How did the tea come to be?
No one knows for sure how tea came to be, but Chinese legend has it that tea was discovered around 3000 B.C. by the Divine Cultivator, Shen Nong.
Among his numerous discoveries and revelations, Shen Nong is credited with teaching the Chinese people how to farm and also with identifying hundreds
of medicinal (and poisonous) herbs by personally testing their properties, which was crucial towards the development of Traditional Chinese medicine.
His experimental with verious herbs sometimes resulted in poisoning, and he used tea as an antidote.
Tea leaves were first picked from tea plants growing in the wild. Cultivation of tea plants are believed to begun
in China's southwestern province of Sichuan, and then moved down the valley of the Yangtze River.
How did the name 'Tea' came about?
The first mass marketer of tea, the Dutch East India Company imported the first shipment of tea from Fujian, China, where the name for tea is 'te' (pronounced 'tay').
The Dutch adopted this name and spread to most of Europe. At the end of the 17th century, the English changed their pronunciation to 'tee'
and later, 'tea'.
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