Three thousand years. According to one such legend, in the year 2737 BC, the Emperor of China Shen Nung accidentally added a few leaves, fallen from a wild tea tree, to his hot water. He then tasted the mixture and liked it so much that he went on to taste several hundred other varieties...
            According to another legend, from India, in order to prove that he was in China to teach true Zen Buddhism, Prince Dharma vowed that he would not sleep throughout the entire nine years of his mission. Towards the end of the third year, however, he started to become drowsy. He chewed some leaves from a wild tea tree, which restored his courage and strength for the following six years.   Truth to be told we don't really know much about the origins of this beverage, which second to water, is the most frequently consumed drink in the world. We only know that at the time of Confucius (6th century BC), tea (t'u) was used as a funeral offering and that several references are made to it during the Three Kingdoms dynasty (222-277) and that by the Six Dynasties period (385-589), it had become common practice to drink tea. We are fairly certain that it was during the Tang dynasty (618-907) that drinking tea became common in certain levels of Chinese society, in circles close to the court, and by Mongolians, Tartars, Turks and Tibetan monks.. 
           This was the era when the tea ceremony became a refined art. Poet Lu-Yu wrote the "tchaking", a tea ceremony code which describes what utensils should be used, how the tea should be prepared (the leaves should be roasted then pulverized with boiling water and a touch of salt and formed into a kind of cake), not to mention, how it should be consumed. 
           It wasn't until the Song Dynasty (960-1279) that the tea leaves we use today became available, although prepared according to a somewhat different "recipe", as the pulverized leaves were added to water and whipped up into a foam with a bamboo switch. Although during that same period, Marco Polo refers to tea in his "wonders of the world", it was only for a select ¨¦lite, as one had to be a Mandarin of at least seventh rank in order to buy it.
          The Ming Dynasty, which brings us up to 1644, did not contribute much to the tea art, except that it was at this time that tea began to be consumed as it is today - infused in a recipient. It was also during the Ming Dynasty that the "Tea and Horse Bureau" was set up to supervise the tea trade, which was beginning to play an important part in the economy. It was towards the end of the Ming period that Europe discovered tea. 
          The East India Company was the first to make a reference to tea, in 1610 and imported some into Holland, then France and England. It seems that the first "coffeehouse" keeper to think of adding tea to the menu was Englishman Thomas Garraway, in 1657, after which, most coffeehouses became tea parlors.
          England, as everybody knows, was to become the greatest consumer of this age-old beverage from China. Apparently the English felt that the best way to ensure a regular supply without becoming dependant upon Chinese producers was to flood China with opium, thereby creating a reciprocal dependency, which if necessary, could be used as bargaining chips. And in the same aim of gaining independence from China, the English set up trading posts in India and Sri Lanka at the beginning of the 19th century.