The History of Tea

According to archeobotanists the first tea plant archaecamillia coprarexians grew one hundred million years ago in the foothills of a now vanished mountain range in what is now rural Essex. We know this because the ground leaves have been found in the fossilised droppings of Tyrannosaurs from that period leading to speculation that those gigantic beasts grazed tea as a latter day domesticated dog might chew grass to ease its digestion.

Later excavations have unearthed tea straining in the middens of Neanderthal settlements in Asturias, The Salzkammergut, Holstein and Reading. Similar traces have been discovered in Homo Sapien villages of the same period, but no later perhaps indicating that Tea drinking did not 'catch on' at its first attempt. Large quantities of semi-fossilized tea have been discovered in old river sediments upstream from Spalding.

Some one hundred thousand years later tea began to be used as an astringent in the early part of the Mung dynasty, later supplanting steeped red panda fur as the ceremonial drink of choice in the time of Emperor Charro the first from whom tea gets its traditional name. Charro is most famous of course for the hundred and one extensions that he commanded be built on to the imperial palace for his wives. His son invented the conservatory and his grand-daughter Lady Charr-Charr invented both the teaspoon and - controversially - dancing.