China is the birthplace of tea cultivation and tea drinking. It is believed that China has tea-shrubs as early as five to six thousand years ago, and human cultivation of tea plants dates back two thousand years. Tea from China, along with her silk and porcelain, began to be known over the world more than a thousand years ago and has since always been an important Chinese export.

According to Meng Liang Lu, Wu Zimu's famous description of life in the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279 AD), "People must have firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, wine, and tea every day without fail." By the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368 AD), wine was no longer included on this list, but tea remained one of the "seven essential items of daily life." With the popularization of tea-drinking during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), numerous famous varieties of tea emerged.

Cha Jing (The Classic of Tea), the world's first treatise on tea by the renowned Tang Dynasty tea connoisseur Lu Yu, as well as Jian Chashui Ji (Notes on Brewing Tea ), an exposition by Zhang Youxin on the importance of the water used to brew tea, are both important pages in the book of world civilization. With the Tang Dynasty, silk items, porcelain, and tea became the major commodities of Sino-foreign trade and cultural exchange. During the Ming Dynasty, these items were also the most valuable and highly prized trade goods transported on the maritime Silk Road .

Not only does China's tea production go back thousands of years, virtually every major tea-producing country in the world acquired its first varietal tea plants from China. These countries also dispatched representatives to China to study Chinese methods of tea cultivation and processing, in order to advance the growth of their own tea industries. Before the Tang Dynasty (618-907), Chinese tea was exported by land and sea, first to Japan and Korea, then to India and Central Asia and, in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties, to the Arabian Peninsula. In the early period of the 17th century, Chinese tea was exported to Europe, where the upper class adopted the fashion of drinking tea. Chinese tea, like Chinese silk and china, is an outstanding contribution to the world's material and spiritual civilization.

At present more than forty countries in the world grow tea, with Asian countries producing 90% of the world's total output. All tea trees in other countries have their origin directly or indirectly in China. The word for tealeaves or tea as a drink in many countries is derivatives from the Chinese character "cha." The Russians call it "cha'i", which sounds like "chaye" (tea leaves) as it is pronounced in northern China, and the English word "tea" sounds similar to the pronunciation of its counterpart in Xiamen (Amoy). The Japanese character for tea is written exactly the same as it is in Chinese, though pronounced with a slight difference. The habit of tea drinking spread to Japan in the 6th century, but it was not introduced to Europe and America till the 17th and 18th centuries. Now the number of tea drinkers in the world is legion and is still on the increase.

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