A prowl through the history of tea

Although tigers have been on this planet a lot longer than humans, humans have been drinking tea a lot longer than tigers, so I relied on human sources and more recent tiger lore for this brief history of tea.

The short version is that the spread of tea through Japan and China occurred in large part through the tea-bearing Buddhist monks who traveled through those countries from the first century B.C. through the 12th Century A.D.

After tea made its way to Europe, starting with The Netherlands in the 17th Century, the British began to import more and tea from China and gradually became concerned about something called a trade deficit. (I'm not really sure what a trade deficit is, but you can find out about that at Wikipedia.org.) Anyway, this trade deficit caused by purchase of tea from China kept growing and led the British to try to cultivate tea in India during the first half of the 19th century using seeds smuggled out of China.

Around this time a variant of the tea plant native to the Assam region of India was discovered, and tea cultivation in India took off. There is some debate among human scholars, but it seem that Assam and Ceylon tea originated from this Assam variant of the tea plant, while Darjeeling and Nilgiri were developed from the seeds brought in from China.

In the early 1900s someone invented the tea bag, which I consider an achievement of dubious merit. Some applaud the tea bag, and that's their privilege. While I don't consider tea bags nearly as bad as herb tea, I think good tea should be brewed from leaves and that tea bags do a disservice to good tea. So in your exploration of tea,I urge you to brew your tea using loose tea leaves. Once you've started doing that, I predict you won't have much use for tea bags, either.

For those who want a longer, play-by-play version, much of which is the stuff of legend, read on.