There are literally hundreds of varieties of tea leaves around the world, but do you know when and where it was ‘invented’? Of course, thinking that tea was invented is a strange choice of words, but there is a particular legend surrounding the drink that will kind of explain what is meant by the use of that individual phrase.
To understand the legend, we have to go to China, which may not come as a surprise to many. The year is approximately 2737BC and we are in the presence of the Chinese Emperor.
They say that the Emperor was sitting by an open window with a bowl of hot water by his side. A wind picked up and, via a miracle, it blew some tea leaves in through the open window and it landed in the bowl of hot water. Whether or not the Emperor was initially aware of this, he still went on to take a drink and was taken aback by the taste that he experienced. From that moment on, he would place the leaves into his hot water and a cup, or bowl to be more precise, tea was born.
However, we did have to wait a considerable period of time before we then saw the tea bag emerging, which made life easier, as that did not appear until 1908. The inventor of the tea bag was an American in New York by the name of Thomas Sullivan, and we are pretty sure that he had no idea that his invention would take off in the manner that it did.