, unfailing lost, of your life... well, a good cup of tea is just what you need to recover! Then, when you have come to your senses, and you come back to leaf through the pages of the book on "The Art of Tea" you were reading when your thoughts started flying away, you will easy come across some quotations of famous people about the ancient brew the whole world knows.
Drinking tea is more than a common habit, it is a way to live and to watch the world, crossing over centuries of history.

This year, the worldwide famous British company Twinings of London is celebrating 300 years of blending teas across the globe.
There is perhaps no other things so immediatly evoking an idea of Britishness as tea: but although all of us think of tea as the British contribution to international drinks, actually the history of tea begins in China. According to the most famous legend, in 2737 B.C., the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting beneath a tree while his servant boiled drinking water, when some leaves from the tree blew into the water. Shen Nung, a renowned herbalist, decided to try the infusion that his servant had accidentally created. The tree was a Camellia sinensis, and the resulting drink was what we now call tea.
Another legend links tea drinking to the Indian prince Bodhidharma, who converted to Buddhism and in the sixth century went to China to spread the word. He believed that it was necessary to stay awake constantly for meditation and prayer, and took to chewing leaves from the tea shrub, which acted as stimulant, helping him stay awake. Is there any truth in those legends? It is impossible to answer. But it is a matter of fact that tea drinking became an official drink in China under the Tang dynasty (618-906 A.D.), many centuries before it had even been enjoyed in the West, being already known as a beverage in the time of Confucius (c.551-479 B.C.) and grown in popularity during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - 220 A.D.).
It became such a favourite one that during the late eighth century a writer called Lu Yu, venerable tea master, wrote the first book entirely about tea, the Ch'a Ching, or Tea Classic, in which he describes the proper utensils, the finest spring waters, and the ideal temperatures for brewing. Among the factual data we can read real pieces of poetry:

Its liquor is like the sweetest dew from Heaven

Tea can look like a mushroom in whirling flight just as clouds floating from behind a mountain peak. Its leaves can swell and leap as if they were lighting tossed on wind-disturbed water. Still others twist and turn like rivulets carved out be a violent rain in newly tilled fields...

After him, the second great figure in the history of tea was Lu Tung, a poet who is said to have loved tea as much as life itself, and we can have an idea of his sensitiveness reading, for instance, the Poem 4:

The first bowl sleekly moistened my throat and lips;
The second banished all my loneliness;
The third expelled the dullness from my mind,
Sharpening inspiration gained from all the books I've read.
The fourth brought forth light perspiration,
Dispersing a lifetime's troubles through my pores.
The fifth bowl cleansed every atom of my being.
The sixth has made me kin to the Immortals.
This seventh is the utmost I can drink.

It was shortly after this time, that tea was first introduced to Japan, by Japanese Buddhist monks who had travelled to China to study. Tea drinking has become a vital part of Japanese culture, as seen in the development of the Tea Ceremony (Cha-no-yu), a ritual that has raised the preparation and drinking of tea to an art form which may be rooted in the rituals described in the Ch'a Ching.
Ceremony is about much more than just making a hot beverage. The Taoist idea of trying to find beauty in the world was combined with the Zen Buddhist belief that the mundane and particular were of equal importance with the spiritual and universal. Thus the ritual of tea making expressed the quest of greatness in the smallest details of life, and the formalised acts of graciousness and politeness that are integral to the Ceremony are an outward form of an inner belief in the importance of peace and harmony.




So at this stage in the history of tea, Europe was rather lagging behind. In the latter half of the sixteenth century there are the first brief mentions of tea as a drink among Europeans. The first to ship back tea as a commercial import were the Dutch, from China to Holland via Java. Tea soon became a fashionable drink among the Dutch, and from there spread to other countries in continental western Europe, but because of its high price it remained a drink for the wealthy.
But France seems to have played a fundamental role in the tea-drinking culture. It's a little known fact, but after its introduction to Europe in the 17th century tea was tremendously popular in France. It first arrived in Paris in 1636 (22 years before it appeared in England!) and quickly became popular among the aristocracy. Madame de Sévigné(1626 to 1696), one of history's greatest letter writers on life in 17th Century France, who chronicled the doings of the Sun King and his cronies in a famous series of gossipy letters to her daughter, often found herself mentioning tea:

Saw the Princesse de Tarente [de Sévigné wrote]... who takes 12 cups of tea every day... which, she says, cures all her ills. She assured me that Monsieur de Landgrave drank 40 cups every morning. 'But Madame, perhaps it is really only 30 or so.' 'No, 40. He was dying, and it brought him back to life before our eyes.' . . . Madame de Sévigné also reported that it was a Frenchwoman, the Marquise de la Sablière, who initiated the fashion of adding milk to tea. "Madame de la Sablière took her tea with milk, as she told me the other day, because it was to her taste.

(By the way, the English delighted in this "French touch" and immediately adopted it.)


Britain, always a little suspicious of continental trends, had yet to become the nation of tea drinkers that it is today. It was the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza (1662) to turn a point in the history of tea in Britain. The woman, a Portuguese princess (because of its contact with the courts of the Far East such as Japan, China and Macao, the Portuguese Court was at that time one of the most sophisticated in Europe), was really tea - addicted, and it was her love of the drink that established tea as a fashionable beverage first at court, and then among the wealthy classes as a whole. Her influence made tea more popular among the wealthier classes of society, as whatever the royals did, everyone else wanted to copy. So, the Portuguese Queen of England introduced the "Five O'clock Tea" and soon tea mania spread swept across England, and it became the beverage of choice in English high society, replacing ale as the national drink.

The 18th century is the golden age of the increasing consumption of tea in Britain. British took to tea with an enthusiasm that continues to the present day. It became a popular drink in coffee houses (by 1700 tea was on sale by more than 500 coffee houses in London), which were as much locations for the transaction of business as they were for relaxation or pleasure. They were though the preserve of middle- and upper-class men; women drank tea in their own homes, and as yet tea was still too expensive to be widespread among the working classes. Tea drinking became even more popular when Queen Anne (1665-1714) chose tea over ale as her regular breakfast drink.
During the second half of the Victorian Period, known as the Industrial Revolution, working families would return home tired and exhausted. The table would be set with any manner of meats, bread, butter, pickles, cheese and of course tea. None of the dainty finger sandwiches, scones and pastries of afternoon tea would have been on the menu. Because it was eaten at a high, dining table rather than the low tea tables, it was termed "high" tea.

And nowadays? With recent scientific research indicating that tea drinking may have direct health benefits, it is assured that for centuries to come there will be a place at the centre of British life for "a nice cup of tea".