The Wild Leaf

The tea plant is native to the mountains where southwest China meets present-day Myanmar and northeast India. It has two main varieties: a small-leaved one, sinensis, long grown across China, and a large-leaved one, assamica, native to Yunnan and to Assam in India. Genetic studies suggest people domesticated the plant more than once, in China and separately in India. In Yunnan, on that frontier, it still grows as a tree. Left alone, it can stand many meters tall, and some of the region’s oldest tea trees are counted in centuries. The low bushes of a modern tea garden are the same species, pruned to keep the leaves within reach.

Who first used the leaf is not recorded. Historians think the peoples of these mountains chewed it, cooked it or ate it fermented long before anyone brewed it as a drink. The habit survives: in Myanmar, fermented tea leaves are still eaten today as lahpet.

The oldest physical evidence comes from much farther north. In 2021, archaeologists identified the charred remains of boiled tea leaves in a bowl buried in a Warring States tomb in Shandong, about 2,400 years old. A few centuries later, Emperor Jing of the Han dynasty, who died in 141 BCE, was buried near today’s Xi’an with tea among his offerings. By then, the leaf had traveled well beyond the forests where it grew, and it was valued enough to go into an emperor’s tomb.

Even its name took time to settle. Early Chinese texts wrote tea with tu, a character also used for other bitter plants. The character cha became standard only under the Tang dynasty (618–907).

Its scientific name came much later, from Europe. In 1753 the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus named the plant Thea sinensis: sinensis is Latin for “from China.” Tea was later placed in the genus Camellia, which Linnaeus had named after Georg Joseph Kamel, a Jesuit apothecary who studied the plants of the Philippines. The tea plant became Camellia sinensis.