🔝 Bestselling books about Tea of 2022: our rating

Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to China as well as other East and Southeast Asian countries. After water, it is the most widely consumed drink in the world. There are many different types of tea; some have a cooling, slightly bitter, and astringent flavour, while others have vastly different profiles that include sweet, nutty, floral, or grassy notes. Tea has a stimulating effect in humans primarily due to its caffeine content.

Tea plants are native to East and Southeast Asia and probably originated in the borderlands of southwestern China and northern Burma. An early credible record of tea drinking dates to the third century AD, in a medical text written by Chinese physician Hua Tuo. It was popularised as a recreational drink during the Chinese Tang dynasty, and tea drinking subsequently spread to neighbouring countries in the region, including places such as Champa, Silla, Srivijaya and Yamato Japan.

A few centuries later, Portuguese priests and merchants arriving from Macao first introduced it to Europe during the 16th century. During the 17th century, drinking tea became a fashionable pastime among the aristocracy. In Victorian England, tea was planted on a large scale in India. Today, tea is drunk all across the world.

The term herbal tea refers to drinks not made from Camellia sinensis. They are the infusions of fruit, leaves, or other plant parts, such as steeps of rosehip, chamomile, or rooibos. These may be called tisanes or herbal infusions to prevent confusion with “tea” made from the tea plant.