In 2737 BC, a Chinese emperor named Shen Nung was boiling a pot of water on top of a fire. One of the leaves feeding the fire fell into the container.
When the emperor drank the water, he found that it tasted delicious. What kind of leaf was it that gave the water its flavor? The leaf came from a perennial shrub called Camellia sinensis - better known to us as tea.
This story is just a legend. But tea was discovered in China or neighboring lands thousands of years ago. It spread throughout the East, but for many centuries it was only drunk as medicine.
Then the Chinese learned to roast the leaves - as Shen Nung's fire had done - to make the drink taste better, and people started drinking tea as a refreshing drink instead of a medicine.
Although India is the world's largest tea producer, tea was not grown in the country until the nineteenth century.
The largest tea consumers in the world are, of course, the English.
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