Tea

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Tea is the processed leaf of Camellia sinensis, drunk in China for at least two millennia and traded outward from south-west China first overland and later by sea. Phytolith and biomolecular analysis of plant remains from the Han Yangling mausoleum near Xi'an gives a physical date of roughly the second century BCE for tea as a consumed commodity. From the seventeenth century it became the single largest item by value in European trade with China, and by the nineteenth century it was the commodity around which British fiscal policy, the opium trade and the annexation of Assam tea land all turned. It is a manufactured good as much as an agricultural one: the same leaf becomes green, oolong or black tea according to processing, a fact European buyers did not understand until the middle of the nineteenth century.

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