Tea grew from East Asian traditions of drinking and cultivation. Overland and maritime routes carried it to other regions, gradually making it an everyday drink and a commodity traded across continents.

Different processing methods produce green tea, black tea, and other types. Tea's history connects agriculture, vessels, ceremonies, and trade, as well as changing tastes.

Early tea drinking

People in ancient East Asia ate tea for centuries, perhaps even millennia, before ever consuming it as a beverage. They would nibble on the leaves raw, add them to soups or greens, or ferment them and chew them as areca nut is chewed.

Tea drinking may have begun in the region of Yunnan, where it was used for medicinal purposes. It is believed that in Sichuan, "people began to boil tea leaves for consumption into a concentrated liquid without the addition of other leaves or herbs, thereby using tea as a bitter yet stimulating drink, rather than as a medicinal concoction."

Chinese legends attribute the invention of tea to the mythical Shennong in 2737 BC, although evidence suggests that tea drinking may have been introduced from southwest China. The earliest written records of tea come from China. The word tú appears in the Shijing and other ancient texts for a bitter vegetable, but may refer to several plants, including sow thistle, chicory, smartweed, or tea. The Chronicles of Huayang records the Ba people in Sichuan presenting tu to a Zhou king. The Qin later conquered Ba and its neighbor Shu. In the seventeenth century, Gu Yanwu associated the Qin conquest of Shu with the Qin people learning to drink tea. The ambiguity of early plant names complicates attempts to identify every ancient reference with the beverage consumed today.

Another possible early reference to tea is found in a letter written by the Qin dynasty general Liu Kun who requested that some "real tea" to be sent to him.

Worldwide spread

Tea was first introduced to Western priests and merchants in China during the 16th century, at which time it was termed chá. The earliest European reference to tea, written as chiai, came from Delle navigationi e viaggi written by Venetian Giambattista Ramusio in 1545. The first recorded shipment of tea by a European nation was in 1607 when the Dutch East India Company moved a cargo of tea from Macao to Java, then two years later, the Dutch bought the first assignment of tea which was from Hirado in Japan to be shipped to Europe. Tea became a fashionable drink in The Hague in the Netherlands, and the Dutch introduced the drink to Germany, France, and across the Atlantic to New Amsterdam (New York).

In 1567, Russian people came in contact with tea when Cossack leaders (atamans) Petrov and Yalyshev visited China. The Mongolian Khan donated to Tsar Michael I four poods (65–70 kg) of tea in 1638. According to Jeremiah Curtin, it was possibly in 1636 that Vassili Starkov was sent as envoy to the Altyn Khan. He was given 250 pounds of tea as a gift to the tsar. Starkov at first refused, seeing no use for a load of dead leaves, but the Khan insisted. Thus was tea introduced to Russia. In 1679, Russia concluded a treaty on regular tea supplies from China via camel caravan in exchange for furs. It is today considered the de facto national beverage.

The first record of tea in English came from a letter written by Richard Wickham, who ran an East India Company office in Japan, writing to a merchant in Macao requesting "the best sort of chaw" in 1615. Peter Mundy, a traveller and merchant who came across tea in Fujian in 1637, wrote, "chaa – only water with a kind of herb boyled in it". Tea was sold in a coffee house in London in 1657, Samuel Pepys tasted tea in 1660, and Catherine of Braganza took the tea-drinking habit to the English court when she married Charles II in 1662. Tea, however, was not widely consumed in the British Isles until the 18th century and remained expensive until the latter part of that period. English drinkers preferred to add sugar and milk to black tea, as the tea of choice in the 1720s.