Get Steeped in This Quiz on the History of Tea

In Victorian-era Britain, the shift from farming to industrialization pushed dinnertime later, from sundown to around 9 p.m. Anna Maria Russell, the seventh Duchess of Bedford (a longtime friend of Queen Victoria) was feeling hunger pangs while waiting for the evening meal, so around the year 1840, she began ordering tea, bread, and cake in the late afternoon — a ritual that spread throughout British society.

In 1662, tea in England was mostly used as medicine, only served at coffeehouses as a novelty. Dutch traders had begun bringing it to Europe and Britain from China about 10 years earlier. But when Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess, married King Charles II that year and moved to England, she carried with her loose tea that the Portuguese drank for pleasure, and the beverage caught on throughout English society.

Tasseography is a form of divination that interprets the shapes and patterns of the tea leaves that are left at the bottom of a cup after all the liquid is gone. The practice took hold in Britain in the mid-17th century. It replaced more dangerous divination methods, such as using molten metal or hot wax.

By the 19th century, tea was in high demand in Britain, and competition among exporters grew. In 1866, four ships carrying tea from China — nicknamed “tea clippers” — sailed to London in what became known as the Great Tea Race. The British were so besotted by tea that whatever ship arrived first could mark up its costs by about 10%.

In 1689, a pound of tea cost about a worker’s weekly wage, thanks partly to excessively high taxes by the British. As a response to the high price, smugglers began bringing in illegal but inexpensive tea. The practice became so widespread that the British slashed taxes on tea to stop the crime wave.

Until the late 500s CE, tea was considered a medicinal drink. It was brewed into a high concentration and the resulting elixir was sipped to help with a number of ailments, such as scurvy and indigestion. During China’s Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), drinking tea for enjoyment became popular thanks to new preparations, such as adding orange for flavor or oxidizing the tea leaf more to produce a darker brew.

The yerba maté herb is native to the rainforests of South America, and it was first made into a beverage by Indigenous peoples of the region. They called maté the “drink of the gods,” believing it to have powerful health benefits.

In 1901, two women from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, patented the first mesh tea bag, dubbed the “Tea-Leaf Holder.” Roberta C. Lawson and Mary Molaren came up with the idea to create the ability to brew a single cup of tea instead of a whole pot, without loose tea floating in the cup.

The Boston Tea Party was sparked by the British parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, which raised the tax on tea in the American colonies. To protest “taxation without representation,” the Sons of Liberty, a resistance group led by Boston statesman Samuel Adams, dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The colonial protest was one of the early events leading up to the American Revolutionary War.

The first written reference to drinking tea is from a Chinese dictionary dating back to 350 CE. At the time, the Chinese drank mostly green tea, mixed with other ingredients such as ginger and orange. Tea was so popular and valuable it was also compressed into bricks and used as currency. The rest of the world wouldn’t use tea as a drink for many more years.