​Tea Story

We like to begin every morning with tea. We drink a few cups of tea during the day. But only 300 years ago most people in Europe did not know anything about tea.

This is a story of an English sailor who brought home some tea-leaves as a present for his mother. She told her friends about the present and asked them to dinner to try “tea”. When her friends came, the old woman brought in a dish and put it on the table. There were brown leaves on it, they were boiled. The guests began to eat those boiled leaves. Of course, nobody liked them.

At that moment the sailor came in. He looked at the table, smiled and said, “Mother, what have you done with those tea- leaves?”

“I’ve boiled them as you told me to do.”

“And what have you done with the water?”

“I threw it away, of course.”

“Now you may throw away the leaves, too,” said her son.

Perhaps, this story never took place, but it shows that people in England at that time knew very little about tea.

The Chinese were the first people in the world to grow tea. More than 2000 years ago Chinese people knew about tea and liked it.

Nowadays most people in the world like tea very much.