THE HISTORY OF TEA

          Tea is easily the most popular drink in Britain today. Every year the British drink over 14 million litres of it,which is about four cups a day for every man,women and child in the country. Today the biggest tea-exporting countries in the world are india and srilangka and more than half the tea they export is drunk in britain. The British were not the first nation to drink tea. However,the Chinese were drinkingtea or as they called it tcha or tay (depending on which part of china they came from),for at least four thousand year before the first shipment of tea arrived in london in the late 1630s. It was supposed to have been drunk first by the Chinese emperor Shen Nung In 2737 BC. The Emporor was on journey and was resting under a bush, boiling some drinking water. The bush jush happened to be what botanists call a Cameillia Sinest or tea bush and some of the leaves accidentally fell into the pot of boiling water. The emperor liked what he drank and tea born. The british still use the slang expression char for tea,which is pronounced the same as the Cantonese word tcha.

        The British were not the first in europe to start drinking tea either. The Portugues, who where the first europeans to reach China by sea in 1513, no-ticed that the Chinese drank lots of strange smelling, hot,brown liquid for their health. The Chinese at first refused to sell any tcha or tay to the portugues,but eventually the portuguese were allowed to set up a trading station on a remote Chinese peninsular called Macao, Which enabled them to start shipping tea and other Chinese goods to Portugal.

       The first Englishman to arrive on tehe scene was Captain Weddell,who sailed into Macao harbour in 1637 wanting to do business. we have was not mada welcome  by to portugues or the Chinese and a battle started. The british had the more powerful guns. however ,and in the end, Captain Weddell was given permission to do some trading and set sail for london with a quantity of goods, including what someone on the ship described as a certain drink called char which is onlywater wiht kind of herb boiled in it.